New York 3rd District special election: Suozzi projected to defeat Pilip

Polls are closed in NY-03 now, but it could be a while before we get a critical mass of the vote in. One indicator of how things may compare to 2022 is the partisan breakdown of votes so far, published by Queens and Nassau counties. Early reports suggested Democrats have improved over that election, with about 43 percent of ballots returned as of 7:40PM coming from New York voters registered as Democrats. That compares to 35 percent from registered Republicans — or an 8-point gap. That's up from a 4-point gap in 2022's final results.

Of course, party registration is not the same as voting behavior (Santos won that election, after all) — and a good chunk of NY-03 voters today are not registered with a party. So things could still go the other way. But on balance, I'd expects thing will look better for Democrats than in 2022.

—G. Elliott Morris, 538

One annoying thing about this district is that it's made up of only two counties, Queens and Nassau, and they're both gigantic, so there's not a lot of granularity in the results. (For a normal statewide election, we'd be able to tell you something about how the election overall is trending from results in just a few counties.) For instance, the Associated Press is starting to report some votes from Nassau County, but it's a big and diverse county! Without knowing exactly where in the county those votes are coming from, it's impossible to know if they're good for Suozzi or Pilip.

—Nathaniel Rakich, 538

The Associated Press has already projected a winner in the special election in Pennsylvania’s 140th House District: Democrat Jim Prokopiak. With 3,700 absentee ballots counted, he leads 85 percent to 14 percent, a margin that will surely shrink, but not by enough for Prokopiak to lose.

With the win, Democrats will hold onto their control of the Pennsylvania state House, which was 101-100 going into tonight.

—Nathaniel Rakich, 538

We have our first results out of the 3rd District from Queens County, where around 16,000 votes have reported. Suozzi leads 63 percent to 37 percent among those. However, these first results are also the most likely to be Democratic-leaning because they're mostly Queens's early and mail votes, and we know that the partisan split in vote method is such that Democrats are more likely to use those avenues to vote than Republicans, who tend to prefer voting on Election Day.

Those votes make up 54 percent of the total expected vote in Queens, but just 9 percent of the Third District's overall expected vote. The Queens portion will only make up a fraction of votes tonight: In 2022, it cast 18 percent of all votes in the district, compared with 82 percent from Nassau County. But that doesn't mean it doesn't matter — Queens is more Democratic-leaning, meaning that a notable difference in turnout compared with the Nassau part of the district could impact the final outcome.

—Geoffrey Skelley, 538