by In the heart of Long Island, where Republicans have won every major election in the past three years, Tom Suozzi battled strong political headwinds to claim victory Tuesday in a special House election, capturing a coveted district undecided that had been in the hands of George Santos. .
Suozzi’s eight-point victory flipped one of the five House seats Democrats need to regain the majority in November, giving the party a much-needed injection of optimism. But his campaign also provided something that may prove more valuable: a playbook for candidates across the country competing in an arena where President Biden and his party remain deeply unpopular.
The strategy went something like this: challenge Republicans on issues they normally monopolize, such as crime, taxes and, above all, immigration. Shows an independent streak. And stoke the Democratic base with attacks (in this case, almost $10 million in ads) on the issue of abortion and former President Donald J. Trump, the likely Republican candidate for the White House.
“It’s a very interesting lesson for Democrats that you can escape your opponent’s attacks on immigration by not just leaning into the issue, but by redoubling your efforts,” said Steve Israel, a former congressman from the district who once ran the campaign. of House Democrats. arm.
“Instead of trying to spin around the issue, he charged forward,” Israel added.
One of the most vivid examples came in the final weeks of the race. One morning, Suozzi was heading to a meeting and learned that his Republican opponent, Mazi Pilip, was about to hold an event at a Queens migrant shelter blaming him for the country’s growing border crisis.
The issue had all the makings of a political storm for the party in power, one that other Democrats might have dismissed as a lost cause. But Suozzi swerved his car through the congested traffic, stopped just in time to follow Pilip in front of the television news cameras, and dove headlong into the fray.
“We have to try to respond to what people are hungry for,” he explained at the January event. “This is what people are hungry for.”
On Wednesday, even House Speaker Mike Johnson acknowledged that Suozzi’s approach had succeeded, although he downplayed the significance of the outcome.
“He sounded like a Republican talking about the border and immigration,” Johnson told reporters at the Capitol. “Because everyone knows that’s the main issue.”
Suozzi’s victory wasn’t the only good news for Democrats Tuesday night. They too won a special election in a key battleground, Bucks County, Pennsylvania, to maintain control of the House of Representatives.
In both cases, the Biden campaign issued statements calling the Democratic victories defeats for Trumpism, a view echoed in part by a spokeswoman for Nikki Haley, Trump’s last major, if long-range, rival in the elections. Republican primaries.
“We just lost another Republican seat in the House of Representatives because voters overwhelmingly reject Donald Trump,” spokeswoman Olivia Pérez-Cubas said of the race in New York. “Until the Republicans wake up, we will continue to lose.”
Trump, for his part, distanced himself from Pilip, a registered Democrat who ran as a Republican, mocking her as a “very foolish woman.” In a statement on TruthSocial, he wrote in capital letters: “MAGA, which is the bulk of the Republican Party, is staying home, and always will be, unless treated with the respect it deserves.”
Political strategists of all stripes warn against drawing sweeping conclusions from the special election. Elections can offer a snapshot of political energy at a given moment, but they are far from predictive.
Certainly not everything about Mr. Suozzi’s victory will be replicable. After three decades in local politics, he had the benefit of a strong personal brand, plus a largely unknown opponent and a Republican predecessor who was universally vilified after his expulsion from the House in December.
And while Suozzi’s candidacy spared Democrats a complete panic in an election year, it also laid bare the magnitude of the challenges facing the party.
Suozzi, a longtime Biden ally, distanced himself from the president and the national party at almost every turn. That will prove much more difficult for candidates on the ballot during a presidential election, and some of Suozzi’s positions would risk backlash from the Democratic base in other, less moderate districts.
“Joe Biden won this district by eight points, Democrats outspent Republicans two to one, and our Democratic opponent spent decades representing these New Yorkers; however, it was still a dogfight,” said Rep. Richard Hudson of North Carolina, the Republican House chairman. campaign arm, he said in a statement. “Republicans still have multiple paths to grow our majority in November.”
Still, Democratic candidates and operatives were clearly encouraged by Suozzi’s ability to defuse a potent set of issues that typically paralyze the party, especially as he competes in five other Republican-controlled swing districts in New York.
Immigration was by far the most important. Illegal border crossings peaked in December. The arrival of more than 170,000 asylum seekers in New York City, straining budgets and the police force, has brought a sense of chaos close to home.
Republicans hit Suozzi with millions of dollars in attack ads that portrayed him as a Biden lackey who favored open borders. At one point, Pilip’s campaign called him the “godfather of the border crisis”.” House Republicans released a memo Wednesday, citing private polls last week that showed that 45 percent of voters cited immigration as their top issue, and that the attacks severely tarnished Mr. Suozzi’s image.
Republicans had used similar fears about an adjacent issue, crime, to drive notable victories in the New York suburbs since 2021, especially on Long Island. His successes there in 2022, at a time when Republicans were underperforming across the country, almost single-handedly secured the party’s margin in the House.
But this time, Suozzi, who watched his fellow Democrats virtually concede the issue to Republicans that year, was determined not to repeat the mistake.
So, over the course of the two-month race, he broke with party orthodoxy, calling on Biden to close the southern border and demanding that immigrants accused of assaulting police officers in Times Square be deported. But his main objective was bipartisanship, with the message that “solutions are not short sentences.”
When Pilip rejected a bipartisan deal in the Senate to boost deportations and strengthen the border, Suozzi turned the tables, arguing he was putting grassroots politics above national security.
Other public opinion polls over the course of the race suggested that Pilip had an advantage among voters concerned about the border issue, but Suozzi narrowed the confidence gap. Democratic strategists credited Suozzi’s direct embrace of immigration as a campaign policy for helping him win over the district’s large bloc of independent voters, who had abandoned the party in 2022. And among loyal Democrats, the messages more traditional Democrats on abortions, gun safety and Mr. Trump motivated strong turnout.
Biden himself has begun trying a similar approach on the issue, blaming Trump for ruining the bipartisan deal in the Senate that Republicans had negotiated. The message has been echoed by other Democrats who call Republicans extremist and uninterested in solutions to urgent problems.
“This was such a stark and clear decision about whether people want members of Congress who are fear-mongers or who are going to solve a lot of problems,” said Rep. Pat Ryan, a New York Democrat who is preparing to defend a party nearby. Hudson Valley swing seat. “We have had more than a year of chaos, division and dysfunction in the House. And for me this is a clear rejection of that.”
