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

The Dems will certainly point to tonight as evidence of all kinds of predictors for November (see Leah’s earlier post) but the reality is this was such strange circumstances and such a small pool of voters that it’s not going to tell us very much concrete about the general election. The only narrative I am willing to accept about tonight is the fact that this muddies any claims that NY-03 had shifted firmly to the right based on the last few elections, where Santos, Zeldin and Pinion (Chuck Schumer's challenger) won the district. It’s still a swingy area that will be one to watch in 10 months time!

—Kaleigh Rogers, 538

In my opinion, Tia, there are too many factors that determined this one election outcome, and they are prone to overinterpretation by analysts. In fact you can pretty much choose your adventure with this race: You're a Democrat? Then Suozzi won because Democratic voters care less about those GOP-friendly issues — like immigration and crime — that elected Santos in 2020, and that Trump is running on now. You're a Republican? Then Suozzi won because he had a good ground game and Pilip suffered from low GOP turnout due to the snowstorm.

Look, it's as Geoffrey and Nathaniel say: One special is just one special, and shouldn't change our priors.

—G. Elliott Morris, 538

I'm always skeptical of reading too much into the results of special elections. I mean, just remember Democrats' blockbuster night in August of 2022 in New York, when they won one competitive special and narrowly flipped another solid Republican seat. Those results didn't translate into Empire State success that fall. But I do think it tells us something about Long Island, namely, that Democrats can still win there. That wasn't a given; the party has lost pretty much every competitive election there for the past three years, with candidates who have tried both tacking to the left and right. Now that we know Democrats can still win over voters there, the two other potential pickup opportunities on Long Island (the Suffolk-based 1st District and Hempstead-based 4th District) become that much more believable. And with just 4 seats separating Democrats from the majority, that's a big deal.

—Jacob Rubashkin, Inside Elections

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