Democrats’ NY-3 special election win shows Biden’s path to victory

Facing headwinds from crime, immigration and an election day snowstorm, former Rep. Tom Suozzi succeeded Tuesday in winning back his old job representing NY-3 by convincingly beating Republican Mazi Pilip. On the heels of a brutal news cycle for President Joe Biden’s 2024 campaign, the victory gives Democrats a much needed shot of confidence that their party has the winning formula to appeal to the moderate suburban voters Biden must win to return to the White House. A close examination of Suozzi’s campaign shows how Biden can win reelection.

For several cycles, Long Island has been a canary in the coal mine for Democrats. Even as the party has won elsewhere on the strength of its “Dobbs and Democracy” messaging, Republicans have consistently overperformed across Long Island — but that came to a screeching halt on Tuesday. In 2020, President Biden won Nassau County by 10 points. Two years later, Gov. Kathy Hochul lost it by 10 points. But yesterday, the county returned to its Democratic gravity.

How did Democrats turn the red tide in NY-3, and how can Biden do the same, as his polls show alarming cracks in the Democratic coalition heading into 2024?

The answer is three-pronged. First, Suozzi succeeded in meeting voters where they were — validating their fears on crime and immigration. Second, he rebutted Pilip’s attacks by advancing commonsense bipartisan solutions. Third, he called out Republican extremism and delineated the clear risks it poses to the public. If President Biden can do these three things, he can reassemble the coalition that propelled him to office in 2020.

As voters were inundated by recent headlines showing busloads of immigrants arriving in New York City, the GOP put Suozzi on the defensive immediately — jumping on comments he’d made during the 2022 gubernatorial primary that he “kicked ICE out of Nassau” when he was county executive — in the hope that they could define him as an open-borders, sanctuary-city supporting liberal. It didn’t work.

Suozzi leaned into his bipartisan credentials from his tenure in Congress, stuffing voters’ mailboxes (including my own) with reminders that he worked with the GOP to fix the border — one ad even showed Suozzi with former GOP Rep. Peter King. Suozzi accepted voters’ fears on immigration and portrayed himself as a serious legislator hoping to work with the GOP to find a solution, thus blunting Pilip’s false characterization of him.

Pilip also saw an opportunity as near record numbers of respondents in New York City have been reporting fears about crime in polls — a concern that has made its way to Long Island, where many residents commute to the city for work. In an electorate that values the orderliness of the suburbs, voters feel unsafe in the status quo and remember the Democratic message of several years ago to defund the police and institute cashless bail. But, once again, Pilip failed to tag Suozzi as weak on crime — he touted his bipartisan background and longstanding focus on the issue across all his campaigns.

Simultaneously, Suozzi (and the DCCC) hammered Pilip on her association with the MAGA movement and aggressively messaged that she was running on a national party platform which supports an abortion ban. (Pilip said she was pro-life but not in favor of a national ban.) Suozzi leaned into this issue during the shortened special election campaign.

The road to victory for the Democrats is clear. Party leaders must talk about the fact that they’re serious about solving the problems Americans are most concerned about, from inflation to the border. It’s Republicans who are interested in playing politics, whether by rooting openly for a recession or scuttling a bipartisan deal that would have passed the strongest border security measures in decades. And they must make the case that Republican extremism — from abortion to NATO — is a clear and present danger to the American people.

If President Biden and Democrats nationally can emulate Suozzi’s strategy, they won’t just win the Long Island suburbs in November, but those in swing districts in battleground states like Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. Special elections are more instructive than predictive. Suozzi’s victory in NY-3 does not herald a pervasive hidden strength for the Democratic brand heading into a pivotal presidential election, but it does point towards a winning strategy that Biden and the party should heed. If Democrats listen to the results of NY-3, they can secure four more years for President Biden and hold off the dangerous tide of Trumpism.

Steve Israel was Chair of the DCCC from 2011 to 2015 and represented New York in the House of Representatives from 2001 to 2017.