As recently as Monday, the day before the closely watched congressional special election in New York’s 3rd congressional district, House Republican Conference Chair Elise Stefanik appeared on Long Island. “The nation is watching what happens here,” Stefanik declared at a campaign rally for Mazi Pilip. “The world is watching what happens here.”
If so, the nation and the world saw Republicans lose another race they hoped to win. NBC News reported overnight:
Democratic former Rep. Tom Suozzi is heading back to Congress after he won the special election in New York’s 3rd District to replace former GOP Rep. George Santos, NBC News projects. Suozzi’s victory Tuesday over Republican Mazi Pilip cuts Republicans’ already razor-thin House majority by one seat, making legislating even more difficult moving forward.
With nearly all of the votes counted, the Democratic representative-elect appears to have won by roughly eight points — which represents a rather dramatic swing given that Santos won this same district by nearly eight points about a year and a half ago.
For Republicans, the defeat represents a significant setback. Indeed, party officials appeared confident that they’d finally figured out how to succeed: In a suburban district that’s been moving in the GOP’s direction, the party nationalized the contest, trying to capitalize on President Joe Biden’s weak approval ratings, public concerns about conditions at the U.S./Mexico border, and crime.
Susan Del Percio, Republican strategist, added in an MSNBC piece that in the race’s final stretch, the contest was “subverted by a viral video of migrants beating up two New York City police officers.”
But Suozzi and his Democratic allies had a response: It was Republicans who killed a bipartisan deal with conservative border reforms. Or put another way, in a race in which immigration was one of the dominant issues, Democrats hoped to counter GOP attacks by blaming Republicans for standing in the way of a credible, bipartisan solution.
The results speak for themselves. They also offer Democrats a possible blueprint to utilize elsewhere as the election year progresses, suggesting this wasn’t just another special election.
It’s also easy to imagine the other House Republicans representing districts that Biden carried in 2020 also taking note of the results on Long Island.
But as the dust settles on this hard-fought race, a related thought hangs overhead: It’s been a while since the GOP had reason to be pleased by election results. In August 2022, for example — a couple of months after Republican-appointed Supreme Court justices overturned Roe v. Wade — Democrats flipped Alaska’s U.S. House seat. A week later, in a New York congressional special election in which the National Republican Congressional Committee effectively guaranteed success, Democrats celebrated another key win. The 2022 midterms, meanwhile, were a history-defying success story for Democrats, and on Election Day 2023, the party scored big wins in Kentucky and Virginia. And did I mention the Wisconsin state Supreme Court election? And the abortion rights votes in Ohio and Kansas? Because they matter, too. A Washington Post analysis added overnight, “Daily Kos’s special election tracker shows Democrats have overperformed the 2020 presidential results by an average of five points across more than three dozen special congressional and state legislative elections since the 2022 midterms. They have beaten their 2016 margins by an average of nine points.” If recent history is any guide, Republicans will respond to their latest disappointment by changing absolutely nothing and effectively pretending nothing happened. But if GOP leaders are feeling great about their electoral prospects, they probably ought to pay closer attention.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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