Oh, my god, it's Daniel, Rick, what is going on?
Oh, my god.
Hey, Galen, I can't hear you actually though.
Yeah, I have to serve as interlocutor here.
Yeah, it's OK.
This is actually my dream, not being able to hear Galen.
So-- - Wow.
How are you going to respond to that, Galen?
I'm going to say--
He can't hear you.
--Jacob, I'm so glad you're on the podcast this evening.
[LAUGHTER]
I don't have anything--
I'm sorry.
I don't have to work tonight.
I'm going to go for a drink.
See you guys later.
[THEME MUSIC]
Hello, and welcome to this late-night special
election reaction edition of The FiveThirtyEight
Politics Podcast.
I'm Galen Druke.
It's about a a quarter past 11:00.
And the race in New York's Third Congressional District
has already been called for Democrat Tom Suozzi.
According to the latest tallies right now with about 85%
of the expected vote in, Suozzi leaves Republican Mazi Pilip
by about 10 points, although we expect that to narrow as more
of the election-day vote comes in, somewhere in the range of 6
or 8 points, although by the time
you're listening to this podcast,
you may well know what that margin looks like.
Either way, Suozzi won pretty decisively.
It looks like he will end up beating the limited polling
that we had in the District, which showed about a 3
or 4-point lead going in.
So we're going to talk about it.
And here with me to do that is Politics
Reporter Leah Askarinam.
Welcome to the podcast, Leah.
Good evening, Galen.
Also here with us as ABC National Politics
Reporter, Brittany Shepherd, welcome
back to the pod, Brittany.
Happy to be here.
And also joining us is Jacob Rubashkin, Deputy
Editor of "Inside Elections."
Welcome to the podcast, Jacob.
It's so good to have you.
Thank you, Galen.
First-time long time here.
Happy to be here.
It's always great to have a first timer--
and very flattered that you're also a long timer.
So all three of you have either written about this district,
spent time in this district--
Brittany, you lived in this district.
So we really got the ace team on the podcast tonight.
And I want to just kick things off with,
it's a hot-take economy out there.
The presidential election is feeling like a slog right now.
We just got a competitive special election
in a suburban district that in a district like those
that the House majority is going to run through this fall,
maybe the kind of district that could even determine who
wins the presidential election.
And so lots of folks are weighing in.
Jacob, as a first timer, why don't you kick us off?
What's your takeaway from tonight's results?
Look, it's good news for Democrats, right?
This is a positive for Democrats, both immediately
and in the long term.
They only have to pick off five seats in order
to take back the House majority heading into tonight.
And now they've got one of those.
That's 20% job done already.
And we're still more than eight months away from election day.
So this is a good thing for them.
They get an incumbent, a seasoned incumbent,
in a competitive district heading into the fall.
They prove that they're still a viable party
out on Long Island.
And they get a good news event in what
has been a pretty disastrous news cycle for them
with the past week of stuff coming out of the White House.
So all in, this is a good night for Democrats.
Republicans, still very much in the game.
But they would have preferred to go the other way.
OK, notably, no national lessons there.
I picked up on that, Jacob.
I don't know how intentional that was.
I assume it was.
Brittany, what are your takeaways?
Well, let me introduce a national-election take,
which we know is probably plastered
all over cable news right now.
And it's more of a question.
Has Trump solidly lost the suburbs?
That's already a claim that we're hearing from both
the White House and Nikki Haley tonight,
actually, that this election was actually a referendum
on Trumpism and MAGAism.
Relatedly, I was spending a lot of time in my home district.
It's where I grew up.
It's where my parents still live.
I was there for the last two weeks or so.
And I didn't really hear Donald Trump's
name mentioned all too much.
But Nikki Haley really wants to seem like this loss doesn't
just fall on Mazi Pilip and the Nassau GOP,
but also is at the hands of Donald Trump.
She said, quote, "Despite the enormous and obvious failings
of Joe Biden, we just lost another winnable Republican
House seat because voters overwhelmingly
reject Donald Trump."
That's, I think, a message we're going
to hear from her a lot, tomorrow,
and the remainder of the week as she tries to show that maybe
there's another way forward.
I think we're going to hear a lot of chatter
from political class on X about, Who are
the kind of suburban voters?
