What’s at stake in the special election to replace Santos

The campaign

Special election to replace Santos is a suburban test for Democrats

PLAINVIEW, N.Y. — Democrats are spending heavily to try to retake the swing House seat opened up by the expulsion from Congress of George Santos (R-N.Y.) in a special election on Tuesday that will test the party’s strength with suburban voters.

Lawmakers voted in December to eject Santos, a freshman whom the House Ethics Committee accused of stealing money from his campaign and a long list of other alleged misdeeds, triggering the special election to replace him. (Santos also faces 23 federal criminal charges, to which he has pleaded not guilty.)

Democrats selected Tom Suozzi, who represented the district in Congress for six years before relinquishing his seat in 2022 to run for governor. Republicans turned to Mazi Pilip, a little-known county legislator, whom Suozzi has tried to tie to Santos.

• “Mazi Pilip is George Santos 2.0,” Suozzi told reporters on Sunday at his campaign office in a strip mall in suburban Plainview as volunteers prepared to go out canvassing for his campaign.
• “The only difference between the two is George Santos lied about his record and Mazi Pilip is lying about my record,” he added.

The race — into which the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and House Majority PAC, a Democratic super PAC, have poured more than $10 million — is also a test of how angry voters are about the surge of undocumented migrants who have arrived in New York City and which party they blame more for it.

• “Tom Suozzi helped create our immigration crisis,” the narrator says in a TV ad being aired by Congressional Leadership Fund, a Republican super PAC that’s spent more than $5 million into the race. “In Congress, he’ll make it worse.”

Suozzi has countered by emphasizing his support for the bipartisan border and immigration deal negotiated by Sens. James Lankford (R-Okla.), Kyrsten Sinema (I-Ariz.) and Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), which appears dead after the Senate rejected it last week. In an interview, he argued that lawmakers would feel pressure to revive it if he won.

Pilip has rejected the deal, saying in a debate with Suozzi on Thursday that “it doesn’t really secure our borders.”

As our colleague Hannah Knowles reports, Pilip has made repeat campaign appearances across the street from white tents in Queens “set up to house a thousand migrants bused in from the southern border, whom she calls a threat to public safety.”

“You have many people who live in that district, just like mine, who commute to the city every day,” said Rep. Anthony D’Esposito (R-N.Y.), a freshman who flipped a neighboring Long Island district in 2022. “And clearly the city is a different place under what’s happened.”

Suburban battlegrounds

The district, which includes the affluent North Shore of Long Island along with a segment of the outer reaches of Queens, is one of the richest and most educated in the county. The median household income is about $130,000 — the 12th highest of any congressional district.

Democrats have run strong in similar districts since 2018, when the party flipped House seats in the affluent suburbs of Chicago, Minneapolis, Seattle, New York City and Washington, D.C.

But Democrats have struggled in New York’s suburbs recently. Republicans flipped several House seats there in 2022 that had been held by Democrats for years — including the seat Santos won — helping them to retake the chamber.

• “While Democrats have been overperforming in these kinds of suburban districts around the country, they are underperforming in New York [because] Republicans have been able to capitalize on voter anxieties about immigration and crime,” said Steve Israel, a former DCCC chairman who represented the district for 16 years and now leads the Cornell Institute of Politics and Global Affairs.

President Biden won the district that Pilip and Suozzi are fighting over by eight points in 2020. He also carried the high-income districts in the New York City suburbs that D’Esposito and Reps. Michael Lawler (R-N.Y.) and Tom Kean Jr. (R-N.J.) flipped in 2022.

Republicans need those seats to maintain their fragile control of the House, which will become even more precarious if Suozzi wins.

Peter T. King, a former Republican congressman who represented part of the district and who is now advising Pilip, said discontent with crime and immigration has created an opening for Republicans.

Many voters in the district “are more conservative leaning, certainly on issues like law and order and immigration — and those issues are now at the forefront,” King said.

Democratic discontent

The district is one of the most Jewish in the country, and some Democratic-leaning voters are supporting Pilip over Suozzi because they’re upset with Democrats’ rhetoric on Israel.

Allen Jeremias, a 54-year-old physician, said he had never voted for a Republican before but that he was supporting Pilip — who is Jewish and served in the Israel Defense Forces in a noncombat role — because of her solidarity with Israel. 

Suozzi has sought to assuage such concerns by emphasizing his support for Israel. 

“Tom Suozzi Stands With Israel,” some of his campaign signs read in Great Neck, home to many Orthodox and Iranian Jews. “So Do We!”

But Jeremias said he feared Suozzi might not be able to stand up to Democrats who have been critical of Israel if he returns to Congress.

