Former Queens pol runs for Long Island Senate seat
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Former Queens elected official Rory Lancman is running for the State Senate in Long Island. File photo by John McCarten/City Council Photography
By Ryan Schwach
A former elected official from Queens is running for office once again – but not in his longtime home.
Rory Lancman, who previously represented Eastern Queens in the State Assembly and City Council, is taking a shot at a State Senate seat, not in Queens, but Nassau County.
Lancman now lives in Great Neck, right over the Queens-Long Island border, and is running to represent that community and a large section of Nassau’s north shore in Albany in the 7th District.
The district is centered in North Hempstead, and includes parts of Oyster Bay, Brookville, Glen Cove, Roslyn, Old Westbury and other Long Island neighborhoods.
He is running against Republican incumbent Jack Martins, who like Lancman, was born in Queens.
Lancman left elected office in 2020 to take a job with former Governor Andrew Cuomo’s administration, and not long after moved over to Great Neck.
Since then, he served on local boards that oversaw finances in Nassau County, and on the board of Nassau University Medical Center.
In his time in Long Island, one thing has stuck out.
“You move from Queens to Nassau County, and you really do appreciate how expensive it is to live in Nassau County,” he told the Eagle. “Life in Nassau County is more expensive than it needs to be.
High taxes, energy bills and transportation costs are a major issue, Lancman said. And he argues high costs are going unaddressed by the district’s incumbent.
In essence, affordability is the main issue, but that’s not the word he’d use.
“I don't want to use a buzzword that people wave around because somebody found out that it polls well,” he said. “I can tell you that we do not need to be paying as much as we're paying for all of these basic elements of life here in Nassau.”
While he is running in an entirely different municipality, he argued that the districts he represented in Easter Queens, and the one he wants to represent in Nassau, are cut from the same cloth.
“The boundary between Eastern Queens, where I grew up and represented communities in both the Assembly with City Council, and Nassau County, is really arbitrary,” he said. “They're both primarily single home owner communities with some multi-family residences, and people are very concerned about quality of life, about being able to afford this little slice of Americana that we have carved out for ourselves.”
“The sensibilities of someone living in Fresh Meadows, Queens is not really different from somebody living in Washington or Woodbury,” he added.
Lancman is the only Democratic candidate officially filed in the 7th District, a moderate, purple district that has been traded between Republicans and Democrats for years.
Martins, a St. John’s University School of Law graduate, first represented the district from 2010 through 2016, the year he launched a failed congressional run against Rep. Tom Suozzi.
Martins ran for his old Senate seat again in 2022, defeating Democrat Anna Kaplan by around seven percentage points. In 2024, he was reelected to the seat, defeating Democratic challenger Kim Keiserman by around 11 percentage points.
