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.
In a quick speech in front of supporters, Pilip said she'd called Suozzi and conceded the race. This outcome is not a huge surprise: Suozzi is a known entity and Pilip was a newer face who was outspent in the race.
—Monica Potts, 538
As George Santos’ time as the most recent member of Congress representing the 3rd District comes to a close, he seems to be relishing Pilip’s likely loss.
—Leah Askarinam, 538
Yeah, Geoffrey, based on that Nassau dump, the Associated Press has gone ahead and projected Suozzi as the winner. Our colleagues at ABC News, however, have yet to make a projection.
—Nathaniel Rakich, 538
We're now up to 51 percent of the total expected vote reporting after Nassau reported nearly 70,000 votes. Suozzi now leads 59 percent to 41 percent overall, and he's ahead 58 percent to 42 percent in Nassau. That's not too far behind his 62 percent to 38 percent mark in the smaller Queens portion of the district. Early and mail votes likely constituted much of that update from Nassau, and we know those are usually more Democratic-leaning because of the partisan divide in preferred voting methods. So we can expect that Nassau number to get redder as the night wears on. However, it's pretty clear Suozzi is going to be hard to catch at this point with such a sizable lead with half of the vote in.
—Geoffrey Skelley, 538
