by Tom Suozzi, a former Democratic congressman, won a closely watched special House election in New York on Tuesday, reducing the Republican majority in Washington and offering his party a potential playbook to run in key suburban areas in November. .
His bigger-than-expected victory in the Queens and Long Island district avenged a year of humiliation unleashed by the seat’s former incumbent, George Santos, and halted a trend that had seen Republicans capture nearly every major election on Long Island since 2021.
Suozzi, 61, defended Republican candidate Mazi Pilip in a race that became a costly preview of many of the fights expected to dominate November’s general election, especially over the influx of migrants at the border. and in New York City.
Suozzi, a well-known centrist, distanced himself from his party, calling for tougher policies at the border and promising to work with Republicans to fix a broken immigration system. Polls suggested that her independent approach helped reduce Pilip’s lead on the issue, as Democratic super PACs inundated her with ads attacking her as anti-abortion.
In the end, the race also became an old-fashioned local contest over turnout when a rare Election Day snowstorm blanketed Long Island. The last-minute turnaround likely helped Democrats, who had turned out in greater numbers during early voting despite Republicans’ vaunted Nassau County machine.
With 93 percent of the votes counted, Suozzi had won 54 percent of the vote compared to Pilip’s 46 percent, according to The Associated Press.
Suozzi’s return will have an immediate impact in Washington. Once he is in office, President Mike Johnson can afford to lose just two votes on any partisan bill, an unwieldy margin that could limit Republicans’ legislative agenda in the election year.
Addressing supporters in Woodbury, New York, on Long Island, Suozzi said his victory was an endorsement of the moderate approach he has championed for decades as mayor, county executive and congressman.
“This race was fought in the midst of a closely divided electorate, just like our entire country,” Suozzi said. “We won because we addressed the issues and found a way to bridge our divisions.”
It was also a personal vindication for Suozzi, an ambitious career politician who has seen his fortune rise and fall during three decades in office. He resigned his House seat after three terms in 2022 to run for governor of New York, only to finish a distant third in the Democratic primary.
The cost of that decision became clearer when Santos was exposed as a serial liar and was eventually indicted by federal prosecutors on 23 criminal counts of campaign fraud and other charges. The House expelled him in December, after having served almost a year.
“Thank God,” Mr. Suozzi reveled at his victory party, boasting that he had overcome “all the lies about Tom Suozzi and the squad, about Tom Suozzi being the godfather of the migrant crisis, about the ‘Suozzi Shrine ‘”, and despite the best efforts of the Republican machinery.
Republicans in New York and Washington always knew that retaining the seat vacated by Santos would be challenging given the Democrats’ modest advantage in registered voters and Suozzi’s name recognition. But party leaders were confident they could prevail in a district that includes some of the country’s wealthiest suburban enclaves.
But just an hour after the polls closed, they were relenting. Pilip, a 44-year-old county legislator, did not directly say whether she would run again against Suozzi in the fall, but she implied that she was not ready to leave the political stage.
“Yes, we lost, but that doesn’t mean we’re going to end up here,” Pilip told supporters at a viewing party. “We are going to continue the fight.”
There was little reason to believe the outcome would alter former President Donald J. Trump’s determination to make immigration a pillar of his own campaign.
But it is likely to force Republican leaders and strategists planning the House and Senate races to reconsider the potency of the border issue that Pilip made the centerpiece of his campaign.
The issue was especially resonant here on the outskirts of New York City, and Democrats had privately warned in the final weeks of the race that it could be enough to defeat Suozzi. Voters were faced with daily headlines about the rise in illegal border crossings and the more than 170,000 migrants who have arrived in New York. Just a week before Election Day, New York City’s police commissioner warned that a “wave of immigration crime” had “flooded” the city.
However, instead of dismissing it as an issue that favored Republicans, Suozzi made the immigration crisis a daily focus, along with cutting taxes, fighting crime and protecting abortion rights. He called on Biden to temporarily close the southern border and sought to show voters that he, too, saw the problem and wanted it fixed.
So when Pilip joined his party earlier this month to denounce a bipartisan border deal that included many of the provisions they had demanded, such as speeding up deportations and making it harder to seek asylum, Suozzi went on the offensive.
“EM. Pilip points out that there is a problem! A problem! A problem!” he said during the race’s only debate. “But she has no solution.”
Voters took notice.
“This is someone who doesn’t have to start from scratch,” said Rachelle Ocampo, 36, health care communications director in Queens. “She has experience and knows how to address local and federal issues.”
Mr. Suozzi tried to establish that contrast topic after topic. He presented himself as a seasoned veteran willing to step in and find solutions: restore the sacrosanct state and local tax deduction for suburban homeowners, and defend Israel in the midst of its war with Hamas.
Republicans chose Pilip even though she was virtually untested, with few known policy positions and little experience in a nationally scrutinized race. It was a gamble that her life story as an Ethiopian-born former Israeli soldier would fit perfectly into the political moment.
But Pilip’s inexperience was demonstrated throughout the campaign. She held very few public campaign events and declined invitations to the kinds of forums and debates that would have introduced her to voters. In the one in which she did participate, the Republican raised her voice repeatedly and left the moderator struggling to pin down her position on important issues like abortion and gun rights.
Although Suozzi did not make those issues a central point of his own messaging, the main House Democratic campaign committee and the House super PAC seized on the ambiguity in Pilip’s positions, burying it with $10 million in ads. attack on abortion. In the end, Democrats outspent Republicans on television two to one.
And Suozzi attacked Pilip for her evasiveness and qualifications, suggesting she was unproven and unprepared for such a big role.
“How can you run for Congress in this post-George Santos world and not be completely transparent?” -He asked on the debate stage.
Pilip, who forcibly broke with Santos a year ago, sought to assure voters that she was a model of personal and public ethics. Many voters ultimately concluded that she posed too much of a risk.
“We couldn’t have someone like Santos again,” said Pierre Vatanapradit, an IT worker, while voting for Suozzi on Saturday in Bayside, Queens. “We can’t let that happen again.”
But after weeks of campaigning, it was the most local issue, a snowstorm, that electrified the final day of the race, as both parties scrambled to turn out voters stuck at home.
This being Long Island, a suburban sprawl where politics and public works have a history of mixing, Democrats suspected that the Republicans who control the government of Nassau County and each of its three municipalities could selectively open paths for their voters. .
“Of course we’re concerned about where they plow the roads,” Jay Jacobs, chairman of the state Democratic Party, said Monday.
Bruce Blakeman, the Republican Nassau County executive, said he was “personally offended” that Democrats were questioning the integrity of his administration and promised to equitably clear streets.
The Congressional Leadership Fund, the main super PAC for House Republicans, even hired private snow plows to help clear prime areas of the party’s constituencies more quickly, according to its spokesperson.
In the end, it wasn’t enough to close the gap.
Ellen Yan and Nate Schweber contributed reports.
