What to Know
- Democrat Tom Suozzi defeated Republican Mazi Pilip Tuesday night in the race for New York's third district, encompassing part of Nassau County and a small portion of Queens
- In the short term, the result could be a factor in ultratight votes in the House, where Republicans hold just a 219-212 majority.
- It's not yet known when he will be sworn in to join his former and soon-to-be colleagues on the hill, as nothing official has been stated, but a source told NBC News that Suozzi may seek to do it as early as Thursday
Tom Suozzi is going back to Washington, D.C., after winning the New York special election to fill the seat left vacant by George Santos after his expulsion last year.
But the question is: When exactly will he be joining Congress?
Suozzi, a Democrat, defeated Republican Mazi Pilip Tuesday night in the race for New York's third district, encompassing part of Nassau County and a small portion of Queens. Suozzi represented the district for three terms before giving it up to run, unsuccessfully, for governor in 2022.
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If the victory itself wasn't a surprise, the margin of victory came as a surprise to many.
"This is a major victory. It wasn’t even close," New York Gov. Kathy Hochul said Wednesday, saying the win shows the road ahead for Democrats — a notion that the White House echoed.
"The people of New York's Third District issued a strong repudiation of Republicans who put politics ahead of national security," said White house Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre.
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It’s unclear how long his next stint on Capitol Hill will last, as a redistricting process unfolds that could reshape the district. But for now the result narrows the already slim Republican majority in the House. And it provides Democrats a much-needed win in New York City’s Long Island suburbs, where the GOP showed surprising strength in recent elections. It was a win in a politically mixed suburban district, which could lift his party’s hopes heading into a fiercely contested presidential election later this year.
So when will he be able to join his former and soon-to-be colleagues on the hill? The short answer is, it's not yet known, as nothing official has been stated.
However, a source with knowledge of the situation told NBC News that Suozzi may seek to do it as early as Thursday. If that is not possible, he'd likely have to wait two weeks from this week, with the House on recess the week of Feb. 18.
In the short term, the result could be a factor in ultratight votes in the House, where Republicans hold just a 219-212 majority. In an example of how important one seat can be, House Republicans voted Tuesday night to impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas by a single vote, punishing the Biden administration over its border policies.
Suozzi, a political centrist well known to voters in the district, stressed his campaign trail theme of bipartisan cooperation in a victory speech that was briefly interrupted by protestors criticizing his support of Israel.
“There are divisions in our country where people can’t even talk to each other. All they can do is yell and scream at each other,” he said, acknowledging the demonstrators. “That’s not the answer to the problems we face in our country. The answer is to try and bring people together to try and find common ground.”
“The way to make our country a better place is to try and find common ground. It is not easy to do. It is hard to do,” Suozzi told supporters at his election night party in Woodbury.
Suozzi’s win will likely reassure Democrats that they can perform well in suburban communities across the nation, which will be critical to the party’s efforts to retake control of the U.S. House and reelect President Joe Biden.
Suozzi's win followed a special counsel's conclusion that characterized Biden's memory as “faulty,” “poor” and having “significant limitations," though also saying charges weren't warranted against the president for mishandling classified documents. He also has called Biden “old.”
Still, forecasting for November could be complicated given that turnout, already expected to be low given the abbreviated race, was potentially hampered by a storm that dumped several inches of snow on the district on election day. Both campaigns offered voters free rides to the polls as plows cleared wet slush from the roads.
On the campaign trail, Suozzi, a political centrist, leaned into some of the same issues that Republicans have used to bash Democrats, calling for tougher U.S. border policies and a rollback of New York laws that made it tougher for judges to detain criminal suspects awaiting trial.
His win will likely reassure Democrats that they can perform well in suburban communities across the nation, which will be critical to the party’s efforts to retake control of the U.S. House and reelect President Joe Biden.
Democrats and Republicans will get a chance to fight over the congressional seat again in November’s general election, though the battleground may look different.
That’s because the state’s congressional districts are set to be redrawn again in the next few months because of a court order. Democrats, who dominate state government, are widely expected to try to craft more favorable lines for their candidates.
New York is expected to play an outsize role in determining control of Congress this year, with competitive races in multiple contests in the suburban and exurban rings around New York City.
