The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
In New York win, Democrats sense a pivot
Special election result gives them belief that party can make immigration a winning issue.
Avictory in a New York special election Tuesday injected Democrats with fresh optimism that the party might have found some of the basic ingredients to neutralize immigration and the border as political issues, which party officials privately have seen as among their deepest areas of vulnerability in 2024.
The success in the race for a House seat by former and now future Rep. Tom Suozzi — a Democrat whom Republicans had pilloried as “Sanctuary Suozzi” — came in a corner of the country, Long Island, that had been increasingly hostile to Democrats in the past two years. And Suozzi won after he frontally and repeatedly addressed a topic that his party has sometimes tried to shy away from.
Why immigration was a key issue
Border crossings have surged to record highs in recent months, with more than 170,000 migrants arriving in New York City. Republicans had hoped to use immigration to paint Suozzi as unacceptably beyond the mainstream. The leading GOP super PAC spent roughly $3 million on two TV ads that said Suozzi had “rolled out the red carpet for illegal immigrants.”
But in the final 10 days of the race, an analysis from AdImpact, a media-tracking firm, showed that Democrats actually were airing more ads than Republicans on immigration, with Suozzi’s campaign running clips of an appearance he once made on Fox News in which he was introduced as “one of the Democrats” backing Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Donald Trump’s role
Suozzi’s victory came only days after congressional Republicans had torpedoed bipartisan legislation on Capitol Hill that would have cracked down on unlawful migration across the border with Mexico. Donald Trump, the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination, had lobbied aggressively against the bill, insisting that its passage would help Democrats, as he hoped to preserve the border crisis as a cudgel to hit President Joe Biden with this fall.
That bipartisan deal’s failure did not feature prominently in advertising in this House race. But Suozzi did speak about it as he took some unusually hard-line stances for a Democrat, including calls to temporarily shut down the border and deport migrants who assault the police.
Other Democrats have sought distance from the White House on the issue — most notably, New York City Mayor Eric Adams. Last fall, Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, a Democrat whose state will host the Democratic National Convention this summer, wrote that the influx of migrants was becoming “untenable” as Republican governors bused migrants to Democratic-run cities and states.
Democratic leaders Wednesday said they believed that the Suozzi win on the heels of Republicans killing a bipartisan border security package represented an important moment that signaled Republicans bear at least some of the blame for the troubles at the border.
“We have now made the border an issue where Democrats are on their front foot, whereas before all this happened, we were on our back foot,” Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-New York, the majority leader, said in an interview Wednesday. “Trump almost handed us the issue on a silver platter when he said he didn’t want to do it for political purposes after saying the border is an emergency.”
Schumer called New York’s third congressional district, which covers parts of Queens and Nassau County, one of the 20 districts in the United States where border issues are most salient, making the loss more worrisome for the Republican Party.
Political draw?
It is not that most Democrats think the border suddenly is a winning issue for them so much as one that they could fight to more of a political draw, while winning over voters on topics like abortion.
“It has been turned from a negative issue to a positive issue,” Schumer said of the border issue for Democrats, adding, “Not totally positive, but overall positive.”
House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-Louisiana, downplayed the significance of the special election, saying Suozzi had “sounded like a Republican” on immigration and that his success was not repeatable. “That is in no way a bellwether of what’s going to happen in the fall,” Johnson said in a news conference on Capitol Hill.
Overall, though, Democrats were feeling bullish.
Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Connecticut, had been his party’s lead negotiator on the collapsed border package. He wrote in a memo to his colleagues Wednesday
that the package’s demise presented Democrats “with a unique, unprecedented opening to go on the offensive on border security” and that the special election outcome was “proof ” that the political climate was shifting.
“The politics of the border are changing before our eyes,” Murphy wrote.
Whatever the long-term lessons of the special election, the Democratic victory immediately narrowed the already tenuous Republican grip on the House, making governance harder in the coming months and the task of the party holding the chamber more challenging in the fall.
Not a win for Biden or Trump
Suozzi distanced himself from the White House at times in the race, questioning Biden as the party’s nominee in a TV interview on the eve of the election when he said that “the bottom line is, he’s old” and that he “likely” will support the president “if he ends up being the Democratic nominee.”
For his part, Trump blamed the Republican candidate on Long Island, Mazi Pilip, for not embracing him more fully, calling her “foolish” for trying to “straddle the fence.”
Special elections often are overinterpreted for their importance, and this particular election was especially, well, special. The congressional opening came only because of the expulsion of a scandal-plagued Republican, former Rep. George Santos, who had drawn national attention for his fabulist tales and eventually a federal indictment. Democrats had a ready-made recruit for the tight timeline of the special election in Suozzi, who represented the region for years before making an unsuccessful run for governor. He also had an established centrist reputation.
Democrats also outspent Republicans roughly 2-to-1. The race was held in a district that Biden carried by about the same margin as Suozzi appeared on pace to win, though the region had drifted rightward since 2020.
“The result last night is not something, in my view, that Democrats should celebrate too much,” Johnson said.
Dueling takeaways
In a sign of the stakes of the result and how it is interpreted politically, top officials in both parties wrote dueling memos Wednesday framing how immigration had played out.
The National Republican Congressional Committee argued that their immigration advertising barrage had “moved numbers,” even in a loss, releasing some private survey data, including that 45% of voters in the committee’s final poll viewed immigration as the top issue.
“Imagine what we will do to any candidate without the institutional advantages Suozzi brought to the race,” the NRCC’s memo read.
The main Democratic super PAC involved in the race, the House Majority PAC, wrote in its own memo that about 20% of the group’s paid communications — TV spots, mailers, digital ads — had mentioned immigration (abortion still appeared nearly twice as often). The memo likened the topic to the party’s vulnerability in 2022 on the economy and inflation, and argued that it was imperative for candidates to address those topics directly.
Suozzi and his allies consistently addressed immigration, and party strategists called it a blueprint going forward.
Wednesday, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee began a modest and symbolic online advertising campaign in Texas and Florida, where two Republican incumbents are up for reelection (Texas’ Ted Cruz, Florida’s Rick Scott), saying Republicans are the ones who “won’t secure the border” and won’t “crack down on fentanyl trafficking.”