• “I’m just not certain, it if comes to a vote, whatever the vote might be in the future, that he’d stand against the party,” he said.

John, a Democratic-leaning voter in Great Neck who works in finance and who declined to give his full name because he did not want to talk publicly about how he’s voting, said he would support Pilip. While he has no problem with Suozzi’s record on Israel, he wants to send a message to other Democrats who have failed to condemn “the hateful, hateful rhetoric that’s been coming out from the left.”

“I have never voted Republican in my life and I don’t know if I ever will again, but I will this time,” he said.

Sticking with Suozzi

Some voters upset with Biden’s handling of the border, on the other hand, aren’t taking their frustrations out on Suozzi.

“I think Biden did a horrible job with the border,” David Rosenthal, 76, who lives in Plainview and works at Nassau Community College, said standing outside the early voting site in Plainview on Sunday.

Still, Rosenthal said he voted for Suozzi because he can’t abide Republicans since Donald Trump took over the party.

Another Suozzi supporter, Steve Sinacori, 52, a lawyer who lives in the Queens portion of the district, said Biden “is performing a dereliction of his duties” by failing to protect the border — but he has no quarrel with Suozzi.

“Tom has a proven record,” Sinacori said. “The person we know is better than the person we don’t.”

On the Hill

House Democrats highlight GOP record on LGBTQ rights

The Congressional Equality Caucus is out with a new report highlighting the large number of anti-LGBTQIA+ bills and amendments this Congress. 

The report, “Obsessed: House Republicans’ Relentless Attacks Against the LGBTQIA+ Community in 2023,” says Republicans voted on more than 50 discriminatory bills and more than 95 anti-LGBTQ+ amendments in 2023.

Those bills and amendments target transgender youths, restrict access to medical care and “encourage” discrimination against LGBTQIA+ people.

“When Republicans took control of the House last year, they launched an avalanche of attacks against the LGBTQIA+ community,” said Rep. Mark Pocan (D-Wis.), the chairman of the Equality Caucus. “House Republicans need to quit their obsessive attacks against our community and do what the American public wants Congress to do — tackle the actual challenges facing everyday Americans.”

What we're watching

At the White House

Biden is set to speak at the National Association of Counties’ meeting in Washington this morning.

In the afternoon, he’ll meet with King Abdullah II and Queen Rania Al Abdullah of Jordan at the White House. The meeting comes nearly four months after Biden’s planned visit to Jordan was scrapped after a blast at a hospital in Gaza inflamed the Arab world.

We’re watching whether Biden repeats his recent criticism that Israel’s military campaign has been “over the top.”

On Friday, Biden will travel to East Palestine, Ohio, a year after the derailment of a train carrying toxic chemicals forced the evacuation of the town. The railroad industry has lobbied to weaken a bill proposed by Sens. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) and J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) in response.

At the White House

Trump’s NATO-bashing comments rile allies, rekindle European fears

Trump’s suggestion that he would encourage Russia to attack U.S. allies who aren’t spending enough on defense set off alarm bells in European countries already worried about America’s reliability as an ally should Trump win a second term in office, our colleagues Joby Warrick, Michael Birnbaum and Emily Rauhala report.

• “Some European policymakers said that Trump’s rhetoric was a security threat to the continent. A senior German lawmaker who was a top foreign policy lieutenant of Chancellor Angela Merkel wrote that Europe needed to get ready to stand on its own.”

Why it matters: “Never before has a president of the United States — even a former one aspiring to reclaim the office — suggested that he would incite an enemy to attack American allies,” the New York Times’s Peter Baker writes. “Trump’s rhetoric foreshadows potentially far-reaching changes in the international order if he wins the White House again in November with unpredictable consequences.”

The Media

Must reads

From The Post: 

• Welcome to Silicon Desert: How Biden helped boost an Arizona boomtown. By Jeanne Whalen.
• Biden campaign joins TikTok in an effort to reach younger voters. By Taylor Lorenz.
• Austin back in hospital to have bladder symptoms evaluated. By Dan Lamothe.
• Aid bill for Ukraine, Israel on track to pass Senate early this week. By Liz Goodwin and Mariana Alfaro.
• ICYMI: McConnell ‘willing to take the heat’ on Ukraine aid that divides the GOP. By Liz Goodwin and Leigh Ann Caldwell.

From across the web: 

• Biden disparages Netanyahu in private but has not changed U.S. policy toward Israel. By NBC News’s Carol E. Lee, Jonathan Allen, Peter Nicholas and Courtney Kube.
• RFK Jr.’s super PAC runs a $7M ad during the Super Bowl. By Politico’s Brittany Gibson and Sam Stein.

Viral

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