How far Suozzi's win will go to calm Democrats' anxiety about the president’s age and low approval ratings is hardly clear. The district backed Biden by 8 points in 2020 but voted for Santos during 2022's midterm election — when Republicans fared better across New York than expected by campaigning on getting tough on immigration and combating crime rates that had risen in some areas.
A surge of migrants arriving to large, Democrat-run cities, including New York, has turned security along the U.S.-Mexico border into an especially tricky issue for Biden's party across the country. Queens is home to one of New York City's few large-scale tent housing facilities for migrants — and yet Suozzi took the issue head on.
“This is the template for Democrats everywhere because you could not imagine a district that could have been more hostile to what the stereotype of a Democrat is,” said Lis Smith, a national Democratic strategist and advisor to Suozzi's campaign. “You just need to go on offense and say, ‘I’m the one who wants to secure the border. It’s the Republicans who want chaos at the border.'"
That's “a very easy message that can be adopted by Democrats across the country,” Smith said.
During the campaign, Suozzi spoke often about strengthening immigration policy, and said he would support a temporary closure of the U.S.-Mexico border to slow the influx of migrants, echoing Biden's recent willingness to do the same. Last month, Suozzi rushed to Queens' tent migrant housing area for a rebuttal news conference directly after Pilip held an event there seeking to link him to federal immigration policy.
Souzzi was a vocal supporter of a bipartisan Senate deal on immigration that Republicans turned against after Trump, the former president and current Republican presidential primary front-runner, urged them to do so. Souzzi even began his victory speech by scoffing at being attacked as “the godfather of the migrant crisis” and “sanctuary Souzzi.”
That resonated with Lois Clinco, 59, who said she voted for Suozzi because she hopes he can “keep the migrants out, because we’re overpopulated now.”
Still, Grant Reeher, a political science professor at Syracuse University, cautioned against extrapolating Suozzi’s win, noting the snowstorm and a short runup to the special election which also had unique, Santos-related contours.
“If I were a Democratic consultant or strategist, I would be taking a huge grain of salt before I base my playbook on this election,” Reeher said.
Biden's reelection campaign noted that Democrats have racked up a series of special election and off-year legislative victories since he took office. It also said that more immigrants had arrived to Queens County in the last year than in all of Chicago — emphasizing how important the issue was to Suozzi's win.
White House, spokesman Andrew Bates called Tuesday's result "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," Bates said in a statement. “The results are unmistakable.”
Despite years of Trump stressing a law-and-order message, Republicans have seen their support slip in many suburban areas as the former president has solidified his hold on the national GOP. Still, Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson shrugged off larger implications of Tuesday's race for his party.
“The result last night is not something, in my view, that Democrats should celebrate too much,” Johnson told reporters Wednesday, adding that Suozzi "ran like a Republican, he sounded like a Republican talking about border and immigration because that’s the top issue on the hearts and minds of everybody.”
But Suozzi also promoted defending abortion rights, echoing a message Democrats have used around the country since the Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to an abortion. New York will have a referendum on the November ballot asking voters to bar discrimination based on “pregnancy outcomes.” Despite not explicitly guaranteeing the right to an abortion, supporters argue the measure will further protect access to the procedure, and Democrats see it as a way to drive turnout.
Suozzi's victory could also be viewed as a personal slap for Trump since the former president's childhood home was in the Jamaica Estates section of Queens. Still, Trump advisors blamed Pilip's defeat on her not embracing the “Make America Great Again” movement more closely.
New York Republican chair Ed Cox said the party isn't abandoning its winning issues and would defeat Suozzi when he's up for reelection in November. That's when, he said, "the campaign resets to focus on Joe Biden and Democrats’ disastrous open-borders, soft-on-crime policies, rather than the specific circumstances that brought about this special election.”
But Suozzi didn't exactly embrace Biden. He even said during a television interview, “The bottom line is he’s old.” Suozzi also suggested that he didn’t think it would be helpful to have Biden campaign alongside him for this race.
“If I were advising him," Reeher said of the president, "I would have a big red headline on top that says ‘consider this race with caution, there are a number of things here that may not apply to you.’”
