Former Democratic representative Tom Suozzi handily defeated Republican Nassau County legislator Mazi Melesa Pilip in Tuesday’s special election for expelled GOP representative George Santos’s seat, a warning sign for vulnerable House Republicans as they stare down a competitive presidential cycle this fall. The race for Santos’s Long Island and Queens seat, Suozzi’s old district, had been considered a dead heat by a number of polls. Votes were still being tabulated when the Associated Press called the race at around 10 p.m.
A snowstorm appeared to significantly blunt Election Day turnout in Santos’s old district, which favored President Joe Biden in 2020 but has trended Republican in recent elections amid suburban voters’ concerns with crime and New York City’s migrant crisis. More than 170,000 migrants have entered the city since spring 2022.
Democrats are expected to tout Tuesday’s victory as a bellwether for suburban- and independent-voter attitudes ahead of this year’s presidential election. The race had focused heavily on public safety and crime — two issues that, along with favorable redistricting, had buoyed New York Republicans’ clean sweep in the 2022 midterms.
Polls released in recent days suggested that Suozzi had a narrow edge within the margin of error.
Local Republicans bet their chips on political newcomer Pilip, a registered Democrat and Ethiopian-Israeli immigrant who formerly served in the Israel Defense Forces and had flipped a local legislative seat in 2021 with the help of local Republicans. She had centered her congressional campaign on immigration. “We have a tent city around us,” Pilip told National Review in a recent interview. “We need to secure the border as soon as possible.”
Her low name recognition presented major challenges for her bid against Suozzi, a deft politician who represented the district for three terms before leaving the seat in 2022 to launch an unsuccessful Democratic primary bid for governor. Though he struggled to distance himself from his unpopular president, with whom he voted 100 percent of the time in the 117th Congress, he figured out how to navigate voters’ concerns about public safety and successfully present himself to voters as hawkish on immigration.
Both parties had spent millions on the race and offered voters free transportation to polling sites throughout the day amid the snowstorm. The House Republican–aligned Congressional Leadership Fund paid for snowplows to clear the roads on Tuesday in an eleventh-hour effort to juice crucial Election Day turnout for Republicans in a district where early voting traditionally favors Democrats.
Suozzi’s win is a major blow to House Republicans. From a pure political-math perspective, dozens of GOP-conference members made an audacious bet when enough of them sided with Democrats in early December to formally boot the district’s indicted former representative George Santos from the lower chamber. Keeping him in his seat would have risked green-lighting the expelled congressman’s alleged criminal conduct in a competitive district where suburban voters are already trending toward Republicans. Santos faces a 23-count superseding indictment on an array of charges including wire fraud and aggravated identity theft. House GOP leaders uniformly opposed the expulsion measure, but House Speaker Mike Johnson told members to vote their conscience.
Pilip’s loss puts extra pressure on House GOP leaders to help their most vulnerable members survive tough reelection races — many of them in New York — as they struggle to manage their already slim and fractious conference. They’re reminded every day they’re in session that every vote counts.
Earlier on Tuesday, House Republicans narrowly impeached Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas in a 214–213 party-line vote, just one week after three GOP no votes had stifled the leaders’ first attempt. With three House Republicans joining a united Democratic caucus in opposing impeachment on Tuesday evening, House Majority Leader Steve Scalise’s return to Washington after receiving blood-cancer treatment made the difference. Two Democrats and two Republicans were absent from Tuesday’s vote.