How Suozzi Got His Seat Back
A Look At What Democrats Did To Flip George Santos' Long Island District
Tom Suozzi is headed back to Congress.
The former congressman and Nassau County Executive, who retired in 2022 to make a quixotic bid for governor, won his seat back in a special election for New York’s 3rd Congressional District on Tuesday. He will replace his successor, the scandal-plagued freshman Republican George Santos, who was expelled from the House of Representatives over a laundry list of ethics violations and criminal accusations in December, only 11 months into his term. Suozzi defeated Nassau County Legislator Mazi Pilip, an Ethiopian-born Jew who lived in Israel for many years and served in the Israeli Armed Forces. Pilip, a registered Democrat, represents a longtime Democratic district in the county legislature.
The race to succeed Santos was expected to be close. The Long Island-based district, which includes all of northern and eastern Nassau County and several neighborhoods in Northeast Queens, voted for Joe Biden in 2020 by eight points, but then voted for Santos by the same eight-point margin in 2022 and Republican gubernatorial candidate Lee Zeldin by double digits. Republicans also dominated the 2023 local elections in both counties.
In the end, it wasn’t very close. With 93 percent of precincts reporting as of Wednesday morning, Suozzi won the race by the same 8 percent margin Santos did, 54 percent to 46 percent. He won 62 percent of the vote in the Queens portion of the district and unexpectedly won the Nassau County portion, defeating Pilip there 53-47.
The margin of his victory came as a shock. One political advisor joked before the polls closed he was so sure it would be close, that he would “streak naked” through a Queens neighborhood should Suozzi win by more than six points. (No word on whether he’s going to follow through on that.) Another Democratic politico from the district said he thought Suozzi would win, but expected it to be close enough that Pilip wouldn't concede immediately and there would be “fireworks.” Instead, the margin was so big, that Pilip publicly conceded before the race was even called by the major networks.
How did the Democrats manage to win back a seat they lost in 2022 by a significant margin? Mostly, it was due to a lot of lessons learned, a seasoned candidate familiar to and liked by voters, and some late-in-the-game faceplants by Pilip and national Republicans.
1.) Suozzi Neutralized The GOP’s Strongest Issue
If you, like me, live in the New York media market, you probably saw too many television advertisements for this race to count, and you know that nearly all of them revolved around the migrant issue. A major issue in the New York area, migrants was supposed to be a strong issue for Republicans, who won the seat in 2022 running on crime and law and order.
But unlike Democrats in 2022, who avoided the crime issue hoping to shift voters to more favorable topics like abortion and gun control, Suozzi took on the migrant issue directly. He ran ads showing his support for stronger immigration laws. One ad featured him as a guest on Fox News during his last term in Congress criticizing progressives on the issue.
Though he endorsed rather draconian policies on the border, he also mentioned his support for some left-of-center policies like the DREAM Act in his ads. As a result, he neutralized the attacks against him without alienating too many Democrats. One Republican attack ad featured Suozzi bragging that he “kicked ICE out of Nassau County,” a reference to his refusal to let Nassau County Police work with Immigration and Customs Enforcement to find and deport undocumented immigrants when he was county executive. However, Suozzi hasn’t been Nassau County Executive for 15 years. It’s hard to logically tie his quarrel with ICE a decade and a half ago to the current migrant problem. Suozzi responded by reiterating his support for ICE today and his votes to fund it in Congress.
The Republican’s entire immigration message further collapsed last week when House Republicans, on the orders of former President Donald Trump, refused to take up the Senate’s border security bill that included many of the policies Pilip had been calling for in her early ads. Suozzi said he’d support the bill, but Pilip said she’d oppose it. The bill included aid to Israel, which fatally damaged the other issue Republicans hoped they be strong on.
2.) A Bad Bet On Israel
Back when it became clear there would be a special election for the seat, Republicans immediately presented Pilip as a top recruit. Pilip’s background as a former Israeli Defense Force paratrooper was a major factor in why she was chosen.
Several Nassau Republicans I spoke to in December said they expected the Israel-Hamas War to become a major issue in the race, and they believed the rising opposition to the war among progressives would eventually push the Democratic Party and President Biden against Israel. As New York Democrats had bent to the will of left-wing activists in the past, there was an assumption they’d be forced to do so again.
The Third District includes a large Jewish population and is strongly Zionist. Being Israeli, the GOP hoped Pilip would have the credibility to leverage the issue should Biden and top Democrats be pushed to turn on Israel.
That never happened, however. Democrats kept the anti-Israel left at bay and continued to openly support Israel in the war. When Pilip vowed to oppose the border security bill that included aid to Israel – while Suozzi, a longtime Zionist, said he would support it – any Republican advantage on the issue evaporated.