And can Democrats replicate this in November?
I want to put a big asterisk here that this
is a special election.
And Suozzi only has this seat up until November.
I think it's less of a foregone conclusion,
what happens in November.
But I think the Democrats are going to try to mine--
maybe running moderate and pushing anti-Trump
the most they can will help in a place like this.
Even though they went for Lee Zeldin--
what is it, guys, 10, 12, 13--
12 points, yeah.
--in the gubernatorial front, something like that,
that it still was a district Biden won by 6, 7, 8.
And that combination enough, by running
maybe more moderate of DC but still far left of Trump,
can be some kind of winning calculus.
Brittany, it's funny that Nikki Haley is hammering Pilip
and trying to tie Trump to her loss
because when I interviewed Mazi Pilip two weeks ago,
she was very favorable toward Nikki Haley.
I asked her about the presidential election
and how she felt running as Trump was locking up
the nomination, and she was like,
oh, you're forgetting about Nikki Haley, like I love Nikki
Haley and she's really great and we're going to see what
she can do with this primary.
So I guess Haley didn't get that message if she's using her
as a tool against Trump now.
Yeah, maybe trying to audition for her surrogacy spot
if something happens at the convention.
All right, so Jacob's got the local.
Brittany's got the national.
Leah, what do you have for us, the weather?
Yeah.
The atmospheric?
[LAUGHTER]
Yeah, the exact snowfall.
So I think nationalish.
I think the main takeaway that you're going to see from--
especially-- Democrats are already saying this publicly
on social media, like, oh, Democrats
have not lost the suburbs.
But like Brittany said earlier, this is a very different suburb
from the Georgia sixth suburbs that we
were looking at in the 2017 special election
before the 2018 wave.
This is a really unique district.
So I think the big question going in, knowing that turnout
was going to be a crap shoot--
it's a special election.
So who knows?
We don't have comparable data to be like,
What do New York Third District voters do in February
of an election year?
We don't know who's going to turn out.
And then it snowed.
And that made life difficult.
So it's one of those where I feel
like if it was a massive victory on either side, a blowout,
we could maybe learn some lessons from it.
But because we're seeing--
right now, Suozzi's carrying the district--
or winning the district by 9 points.
Like Jacob said earlier, that will probably narrow.
Biden carried the district by 8 points.
What it's telling me is that there
hasn't been a massive shift on Long Island since 2020.
It doesn't mean that it hasn't changed.
It doesn't mean the political environment
hasn't gotten harder.
But it's not completely new political terrain,
which it kind of looked like it might have been after the 2022
election when George Santos won the district and the Republican
Senate candidate carried the district, which was
just not a competitive race.
Lee Zeldin carrying the district made a lot more sense
because in governor's races, voters are
more likely to switch parties.
So all that's to say, I think it's probably
a relief for Democrats.
It's good news for Democrats.
But it's not exactly a sign to Republicans, like, oh,
don't even try next time because this is a district
that Biden carried by 8 points.
OK, well, being a contrarian here, Leah, since you and Jacob
have both said that this was a good night for Democrats,
I'm going to have to go ahead and say that it was
a good night for Republicans.
The candidate who was hawkish on the border, tough on crime,
ended up winning the district.
And that's good news for a party that is seen as a strongest--
stronger on immigration, stronger on crime,
stronger on the economy.
Those were the top-three issues in the district.
The only problem is that that person
who was running on the Republican platform was--
oh, crap, a Democrat.
That's actually why I think this district is so hard
to derive national meaning from, because Suozzi
is very particular.
He had about 80% name recognition at the start
of this race in the district.
He's extremely well known.
So that's one.
Two, he's known to be a moderate.
He was a primary challenger to Governor Kathy Hochul
of New York, who isn't even--
wasn't, at least once upon a time,
seen as a particularly progressive governor.
But he ran to the right of Kathy Hochul,
saying, basically, she's too progressive for New York.
He also was then hawkish on immigration, hawkish on crime,
and emphasized those things, ran ads
saying that he was different from the rest of the Democrats
and Joe Biden on these issues.
And so when you have a candidate like that, who's
known so well and so significantly
differentiated from the rest of the party,
does his win actually say much about the Democratic Party
on the whole?
