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

Geoff, Queens is small but mighty and can serve as a "tiebreaker" of sorts for the district. In a close election, the Nassau portion of the district tends to end up pretty close to tied, and Queens has the potential to put Democrats over the edge. The closest race the district has seen in recent years was the 2022 state comptroller race, where Democrat Tom DiNapoli lost the 3rd by 2 points. He lost Nassau by 4 points but won Queens by 6 points. Of course, that wasn't enough to win overall, so Suozzi will have to do better than winning Queens by 6, but like you said, he looks on track to do so.

For reference, though, Biden won the Queens portion of the district by 20 points in 2020, and even that pales in comparison to the 30+ point margins that statewide Democrats achieved in 2018. That's a good reminder of how dire the situation has gotten for Democrats in recent years here.

—Jacob Rubashkin, Inside Elections

Queens has reported more votes, with 12 percent of the overall expected vote now in and about three-fourths of the votes we're expecting from Queens. Suozzi leads 63 percent to 37 percent among those votes, which puts him well ahead of Democrat Robert Zimmerman's pace in the 2022 midterms, when he lost to Santos. Back then, Zimmerman won the Queens portion of the district by only 4 points, 52 percent to 48 percent, although Santos won about 54 percent to 46 percent overall. There's a good chance that more Election Day votes will reduce Suozzi's edge in Queens, but it's hard to imagine his lead there dropping to just 4 points.

—Geoffrey Skelley, 538

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