Democrats keep uneasy winning streak alive in 'warning sign' race for NY-3 Santos seat: ANALYSIS
It was the kind of race the party had no excuse to lose -- and in the end, the Democrat won with relative comfort.
The win in the House seat in New York made famous for the duplicity of its ousted former representative reveals an under-the-radar truth: For all the worries of Democratic wipe-outs in the era of an unpopular and elderly president, the party seems to keep winning when voters actually vote.
It's an electoral winning streak that carried the party through the 2018 midterms, the 2020 general election, a 2022 cycle where losses were kept to a minimum and 2023 victories that extended into redder states like Ohio and Kentucky.
Also on Tuesday, Democrats kept control of the Pennsylvania House with a separate special-election victory. It adds evidence to a recent 538 analysis identifying a trend that could bode well for the party's prospects in 2024: Starting in 2023 and going into this week, Democrats overperformed district partisan makeups in US House and state legislative races by an average of seven points.
Yet those same truths that could easily lead the party into a misleading complacency. Democrat Tom Suozzi's win was more of a nail-biter than the eight-point victory would suggest, with Suozzi himself -- a former three-term House member -- raising alarms about his party's standing across the nation's suburbs.
"I think my whole campaign is a warning sign for Democrats," Suozzi told ABC News' Brittany Shepherd in the days before Tuesday's special election.
Suozzi faced down a barrage of negative headlines that the rest of his party won't be able to evade this fall: chaos at the border, still-stubborn prices, rising crime, and -- inevitably, if indirectly -- concerns about the age and mental acuity of President Joe Biden.
Between name recognition and a vast financial edge, Suozzi had advantages few challengers will. Then there's the unique circumstances by which the seat was open: The man elected to represent the district in 2022 was exposed as a serial fabulist whose alleged crimes became too much even for many in his own party to stomach, with Rep. George Santos, R-N.Y., finally expelled from office in December.
Former President Donald Trump aimed his blame at the hand-picked choice of the local GOP, Mazi Pilip, whose central-casting bio -- mother of seven, Ethiopian-born Jew who fought in the Israeli army -- included the fact that she was actually a registered Democrat.
"MAGA, WHICH IS MOST OF THE REPUBLICAN PARTY, STAYED HOME – AND IT ALWAYS WILL, UNLESS IT IS TRATED WITH THE RESPECT THAT IT DESERVES," Trump wrote in all-caps on his social-media platform, Truth Social.
Not surprisingly, President Joe Biden's campaign drew the opposite lesson.
"Donald Trump lost again tonight. When Republicans run on Trump's extreme agenda – even in a Republican-held seat – voters reject them," Biden campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez said in a statement.
Trump's last remaining Republican primary opponent, former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley, suggested that the GOP loss should ring alarm bells inside her party, which remains all but certain to nominate Trump for president again.
"Let's just say the quiet part out loud. Donald Trump continues to be a huge weight against Republican candidates," Haley spokesperson Olivia Perez-Cubas said. "Despite the enormous and obvious failings of Joe Biden, we just lost another winnable Republican House seat because voters overwhelmingly reject Donald Trump."
The image of Trump as a negative factor in majority-making districts will remain close to GOP strategists' minds going into November, particularly as Trump tries to take full control of the party apparatus. Republicans are defending 17 other suburban-heavy House districts this year, including six more in New York and New Jersey alone.
The most immediate consequence of the Democrats' victory was a further narrowing of the already unthinkably thin GOP House majority. That comes with a series of funding deadlines and legislative hurdles looming that could underscore Republican dysfunction at a perilous political time.
Republicans can now afford to lose only two votes on any matter before the House without having to lean on Democrats. Tuesday's vote to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas took place when it did in part to get ahead of this election; had Suozzi been seated a day earlier, the impeachment vote would have failed in a tie.
Special elections are famously over-interpreted from multiple directions, and this one took place in a particular moment of political whiplash. Trump's grip on his party has become more clear as Republicans jettisoned a border-and-foreign-aid deal they helped negotiate, all while Biden's political limitations were underscored by a startling special counsel report released just five days before Tuesday's election.
For all their internal worries about what 2024 holds, an enduring truth of the Trump era was revealed again. An anti-MAGA majority exists both in key congressional districts and across the country, even if there's no guarantee its awakening will carry Democrats from here.
