A Special Victory

Tom Suozzi defeated his Republican opponent in a critical special election. Here’s what to take away.

Democrats got an early Valentine from voters in New York’s purple suburbs in Queens and Long Island. Democrat Tom Suozzi cruised to victory over his Republican opponent, Mazi Pilip, in the most hotly contested and closely watched special election in the country.

I want to pause first and thank everyone here who answered my ask by donating and/or volunteering. We raised over $30,000 for Suozzi, helping him defeat his opponent and flip George Santos’s vacated congressional seat in New York’s 3rd district.

Now, on to some post-election analysis. While special elections aren’t normally predictive of or informative about the general, this one stands out. 

First, turnout looked more like a midterm election than a special one. And Democratic early voting and mail-ins dominated it. Democrats turn out more early voters because they trust the system, while Republicans have been taught by Trump not to. That’s a self-own that continues to haunt Republicans, especially when Election Day turnout is thwarted by bad weather, like we saw on Tuesday.

Second, Republicans tried to make this all about the border and the migrant crisis. Ads about “Sanctuary Suozzi” and the “Godfather of the Migrant Crisis” were everywhere. But Suozzi flipped the script. He talked tough on immigration and hammered on the fact that Republicans walked away from a bipartisan border solution. Expect to see other Democrats, particularly in swing districts, adopt this playbook.

Finally, the polls were off. Way off. Some had the candidates neck-and-neck, others within four. But Suozzi won by eight points, matching Biden of four years ago. The polls have been consistently underestimating Democratic enthusiasm—bad news for the GOP. 

I’ll break these down a bit more below. While every special election has its own idiosyncrasies—and there were a lot here, given who used to hold the seat—the results are generally pretty good news for Democrats. We should savor the win and leverage it going forward.

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Early voting, turnout and persuadables

Early on, it was encouraging to see so many ballots coming in via mail and through early in-person voting. Their composition not only heavily favored Democrats, as was expected, but the breakdown tilted even more strongly the Democrats’ way than in the prior election.

Two days before Election Day, the early vote numbers stood as follows, according to election watcher Tom Bonier, formerly of Target Smart.

Early in-person: 48,365 votes, +11D party reg 

Mail-in voting:   12,694 votes, +29D party reg 

That’s around 61,000 early votes, out of a total cast of around 170,000 by Election Night. Mail-in votes would continue to come in past February 11.

Importantly, the Democratic share of these numbers exceeded the 2022 figures by around three points. In 2022 they were +7.8D for in-person and +26D for mail-in, respectively. That was a good indication that enthusiasm was up among Democrats to replace Santos with Suozzi. And it’s enthusiasm that wins special elections.

Further, most special elections tend to see only a fraction of the turnout numbers that normal elections see. But by the end of Election Night, as Nate Cohn of the New York Times noted in his subscriber-only newsletter, turnout for the special election in NY-3 looked more like a midterm election, even with the heavy snowstorm. 

It’s not surprising that turnout was nonetheless high. This was a highly charged, emotionally-laden election. Voters who had felt betrayed and bamboozled by Santos wanted to lodge their protest. The House majority is so thin that the outcome could be determinative of key votes. Indeed, had the GOP waited until Suozzi won and was seated, the shameful impeachment vote against DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas would have failed by one vote.

And the two parties spent enormous sums of cash to win the race, which was seen as a bellwether for the 2024 general election. As I’ll discuss below, the race also became a referendum of sorts on which party the voters trusted more to handle the question of immigration.

Borderline failure

If there had been any doubt about what Suozzi’s opponent Mazi Pilip intended to make the race about, those were erased at her very first press conference, held outside the district’s sole migrant center. 

The influx of migrants, often bussed by Gov. Abbott of Texas into big cities like New York, Chicago and Denver, has become a hot-button issue as their numbers swelled beyond the capacity of local governments to adequately house, feed and process them. Pilip, an immigrant of Ethiopian descent who grew up in Israel, stressed how “legal” immigrants who had gone through years of the system were being treated unfairly with the arrival of so many unauthorized migrants.

But as The Daily, a podcast by the New York Times, noted yesterday, Suozzi heard about the planned announcement and arrived to give a press conference of his own, insisting he was tough on immigration and that it was Congress that had failed to fix the problem.

His argument received a major boost toward the end of the campaign when it was clear that Republicans in the House, among whom Pilip had hoped to serve, had summarily rejected a solution on the border and the migrant issue. Worse still, this was at the direction of former president Trump, who insisted that a solution would hand Biden a political win. As I noted in an earlier piece, this was a fairly big gift to Biden and the Democrats, because now they could start to shift blame to the Republicans, for whom it seemed the problem was more useful than the solution.

Suozzi capitalized on this gift, blasting Republicans for failing to accept a bipartisan Senate solution on the border and the migrant issue. Efforts to paint him as “soft” on immigration didn’t seem to move voters, especially after he countered that his earlier years of experience in Congress would help craft real solutions to the crisis. Indeed, at least anecdotally speaking, two different CNN reporters noted that they had spoken to Republican voters on Election Day who had voted for Suozzi out of frustration and anger that the GOP had refused the solution that their own negotiators had offered.

