Democrats pick up House seat in special election in NY-03!
Democrats have not won a major election in suburban Nassau County since Biden took the area in 2020. NY-03 is mostly in Nassau County and was famously won by Republican fabulist George Santos in 2022. It was Santos's ouster from the House which led to this special election.
So Democrat Tom Suozzi easily defeated his GOP opponent Mazi Pilip on Tuesday by a margin similar to Biden's win in 2020.
Republicans sought to use immigration against Democrats in this election – and failed.
William Kristol and Andrew Egger observed at The Bulwark:
Republicans pummeled Suozzi on immigration with waves of hyperbolic border-invasion ads. But in his three terms in Congress Suozzi had been, for a Democrat, something of a border hawk. And he had plenty of money to portray himself as that. Indeed, he did so aggressively.
When Republicans in Congress torpedoed the border bill, Suozzi attacked them for doing so and lamented that it would not now be able to expel “eighty percent” of asylum seekers and to stop migrants from flooding New York.
Yep, Republicans have been demanding border reform. When a viable bipartisan plan became a possibility in the US Senate, they shot it down on orders from adjudicated sex offender Donald Trump.
So now we have a Republican border crisis which Trump hopes will catapult his demented self back into the White House. But indications from NY-03 are that it probably won't work out for them.
Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut was one of the senators who worked on the Senate bipartisan immigration reform which Trump sabotaged. Murphy sees the MAGA GOP flip-flop on the border as something which can be used against Republicans nationally.
Sen. Chris Murphy urges Democrats to follow Tom Suozzi and go on the offensive on the border
“Suozzi messaged aggressively on the issue, running ads that highlighted his support for a secure border and legal pathways to citizenship,” Murphy wrote. “He flipped the script on his Republican opponent, successfully painting her as unserious about border security because of her opposition to the bipartisan border bill, and turned what could have been a devastating political liability into an advantage.”
Murphy acknowledged his frustration that after months of negotiating the bipartisan border security bill, Republicans in the Senate ultimately knifed it in a matter of days. But he said the GOP’s rejection of the bill provides Democrats with a way to counter GOP talking points on the border.
Back in NY-03, some Republican apologists tried to blame the 7.8% defeat of their candidate on the weather. The official NWS weather station at La Guardia Airport in Queens, next to NY-03, reported a grand total of 3.3 inches [8.38 cm] of snow on Tuesday. And the snow was over by 3 PM. In New York, polls are open until 9 PM. There was plenty of time for Republicans to sweep away the minor amount of snow from their sidewalks and get to their polling places. Don't let the GOP give you a snow job about their loss of a swing district.
Anyway, with the victory of Tom Suozzi, Republicans are one step closer to losing their majority under Speaker "MAGA Mike" Johnson.