Maybe it tells them the direction
they want to move in if they want
to win districts like this.
But does it actually say that Democrats
are going to, outside of this one situation,
do well in places like this?
I think you'd make a good point, Galen because I talked
to Tom Suozzi last week about this very thing, like,
Is there meaning to be mined here?
And he told me that his campaign,
win or lose at the time, was a big warning sign for Democrats
because he believed that there had to be a lot more Tom
Suozzis being run outside of special elections in order
to not just inch into Republican margins,
but to completely flip the House.
He really believes that Biden and the establishment
should not be making any concessions to the more
progressive flank of the party.
I don't know if he's in big business,
to be giving all of this political strategy for free
to the White House.
Probably be best served calling them
up and not telling me directly.
But it was fascinating because he told me
that his message to his colleagues in DC
is very simple, very short.
It's, wake up.
And he believes it through and through.
And I am curious if that's a message that will fall
on deaf ears or if the Election Committees, all
the National alphabet-soup committees in DC
will hear that, listen to that, and maybe retinker the strategy
where they're trying to handpick some folks to run
for the upcoming elections.
So I don't totally buy that argument.
And I think it's--
it's partially because-- first off, granted,
Suozzi is a uniquely-suited candidate
to do well in this district.
That was a good recruit.
And who knows if he would have gotten
through a traditional Democratic primary.
He was handpicked by party leadership
because it was a special election--
by local party leadership.
But the idea that he's running against the Democratic Party,
therefore that's not necessarily a good sign for Democrats--
that's just what happens in competitive districts.
I think if we go back to 2018--
I wish I had the number on me.
But the number of Democrats who ran,
saying that they wouldn't vote for Nancy Pelosi for Speaker,
that they didn't-- they weren't Trump supporters.
But they at least pushed back on the Democratic Party
quite a bit.
And they did do the whole gun rights and immigration
and all of that.
So I think it's a sign that Democrats can win in New York
despite that messaging, which was not clear before tonight,
I think, that state Democrats, especially in New York, and New
York City Democrats, have not poisoned the well for Democrats
running down ballot in a way that prevents
anyone else from winning.
It looks like you're about to-- you have a--
push-back, Galen.
I have to push back a little here.
I think there's a big difference between running
against a decades-running boogie woman from San Francisco,
in Nancy Pelosi, who has an approval rating that's
massively underwater because her name is associated
with the House of Representatives, which
no one in America likes, versus the President
of the party who won the district by 8 points in 2020.
If Joe Biden is going to win in 2024,
he has to actually be doing well in these districts,
not be doing--
not be the person that candidates
have to run against in order to win in these districts.
But it is agreed--
and in a Biden plus-8 district it, is a concern.
But this is a Biden plus-8 district in--
on Long Island, which we have--
Thank you for the correction from in to on, by the way.
I want to flag to our listeners and viewers
that it is on Long Island, not in Long Island.
Leah, sorry. continue.
No, I'm honored that you caught that.
This is a unique district.
And in districts that Biden narrowly carried
or that the sitting President narrowly carried,
I think that it is--
you do see that kind of--
we have those conversations every year with--
is Biden or Obama or Trump or whoever
it is going to campaign with these candidates down ballot?
And when it comes to those really close districts
where maybe Biden carried it by less than 5 points,
I think that's a conversation that is pretty normal to have.
Should you run with the party, should
you run against the party, or just run on your own.
And I think the dynamic--
OK, well, maybe you're convincing me because now
that I'm thinking about it--
but he didn't really-- no, no, you're not.
I take it back because he didn't--
Aw, shucks.
I just had a mini conversation in my brain really fast
in that moment.
But he didn't run against Joe Biden.
He didn't run-- he ran against people who are too far left.
He ran against people who are too progressive,
who won't compromise.
He wasn't running against Biden himself.
And I think that kind of running on your own,
trying not to associate yourself with the party,
is pretty conventional for competitive districts.
But I take your point.
Can I meet you in the middle?
I also think that's an important differentiation.
He tried to distinguish himself as like one
of the only Democrats in the House
who voted X or Y way on immigration.
And so he was really differentiating
himself in some ways from 90% of the Democratic Party.
