Democrats cut into Republicans’ already narrow House majority.
Democrat Tom Suozzi has won the special election in New York’s 3rd District, defeating Republican Mazi Pilip to flip a House seat from red to blue. (The seat was formerly held by Republican Rep. George Santos, who was expelled from Congress in December after a series of scandals.) As a result, Republicans’ already narrow House majority has been reduced to 219-213.
Throughout the night, 538 reporters, analysts and contributors have been live-blogging the results in real time and breaking down what (if anything) they mean for November. Read our full analysis below.
I spoke too soon about not having precinct results in the 3rd District. Ben Rosenblatt, a Democratic data guru in New York politics, is hosting a precinct map of the results on his website — though there's a question about whether Nassau County will make precinct-level data available at all. Still, the map of Queens is pretty!
—Nathaniel Rakich, 538
I'm thinking about what we are going to take away from this evening. I think either party can try to spin their way out of a bad performance, based on the weather, the uniqueness of the candidates or the nature of special elections. But either way, people are going to be talking about immigration. According to polls it is the most important issue to all voters in the district, and it was the issue that saw the most ad spending by a significant clip.
The interesting thing, though, as far as takeaways are concerned, is that both candidates have been pretty hawkish on immigration, and Suozzi has tried to create distance from his own party on the issue. So if Pilip wins, the lesson is sort of, "Oh boy, Democrats are screwed on the issue of immigration in these kinds of competitive areas of the country." But on the other hand, if Suozzi wins, the lesson is still likely to be, "If Democrats want to win in these kinds of districts, they may need to mimic Suozzi's toughness on immigration."
—Galen Druke, 538
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
