Diving Into The Race To Replace George Santos
There Is No Guarantee Democrats Can Win New York's 3rd District Anymore
George Santos is out.
The ball of chaos who derped into Congress riding a red wave on Long Island in 2022 has been expelled after being indicted on campaign finance fraud charges, and a scathing House Ethics Committee accused him of similar crimes. His expulsion means the district will have to elect a new representative in a special election, which Gov. Kathy Hochul has called for February 13th. The winner will serve the remainder of Santos’ term.
The special election provides an opportunity for Democrats, who previously held the seat since 2010 and have represented much of the area in Congress since the early 1990s. Winning back the seat may seem fairly easy – after all, Biden won it in 2020 as did Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama before him – but the political winds on Long Island have shifted dramatically since 2020, and that makes this race no easy feat.
New York’s 3rd Congressional District has been Long Island-based since the 1950s. In the 2010s redistricting, when New York lost two seats, it was combined with the 6th Congressional District along Long Island’s North Shore and became a sprawling suburban district stretching from Northeast Queens to Huntington in Suffolk County. It was represented first by Democrat Steve Israel and later by former Glen Cove Mayor and Nassau County Executive Tom Suozzi, a Democrat who retired to run for governor in 2022. Suozzi is the Democratic Party’s candidate for the February 13th special election. Republicans are to pick their candidate next week.
Once considered solidly Democratic, Santos was not expected to win the seat in 2022, but a red wave triggered by anxiety over crime and the growing migrant problem in New York City swept Santos and a half dozen other New York Republicans into Congress. Many 3rd District residents commute to and spend a lot of time in New York City and were attracted to the anti-crime message of Republican gubernatorial candidate Lee Zeldin, a fellow Long Islander who won the 3rd District by 12 points. His win was a massive swing from 2020 when President Joe Biden won it by eight. Democrats up and down the ballot, including Sen. Chuck Schumer, all lost the district in 2022.
The district’s swing to the right in recent years was due to several factors.
First, redistricting made it more Republican. The district lost Huntington, which is an affluent and diverse town that voted for Mitt Romney, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden, one of the few places on Long Island that trended Democratic in the last decade. Replacing Huntington was most of the Town of Oyster Bay, a solidly Republican township that even voted for John McCain in 2008. The southern portion of Oyster Bay, part of the 2nd Congressional District in the 2010s, includes the New York City suburbs of Massapequa, Farmingdale, and Bethpage, home to the same type of Italian and Irish-American working-class that also make up the electorate in staunchly Republican Staten Island. These communities are also home to many NYPD and FDNY members and their families and are heavily influenced by crime and law and order issues. This portion of Oyster Bay was the political base of former Rep. Peter King, from 2003 to 2015 was the only Republican in the Long Island delegation, and for a time in 2009, one of only two Republicans in the entire New York State delegation. King’s base was so Republican that he resisted the blue waves in 2006 and 2008 when Democrats swept nearly every office on Long Island.
Second, the region itself has been veering Republican at breakneck speed since 2020. In 2021, and again in 2023, Republicans swept all the local offices, even winning the Town Supervisorship of North Hempstead, a longtime Democratic stronghold, and the mayoralty of Glen Cove, a job Suozzi once held. Republicans also won a Great Neck-based seat in the Nassau County Legislature, drawn years earlier as a Democratic vote sink to protect adjacent Republicans. The winner, Mazi Melesa Pilip, is an Ethiopian-born Jew who emigrated to Israel during Operation Solomon and served in the Israeli Defense Forces before moving to the United States. She is among the potential candidates Republicans are eyeing to replace Santos in the special election.
The district includes some low-density neighborhoods in the New York City borough of Queens along the Nassau border, including Whitestone, Bayside, Douglaston, Little Neck, Glen Oaks, and Bellerose. These neighborhoods have historically been overwhelmingly Democratic, even giving Biden over 60 percent of the vote in 2020, but they’ve become more Republican down-ballot in recent years. In 2021, Republican Vickie Paladino, a far-right candidate once considered unelectable, won the New York City Council district that included these Queens neighborhoods. She campaigned hard against progressive policies on crime and education. Paladino became notorious for posting a video of herself breaking COVID protocols during the pandemic and endorsing anti-vax and anti-public health messages.
