Democrat Tom Suozzi has won the special election in the 3rd Congressional District in New York, the Associated Press projects, flipping the seat held by the ousted Republican Rep. George Santos and further narrowing the House GOP's already razor-thin margins.
The race was widely viewed as an early barometer for November's likely rematch between President Joe Biden, a Democrat, and former President Donald Trump, a Republican, and was expected to be a close race, according to recent polling. But 93% of the vote in as of Wednesday morning, Suozzi had nearly 54% of the vote, leading Republican Mazi Pilip (46.1%), a relative newcomer to politics, by more than 13,000 votes.
“Despite all the attacks, despite all the lies about Tom Suozzi and 'the Squad,' about Tom Suozzi being the godfather of the migrant crisis, about ‘sanctuary Suozzi,’ despite the dirty tricks, despite the vaunted Nassau County Republican machine, we won,” Suozzi said during his victory speech Tuesday night.
Pilip, a Nassau County legislator who was elected as a Republican despite being a registered Democrat, conceded the election results before Suozzi spoke.
“We all [worked] so hard every single day in the last eight weeks and we did a great job,” Pilip said. “Yes, we lost, but it doesn’t mean we’re going to end here.”
The district covers the neighborhoods of Little Neck, Whitestone, Glen Oaks, Floral Park and Queens Village in Queens, as well as large stretches of Long Island’s Nassau County.
Suozzi, a longtime fixture of Long Island politics, previously held the congressional seat for three terms. He gave up his seat to pursue an unsuccessful run for governor. He previously served as the mayor of Glen Cove and the Nassau County Executive.
Throughout his campaign in a district that flipped from Democratic to Republican representation in November 2022, Suozzi tried to convince voters that he’s a politician who is not afraid to work with all parties, including leaning into migrant issues and highlighting the times he's broke with his party on immigration. But his candidacy was also heavily focused on getting to work, a message encapsulated in his campaign slogan, "Let's Fix This."
“Let’s send a message to our friends running the Congress these days,” Suozzi said in his remarks Tuesday night. “Stop running around for Trump and start running the country.”
The Biden reelection campaign and the White House took a victory lap after Suozzi's decisive win, calling it a rebuke of Trump and Republican policies.
"Donald Trump lost again tonight. When Republicans run on Trump’s extreme agenda – even in a Republican-held seat – voters reject them," said Biden campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez on Tuesday evening. "As we saw in 2020, 2022, 2023, and now tonight, when it comes down to the choice between Donald Trump’s chaos and division and President Biden who wakes up everyday working to get things done and make Americans’ lives better, voters are consistently choosing the leadership of President Biden and Democrats. Trump and the MAGA extremists in the House are already paying the political price for derailing a bipartisan deal to secure our borders and fix our broken immigration system."
Biden-Harris campaign communications director Michael Tyler called the race "Republicans’ district to lose," citing the GOP's successes in the district in 2022 up and down the ballot, but said that Suozzi's embrace of a bipartisan bill that would have provided funding to Israel and Ukraine and enacted reforms at the U.S.-Mexico border, as well as Pilip's "embrace of the former president and Republicans’ support for banning abortion," cost her the election.
"Again and again, when it comes time to go to the ballot box, voters are showing up to choose President Biden and Democrats’ agenda of safeguarding freedoms and fighting for working families over the extreme MAGA agenda," Tyler said. "We are putting in the work every single day to make sure this November will be no different."
White House deputy press secretary Andrew Bates said that voters on Long Island proved Biden "right" when the president pledged last week that he would make sure Republicans bore the brunt of the blame for killing the bipartisan border deal.
Bates said that on Tuesday, "voters proved [Biden] right with a devastating repudiation of congressional Republicans. Tom Suozzi put support for the bipartisan border legislation – and congressional Republicans’ killing of it for politics – at the forefront of his case. The results are unmistakable. And right now, House Republicans are yet again putting politics ahead of national security – siding with Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, and Tehran, against America’s defense industrial base, against NATO, against Ukraine, and against our interests in the Indo-Pacific. Tom Suozzi was clear about this choice in his campaign as well, siding with President Biden. As we said before, the American people see through congressional Republicans’ elevation of their personal politics over the safety of the country."
Republicans, meanwile, sought to downplay the results, with House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., attempting to make the case that he doesn't believe the results "that Democrats should not celebrate too much," dismissing Suozzi's win as being a product of his name recognition and a snowstorm that impacted the area for part of Tuesday.
"They spent about $15 million to win a seat President Biden won by 8 points, they won it by less than 8 points," Johnson said. "Their candidate ran like a Republican, sounded like a Republican talking about the border and immigration ... the incumbent had been a three-term member of Congress and had a 100% name ID and a deep family history in the district, our candidate was relatively unknown ... she ran a remarkable campaign, there was a weather event that affected turnout, there are a lot of factors there, that is in no way a bellwether of what is gonna happen this fall."
Despite Johnson's contentions, the results will no doubt be a cause of concern for his conference's already razor-thin majority: When Suozzi is sworn in, the makeup of the chamber will shrink to 219-213, meaning he can only lose two votes on major legislation.
The special election was called to replace Santos, who became the sixth House member to be ousted from Congress in U.S. history after he was indicted on fraud charges and was exposed as having fabricated much of his background.
Santos, who has pleaded not guilty to 23 federal charges, was only in office for 11 months.
With days leading up to Election Day, polls showed it was a tight race, with Suozzi slightly in the lead. But it turned out to be a relatively early night with the race call, and Pilip's concession, coming quickly after the polls closed.
“We, you, won this race,” he said, “because we addressed the issues and we found a way to bind our divisions.”
Pro-Palestinian protesters interrupted Suozzi toward the beginning of his speech. The protesters accused Suozzi, a staunch supporter of Israel, of “supporting genocide,” and called for a cease-fire in Gaza.
Suozzi later referenced the protest, saying there are divisions in the country where people can only yell and scream at each other, and that that “is not the answer to the problems we face in our country.”
“The answer is to try and bring people of goodwill together to try and find that common ground,” he continued.
The issue of the war in Gaza between Israel and Hamas was expected to play a large role in the race, particularly because of the district's significant Jewish population. Pilip, who is an Orthodox Jew, was born in Ethiopia and emigrated to Israel when she was 12, serving in the Israel Defense Force's Paratroopers Brigade. She moved to the U.S. in 2005 and settled in Great Neck, a town on Long Island with a large Jewish population.
But Suozzi also portrayed himself as a staunch defender of Israel and the Jewish people, pledging to break with some progressive members of the Democratic conference who want to curtail aid to the Middle Eastern country and criticizing Republicans in Congress who scuttled the bipartisan border and foreign assistance bill.
The race was to fill the remainder of Santos' term in Congress, which expires in January. The seat will be up for grabs once again in November, so despite both candidates and parties pouring millions into the race, they'll have to hit the campaign trail once again in a few short months.