As a result, Suozzi matched Biden’s numbers in many staunchly Jewish parts of the district, clawing back all the support Democrats had lost in those communities since 2020.
3.) The Jeffries Machine
Both the New York Democratic establishment and the progressive activist groups hoping to supplant them mostly sat this race out, or worked in the background on voter outreach. On the front lines in the campaign were the Nassau and Queens Republican machines, which proved their worth running successful campaigns for local races this past Fall, and the budding machine of House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, the Brooklyn congressman who would become Speaker of the House should Democrats win back a majority in Washington.
New York Democratic boss Jay Jacobs has long been described as a “do-nothing leader.” Jacobs, who is also chair of the Nassau County Democratic Party, was appointed to the position by former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, but Cuomo himself acted as the head of the party. When Cuomo resigned in 2021, the party was left leaderless. Buffalo native Gov. Kathy Hochul holds a lot of sway in her Western New York base, but has very little influence downstate, where the Democratic massacre occurred in 2022 (Democrats held their own upstate.) That left a leadership vacuum looking for a rising political star to fill.
Enter Jeffries. When he won the race to succeed former Speaker Nancy Pelosi as leader of the House Democratic Caucus, it put him in the perfect position to fill the gaping leadership maw downstate Democrats had. There are at least three, perhaps as many as five, downstate House districts that could flip in 2024, and winning them would go a long way to making a Speaker Jefferies a reality.
Jeffries put a laser focus on the Third District special election, hoping it would provide a roadmap for a nationwide campaign to win back the House majority. (With Suozzi’s win, Democrats only need a net gain of four seats to win control and make Jeffries the new Speaker.) To say he put everything into the race is an understatement. The Speaker-in-waiting sent the big guns into the district to move voters for Suozzi. Among them was U.S. Rep. Grace Meng (D-Queens), who represents a district adjacent to the Third District. She hit the ground hard for Suozzi, helping him with a vital group of voters whom Democrats have been lagging with recently.
4.) Winning Back A Key Constituency
The biggest factor in the red wave that swept New York in 2022 was the Democratic Party bleeding votes from the Chinese- and Korean-American communities in New York City and Long Island. A longtime Democratic constituency, these groups swung hard for Republicans due to longstanding discomfort and anger with progressive policies on education and crime that Democratic officials endorsed and promoted. It started a decade ago, with the attempts to get rid of standardized tests for New York City specialty high schools, which are often dominated by Asian-American students. The animosity with Democrats festered with criminal justice reform measures that became the focus of Asian-American activists during the era of rising hate crimes in 2020. Asian-American voters in the New York area became increasingly despondent and angry with Democrats and progressives whom they felt were taking their communities for granted. Through 2020 however, most Asian-Americans in New York stuck with Democrats, owing to Donald Trump’s racism and Republicans ignoring their communities, but once Trump was out of power, they started flirting with Republicans, who were happy to reciprocate.
In 2021 and 2022, Republicans worked Asian-American communities hard, blaming progressive criminal justice policies like bail reform for the rise in anti-Asian hate crimes and progressive education policies for their children being passed over for opportunities. It resonated and Asian Americans swung Republican in the 2021 New York City mayoral election and local elections in Nassau County. In 2022, the group went overwhelmingly to Zeldin and helped elect Santos. Last year, several Asian candidates to New York City’s Community Education Councils were elected with the backing of the staunchly anti-LGBTQ group Moms For Liberty, a favorite group of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. This sent shockwaves through New York Democrats.
Sounding the sirens the loudest was Meng, the only Asian-American in Congress from New York. Meng represents Flushing, one of the largest Chinese-American communities in the United States, and one that saw a hard rightward tilt since 2020. Flushing’s “suburbs” make up a big chunk of the Third District. Meng understood the necessity of winning back Asian voters and made it her mission to campaign hard for Suozzi in these communities.
It paid off. Some of the biggest swings to the Democrats on Tuesday occurred in Asian-American communities. Murray Hill, a Queens community that is over 80 percent Asian, swung more than 20 points left, voting for Suozzi by 24 percent. In 2022, It voted Democratic by only a point. Bayside, a diverse neighborhood becoming more Asian and is partially in Meng’s district, shifted by a dramatic margin too. Santos won Bayside by nine points, but Suozzi flipped it, winning it by 10 on Tuesday.
These swings helped to erase the advantage Republicans gained in the district in 2022 and steer the district back to the Democrats, who before 2022 represented much of the area in Washington for forty years.
This is great! Thanks!