5 takeaways from Democrats’ special election victory in New York

Democrats won a major pickup Tuesday with former Rep. Tom Suozzi’s win in the special election to fill ex-Rep. George Santos’s (R-N.Y.) House seat. 

Suozzi defeated Republican Nassau County legislator Mazi Pilip in a comfortable victory that will return him to his old seat representing New York’s 3rd Congressional District, which voted for President Biden in 2020 by 8 points.

The race was being closely watched ahead of November, especially as New York is set to play a pivotal role in Democrats’ efforts to flip the House.

It also came as the party has been dogged by President Biden’s lagging approval numbers and concerns over immigration, which became a flashpoint in the race.

Here are five takeaways from Tuesday’s results: 

Democrats avert a disaster 

The stakes were high for Democrats heading into Tuesday’s vote. 

The party had a lot going for it in the lead-up to the election after the numerous scandals surrounding Santos. The disgraced former congressman, who was elected in an upset win in 2022, was expelled from the House in December following an Ethics Committee probe into the many false claims he made about his background and the criminal charges he’s facing. 

Republicans turned to Pilip, a relatively little-known county legislator, to be their nominee against Suozzi, who had the clear advantage in name recognition. 

The Democrats also significantly outspent the GOP in the race, with Suozzi raising more than three times the amount that Pilip raised in the final quarter of 2023. 

Despite those advantages, polls showed a tight race between the two candidates, raising concerns for Democrats already pessimistic about Biden.

Republicans argued that the fact the race was close despite the clear Democratic advantage demonstrated the party’s vulnerability.

Certainly, a defeat for Democrats on Tuesday would have set off major alarm bells heading into November. Now, they can breathe a major sigh of relief and focus their attention back on the presidential primaries with a renewed sense of confidence.

House Republicans’ math gets even harder 

The most immediate impact of Suozzi’s win will be that the House Republican majority will get one seat narrower. 

Once Suozzi is sworn in, the GOP will control the House 219-213 with three seats vacant, meaning they could only have two members of their conference defect and still have a vote pass. A key example of the already precarious nature of the Republican majority came earlier Tuesday night when the House narrowly voted to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. 

The vote passed by one vote, 214-213, with three Republicans joining all Democrats in opposing the measure. If the vote had been held after Suozzi is sworn in, three GOP defections would have been enough to sink it. 

The New York 3rd District is one of five in the state that will be particularly key to deciding which party will win control of the House in November. These five districts voted for Biden in the 2020 election and elected a Republican representative in 2022. 

“Joe Biden won this district by 8 points, Democrats outspent Republicans two-to-one, and our Democrat opponent spent decades representing these New Yorkers — yet it was still a dogfight. Republicans still have multiple pathways to grow our majority in November,” said Rep. Richard Hudson (N.C.), National Republican Campaign Committee chair.

With the GOP majority as narrow as it is, the party that wins a majority of these five seats could clinch control of the House in the fall. And Suozzi’s win means Democrats will have an incumbent on the ballot in one of them. 

GOP messaging on immigration wasn’t enough

Pilip centered much of her campaign messaging around immigration as the issue received widespread attention both nationwide and in the district. 

An Emerson College poll released last month found more voters in the district considered immigration more important than any other issue, and one from this month found border security was the issue that voters trusted Pilip the most on against Suozzi. 

Republicans branded the former congressman “Sanctuary Suozzi,” accusing him of supporting sanctuary cities and blaming him for the current situation at the border based on his previous record in the House. Pilip’s campaign argued that Suozzi would vote in lockstep with Biden, whose policies on immigration have been seen as widely unpopular. 

Suozzi responded to the attacks by emphasizing his support for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, noting in an ad that he voted to support the agency in 2018 while many in his party opposed it. He also declared his support for the bipartisan Senate legislation that negotiators from both parties reached and criticized Pilip for opposing it. 

The legislation failed to advance in the Senate after former President Trump urged Republicans to oppose it. 

With immigration gaining such widespread attention as a major issue and voters rating Biden poorly on his handling of it, Republicans saw the border situation as potentially the most powerful tool in their arsenal to attack Democrats. 

But Suozzi was able to fend off those attacks and promote his promise of working with both sides of the aisle to address the issue.

Democrats exceed turnout expectations 

Polls ahead of the election showed Suozzi ahead of Pilip by 3 or 4 points, but he appeared likely to finish ahead of expectations as returns came in Tuesday night. 

Suozzi led Pilip by nearly 8 points with more than 93 percent of the vote counted, according to a Decision Desk HQ count late Tuesday.  

He pulled off the win by outperforming what he needed in both Queens County, a more Democratic area that makes up a smaller part of the district, and Nassau County, which makes up most of the district. 

Suozzi also outpaced other Democrats’ performance in the district in past election years. 

Robert Zimmerman, the Democratic nominee who lost to Santos in 2022, received only 52 percent of the vote in the Queens portion of the district and 45 percent in Nassau. Suozzi stands at above 60 percent in Queens and a majority in Nassau as of the latest vote count. 

Biden, while comfortably carrying the district in 2020, only won the Queens part of the district by 20 points, according to the nonpartisan elections analysis website Inside Elections, compared to Suozzi’s 24-point lead. 

The race was called after the returns made clear that Pilip mathematically would not be able to keep up with how she needed to perform to win. 

GOP faces mail-in voting problem 

The two parties have tended to differ in their voting behavior, with Democrats more likely to vote early or by mail and Republicans more likely to vote in person on Election Day. 

That discrepancy has worried some Republicans, who fear that members of their party are often less likely to vote compared to Democrats.

The disadvantage of in-person voting was underscored Tuesday, as a nor’easter brought heavy snow to the New York region throughout much of the day.

While it’s hard to know for sure how much the weather actually affected turnout, it’s likely to have prevented at least some people from heading to the polls Tuesday. Based off past voting habits, it’s probable that many of them were Republicans.

The disappointing GOP turnout underscored the extent to which Trump’s criticism of mail-in voting continues to be a thorn in the party’s side.

Trump has railed against the voting method as part of his false claims about the 2020 election being stolen from him.

Some Republicans have tried to encourage early voting to close the gap with Democrats, but work remains to be done.