The Long Island district, which includes Nassau County and parts of Queens, has historically been Democratic, but has trended Republican in recent years. This is exactly the upscale suburban area that Democrats who voted against President Biden will need to win in November.
In the short term, flipping one House seat would also cause headaches for House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana), further hollowing out the idea that Republicans “control” the House. His majority is now so slim that he can only lose two members of the dysfunctional Republican conference on any given vote.
Republicans were stunned by the results. Polls and independent internal research showed the race in New York to be closer than it actually was (a near-perfect result had Suozzi winning by almost 8 points). “Nobody expected it to happen last night,” former Congressman Peter T. King, who once represented most of the district, told me. “I thought this was definitely a red wave.”
Suozzi’s victory continued the Democratic Party’s winning streak in special elections. These contests are “useful, but they’re not always predictable,” former Rep. Steve Israel, who once represented the district and led Democratic House campaigns, told me Wednesday morning.
First, Mr. Suozzi is well known to voters as a centrist, having served as a member of the House of Representatives, Nassau County Executive and Mayor of Glen Cove. His Republican opponent was virtually unknown two-term Nassau County Councilwoman Maj Pilip. On television, Democrats outspent Republicans by nearly 2 to 1.
Nevertheless, Suozzi’s message on this issue is worth noting. Nassau County is thousands of miles from the Mexican border, but undocumented immigrants made up the majority of the races. That’s because people in the area “wake up several times a week, in real time, to watch the busloads of migrants arriving in New York City,” Israel said. Pilip, himself an Ethiopian-born immigrant, claimed that “Joe Biden and Tom Suozzi have brought the border crisis before our eyes.”
Mr. Suozzi’s smartest move was to lean into the issue even as Republicans tried to foist it on him with attack ads. He described it as a crisis of “epic proportions” and called on the Biden administration to temporarily close the border. “The federal government’s failure to address this problem for so long has forced it onto New York City, New York State and other states,” he said.
When Pilip voiced opposition to a bipartisan agreement to spend more than $20 billion to strengthen border security and strengthen deportations (echoing former President Donald Trump’s criticism that it didn’t go far enough), Suozzi accused her of joining “Republican extremists.” She has prioritized partisanship over problem-solving with party and House bosses.
For too long, Democrats have preferred to ignore the chaos occurring at the border or claim that the right is stirring up the problem. But recently, Democrats have argued that it is Republicans who are not taking the crisis seriously enough and are using it as election political fodder instead of doing something to fix it now. have a strong argument for
Efforts to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas further emphasized this. The secretary passed the House by one vote just before voting ended in New York, where it was rejected a week earlier. This was an abuse of one of the most solemn responsibilities the Constitution gives the House of Representatives. There is no chance that Mr. Mayorkas will be convicted by the Senate simply for carrying out the president’s policies.
There is no one-size-fits-all winning formula, but Mr. Suozzi’s victory gives Congressional Democrats a template for how to deal with issues that will be hotly pursued by Republicans in battleground states across the country this year. As Israel noted, it also provides a “playbook for a Biden presidency.” Refuse to cede ground and be ready to counterattack.