In the race for a district that gained national infamy after electing an openly gay, Jew-ish serial liar-turned-indicted criminal 23 times over, Democrat Tom Suozzi came out on top, reclaiming the seat he abandoned two years ago.
But while there is certainly cause for celebration, Dems picking up a seat with a Dem who barely identified as a Dem in a district that’s partially in New York City and holds a 10-point voter enrollment advantage isn’t quite the bellwether some want it to be.
In between popping champagne bottles, declaring victory, and making sweeping pronouncements for what Suozzi’s win means for Democrats nationally going into what will be, by all accounts, a nail-biter of an election season, let’s remember that by every measurable standard—voter enrollment, spending, and historical trend—Democrats should have run away with it.
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Actually, having accomplished victory is more about Democrats in New York getting our shit together after an abysmal showing two years ago where we as a party embarrassingly underperformed nationally.
First, let’s give credit where credit is due. Tom Suozzi ran the campaign he knew he had to: active, urgent, and at all times as if he was 5 points down. The strategy and execution were nearly pitch-perfect. The hunger and discipline were palpable and real, the stuff tested politicians know they have to do to cross the finish line.
And he was, by all counts, the perfect candidate for the district and the moment. He has been elected to office in Nassau County—as local mayor, two full terms as county executive, and three as congressman for this specific district—on and off since 1993. Republicans may have wanted to tar him as a far-left, soft-on-crime Squad member but they couldn’t—his record and relationship with the district ran too long and too deep to distort with glossy and misleading ads.
But we should also acknowledge a few indisputable numbers where Dems clearly had the edge. On enrollment, while “blanks” make up over 28 percent of registered CD-3 voters, Democrats and the liberal Working Families Party still hold a clear 10+ point advantage (39.38 percent to 28.22 percent) over registered Republican and conservative voters.
On the money side, Democrats rightly saw the opportunity to further erode Republican control in the House and went all in, outspending Republicans by a margin of almost 2-to-1. Labor unions turned out in force.
Yes, Suozzi stood strong and proud on abortion, but neither choice nor threats to democracy drove the cycle. And we can’t ignore that Suozzi won by running away from traditional Democratic stances on dominant hot-button issues.
Indeed, this year all politics was not local. And on the national issues de jour—mainly migrants and the Israel-Hamas war—Suozzi did not allow any room on the right for his conservative opponent. He called for President Joe Biden to close the border and for the deportation of a group of migrant men caught on video assaulting NYPD officers in Times Square.
His super PAC ran ads featuring him arm in arm with Republican congressman Peter King. Some of his ads ran on Fox News—many missing the word “Democrat” in the “vote for” tagline that preceded Tom Suozzi’s name.
He did this while keeping unpopular Democratic Governor Kathy Hochul at arm’s length—physically and rhetorically. The words Joe Biden barely crossed his lips.
All of this in a district that doesn’t have a long history of being a bellwether to begin with. While Hochul lost CD-3 by 12 percentage points in 2022 when Santos won by 8, Biden decisively won there by 8 points just two years earlier. Two years before that in 2018, Andrew Cuomo won the district by a whopping 15 points, while Tom Suozzi himself had previously won it three separate times before it was redrawn.
Alternatively, after the national embarrassment that was taking a gamble on an unvetted alleged criminal George Santos, it’s hard to imagine a scenario where Democrats would cross party lines to pull the lever for Mazi Pilip, a complete unknown who barely left the basement to campaign and whose name most insiders can neither spell nor pronounce.
It would be a mistake for Democrats to confuse what happened in NY-3 with a larger national message. Going from Suozzi to Santos and back to Suozzi is like going from a brief, exciting but ultimately traumatic and out-of-character affair back to your boring but stable ex who you belonged with all along.
At the end of the day, Democrats in New York took back a seat we never should have given up to begin with.
