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

I don't want to dismiss tonight's result as meaningless, because it's not. However, we should be careful not to over-interpret it as a signal for what could happen in November. My main reason for saying this? Turnout. ABC News's current expected vote projection is about 185,000 total voters. To put that in perspective, 271,000 voters cast ballots in the 2022 3rd District race in what was a high-turnout midterm (for the most part). And in 2020, 398,000 voters would've cast ballots for president in the 3rd District under its current lines, according to Daily Kos Elections' calculations. To be fair, the 2020 presidential race was the highest-turnout election in modern times, but despite the tepid excitement about a likely Biden-Trump rematch, I anticipate another relatively high-turnout presidential contest. So there will be a lot more voters voting in November than in a February special election that also featured inclement weather. Just how the multitude of more marginally-engaged voters who show up in 9 months respond to the electoral environment is an open question.

—Geoffrey Skelley, 538

—Nathaniel Rakich, 538

We've talked about the fact that tonight's race was between an unusual pair of candidates, under unusual circumstances (special elections, Santos, snow storms, oh my!). But would we be election analysts if we didn't debate ... Does tonight's result tell us anything about November?

—Tia Yang, 538

After that first dump of votes from Nassau County about half an hour ago it looked like Suozzi could have pulled off a double-digit win over Pilip. But with more votes coming now, it looks like those were Democratic-friendly early votes, meaning the Democrat's margin will end up in the mid-to-high single digits.

That is higher than, but really not so not so different from, the polls. The four polls we got of the race with the final set of candidates had Suozzi up by an average of 3 points. So if he wins by 6-10 points, we'll have a 3-7 point polling error in terms of the margin between the candidates.

That's a lot less than the average error for a House general election poll, not to mention polls of House special elections (which tend to be even less accurate). So, maybe this a good reminder for everyone: trust the polls, not the vibes (within reason).

—G. Elliott Morris, 538