NY-3 may be just different enough from other suburban swing districts that the immigration debate may not play out the same elsewhere. There is a large AAPI community in Queens that accounts for around a fourth of the voters there, and they may be far more persuadable and solution-driven in their voting patterns than other demographic groups. This is also a district where beating the drum about rising crime succeeded in swinging the district some 16 points in 2022, leading to George Santos’s improbable and fraudulently obtained victory—which itself may have played an outsized role in Suozzi’s easy win.

But it would still be political malpractice for GOP House members in vulnerable Biden-won districts to look at these results and not worry that the repeated failures to act by the GOP-led House—on migration, on the budget, on Ukraine aid—don’t lead to a general sense that they are complicit as members of the “do-nothing” party. 

Moreover, Democratic challengers in these districts, sensitive to the concerns of suburban voters, likely will adopt Suozzi’s harder stance on immigration and also seek to lay the blame for the problem where it now clearly belongs: at the feet of the House GOP. Like Suozzi, they will portray the Democratic party as the side willing to work across the aisle and compromise, which is something voters exhausted by partisan politics truly crave.

Even when protestors interrupted his election night speech over the brutal Israeli campaign in Gaza, Suozzi stayed on message.

“There are divisions in our country where people can’t even talk to each other. All they can do is yell and scream at each other,” he said, acknowledging the noisy situation. “That’s not the answer to the problems we face in our country. The answer is to try and bring people together to try and find common ground.”

“The way to make our country a better place is to try and find common ground. It is not easy to do. It is hard to do,” Suozzi told his supporters. 

And about those polls….

A headline yesterday in the New York Times for its national podcast, The Daily, was highly revealing: “Why the Race to Replace George Santos Is So Close.”

It wasn’t alone. “Tom Suozzi ahead of Mazi Pilip by just 1 point in poll on NY election eve,” wrote the NY Post, breathlessly reporting about a polling outfit that had interviewed 500 likely voters.

Even more reputable pollsters Emerson College Polling and the New York Times/Siena College Poll had Suozzi up by four points, not eight.

But the snow hurt turnout! And the enthusiasm gap doesn’t show up in polling! 

Indeed. But that’s in part why the polls get House races notoriously wrong. As Nate Cohn admitted in his newsletter, they average being off by around six points. Let me say that again: by around six points. That’s certainly enough to make almost any poll of a House race almost meaningless and likely misleading.

The pollsters and pundits know this, but the press still prints headlines that are criminally deceptive. The NY-3 race was never really neck and neck, as the early voting showed. Many pollsters actually hate early voting numbers because it makes their work more irrelevant. (Perhaps that’s why some like the former head of 538, Nate Silver, deride them as “hopium” numbers.)

But here’s the thing: Early voting numbers are actual votes cast. And sure, while there can be some amount of party crossover voting, it’s still far better to extrapolate from these real numbers than from the polls, which by their own admission the pollsters know aren’t accurate enough to support these kinds of headlines.

The bottom line is this: Democrats have consistently overperformed in special and general elections since the Dobbs decision in 2022, even while the polls have failed again and again to predict their success. There is something fundamentally flawed about polling methodology, and it is increasingly irresponsible of the media to run with headlines that are not factually supportable because the polls they are based on are known to be inaccurate. 

In what other area would this ever be okay? It’s like warning there’s a good chance of severe storms or even a hurricane, but based on barometers that haven’t functioned properly for years. 

As we look ahead to November, keep in mind that Democrats are winning and will continue to win, and that the GOP is flailing and will continue to flail. No amount of polling can change that; it can only add unnecessary anxiety. 

Some final thoughts

The fight over border security and migrants in NY-3 showed that the GOP is vulnerable on the very question that they once considered their best weapon. They squandered this all for the sake of the presidential “election vibes” that Donald Trump insisted he must have. 

But, to no one’s surprise, Trump is shooting from the hip and thinking only of himself. Whether the GOP as a national party has a hard time explaining why it walked away from a solution it once demanded isn’t his problem. It’s now the GOP’s, and they own it, full stop.

They seem, however, to be unable to course correct. Rather than reconsider this loser of a political position, they are casting about for blame. As Jake Sherman of Punch Bowl news reported,

A healthy round of finger pointing this morning among Republicans here on Capitol Hill this morning about NY3.

So far I've heard:

- People say the Nassau County GOP machine is useless after supporting Pilip and Santos. 

- People blame the leadership.

- People blame Pilip herself for hiding out and not raising enough cash.

The problem runs far deeper than this, of course. It was the Republicans who had to expel Santos from the seat in the first place because he was such a horrific political liability. They then set themselves up by making the border and migrants seem such a crisis that it absolutely had to be addressed—before ultimately doing nothing at all to act upon it. Not to mention all of the extremism, dysfunction, wasted time in sham impeachments and sycophancy toward Trump.

Voters aren’t blind to all of this, especially in the critical suburbs where congressional majorities and the presidency will be decided.

Republicans need to be taught to understand the very high electoral cost of abject failure, disarray and inaction. Voters are already delivering that message loud and clear. Yet it somehow still isn’t being received.

Welp. Dear Republicans: Keep at it, it’s working really well!