The Queens portion of the 3rd Congressional District is mostly white, Italian, and Jewish (It is home to former NYPD union boss Pat Lynch), and has a growing Chinese and Korean population that has been shifting Republican due to opposition to progressive policies on crime and education. Former Mayor Bill de Blasio rankled Asian voters when he attempted to change the admissions process to several high-performing public high schools, such as Stuyvesant High School. The move was seen as an attack on Asian Americans, who make up the majority of accepted students in those schools. Then, during and after the COVID-19 Pandemic, anti-Asian hate crimes became an epidemic of their own around the New York area, and the perceived indifference toward preventing and prosecuting these crimes from progressives, and by extension Democrats, gave Republicans an opening with Asian voters. They contributed heavily to Santos’ win, helping him outperform Donald Trump’s 2020 performance by double digits in Queens and Western Nassau communities with a large Asian population.
Law and order issues have always been a third rail of New York politics. Former Gov. Mario Cuomo went from a top presidential contender and a dominant force in Democratic politics to losing to Republican George Pataki in 1994 because he opposed the reinstation of the death penalty as a means to curtail New York’s sky-high murder rate. Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani defeated incumbent Democrat David Dinkins a year earlier running on the same tough-on-crime messaging, propelling him into the national spotlight.
Earlier this year, Democrats held a State Assembly seat in Queens that had voted for Biden and Zeldin. Still, the Democratic victor underperformed Hochul in the precincts that overlapped the 3rd Congressional District. All the Republicans running on the local level in the district, including Pilip and Paladino, were reelected by wide margins last month.
Though the district has moved to the right, it is still considered moderate-to-liberal compared to the national political scene. Voters in the 3rd Congressional District are largely socially liberal – pro-choice, pro-LGBTQ rights, and supportive of gun control measures – and the district’s residents pay some of the highest property taxes in the country and count on federal tax laws allowing them to deduct local taxes when filing with the IRS. Former President Donald Trump’s signature tax reform act in 2017, passed by a GOP Congress, capped the State and Local Tax (SALT) deduction at $10,000, which negatively affected homeowners in the district, most of whom pay more than that annually in local property taxes. The SALT cap is almost as unpopular in the 3rd Congressional District as defunding the police. Though Democrats have not yet rolled that back, due to some opposition from progressives, it has been New York-area Congressional Democrats like Rep. Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey who have championed repealing the cap. Suozzi himself was a supporter of repealing the cap in his last term and plans to run on it this year.
Democrats hope returning to a moderate campaign focusing on the excess of Congressional Republicans on social issues and repealing the SALT cap will wipe away any edge Republicans gained in the district over crime. They are also counting on fatigue from Santos’ scandals to help them as well. Republicans hope they can continue to capitalize on the unpopularity of New York progressives. The district has a significant population of Jewish voters, many of whom have direct ties to Israel or are themselves Israeli (Pilip made support of Israel a major part of politics). Both parties will hope to leverage that to their benefit, with Democrats playing up Biden’s support for Israel and Republicans pointing to local progressives’ opposition to Israel’s war in Gaza and their positive reaction to the October 7th attacks.
Besides Pilip, Republicans are looking at State Sen. Jack Martins, a former mayor of Mineola who ousted Democrat Anna Kaplan in 2022 running against her support of bail reform. Martins ran for the seat in 2016, losing to Suozzi by a small margin. Before Santos’ expulsion, there was already one Republican in the race, former NYPD Detective Mike Sapraicone, who is seeking the GOP nomination for the special election, but local Republican leaders seem very interested in Pilip due to her background and her electoral success in a longtime Democratic district. Her district, along the Queens border, includes the Democratic stronghold of Great Neck, one of the places where Santos outperformed other Republicans, and where Republicans would need to tamper Democratic support to keep the seat.
Democrats would also need a strong turnout among black voters in Westbury and New Cassel, and support from traditionally Jewish voters in places like Bay Terrace, Roslyn, and Great Neck. Suozzi could also help Democrats win back Glen Cove, which Santos narrowly won in 2022. They would have to also win back votes among the growing Asian community in the district, especially in Queens. The task is daunting and would require reversing recent political trends and strong efforts by New York’s beleaguered Democratic establishment.
If Democrats do win the special election, they would hold 214 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives, leaving them just four shy of a majority, making the task of winning back the majority in 2024 much easier. It would provide momentum toward possibly winning back other formerly Democratic seats in New York, including the adjacent 4th Congressional District and the 17th in the Hudson Valley, both of which are more Democratic than the 3rd District. Winning the majority would also make fellow New Yorker Rep. Hakeem Jeffries of Brooklyn the Speaker of the House.
For that reason alone, New York Democrats will fight as hard as they can to win this seat back in February and Republicans will battle to defend it.