I also take your point that he wasn't running
directly against Joe Biden.
Jacob has been quietly sitting here, batting his eyelashes,
waiting for an opportunity to jump in.
Take it away, Jacob.
No, look-- well, thank you, Galen.
first, I don't think that--
Brittany, I think your turn of phrase
about the alphabet soup of party committees in DC--
I don't think those guys need any more data points
to convince themselves that they need
to be running more moderate Democrats in swing
districts across the country.
I think that has been the MO, certainly, for Democrats
over the last four election cycles.
And so I think to the extent that there are still
any sort of recruitment or thumbs
to be placed on scales in primaries across the country,
I would continue to imagine that the more moderate candidates
would be looked upon more favorably
by folks here in Washington DC.
But again, I am just so wary of nationalizing
the lessons of this unique New York media environment.
I think there are a lot of lessons--
Say that a couple of time more.
What was it?
Unique New York?
Unique--
[LAUGHS]
There are six or seven highly-competitive House races
in the New York media market, three out
on Long Island, three in the Hudson Valley,
one in New Jersey.
That's the House majority right there.
And I know that there's this tendency
to try and take lessons and extrapolate
them across all 435 districts.
And sometimes we can.
But sometimes we don't need to.
Sometimes we can call the majority
one way or another based on one state
and one media market, even.
And so I do think that there are lessons for the Democrats
in New York on how to talk about immigration.
We see Pat Ryan, who's the Congressman
from the 18th district in the Hudson Valley,
with Suozzi, aligned with Suozzi on a lot of these kinds
of talking points, putting some distance between himself
and the Biden administration.
He was doing that before Suozzi won tonight.
He'll continue to do that after.
We'll see what Laura Gillen does in the Fourth District,
which sits just due south of the seat that Suozzi just won.
But look, I don't know.
I think that this worked for him in this seat.
I don't know if it's going to work for the Democrat running
in Omaha or in Des Moines or in the dozen
or dozen and a half other districts that are going
to be on the House battlefield.
I really am not so convinced that "let a million
Suozzis bloom" is the winning strategy
for Democrats this fall.
What about just Suozzis in New York?
What about that?
How many are there?
Well, my question was more, Does Suozzi work for Biden--
like for Biden's re-election campaign-- more than,
Can Democrats win a district in Omaha
based on a homegrown Long Islander who is known by 80%
of the folks in Nassau County?
So we got a poll from Siena, which is a good pollster,
I think one of the best according
to the FiveThirtyEight pollster rankings-- of this race.
And it had Suozzi up by 4.
It looks like he'll exceed that a little bit.
But it also had Donald Trump up by 5 among the same sample.
And I think that speaks to what you're saying here,
that I think there's a perfectly reasonable universe in which
this was an electorate that voted for Tom Suozzi that
would also vote for Donald Trump,
or would at very least be tied.
I don't think that Suozzi winning tonight is a sign
that Joe Biden has reclaimed the lost
territory on Long Island at least,
let alone the suburbs writ large.
I think that there are probably a number of people who
voted for Tom Suozzi and are going to turn around and vote
for Donald Trump because they either like both of them
or more specifically, they like what both are
saying about immigration.
And I think Democrats shouldn't get too far over their skis
on the Biden angle of all of this, which is why I've spent
all this time talking about the House
and not so much the presidency.
For sure.
And I do want to notice that it could be that they like Suozzi.
But it could also be that Mazi Pilip just
didn't campaign a ton in this race, at least
not traditionally.
And we can't overlook that ol' turnout that we
talk about all the time.
Obviously, people like us, it might seem a no brainer.
It all comes down to turnout.
But perhaps those attacks of Suozzi
calling Mazi Pilip "basement Mazi,"
to borrow from Trump's attacks of Biden-- an interesting tack.
Maybe there was some truth to that.
And I think that maybe--
he told me he believed that voters saw through her brand
and her story.
And I don't know how many people watched the New
York 3 debate on News 12.
I don't know how those sorts of things play.
Oh, well.
Leah, you can tap in in just a second.
But I wonder if him running digital spots
and the messaging around the fact that she actually
has quite liberal views on abortion
and on owning guns that aren't stronger than what
the police run, and the fact that she hasn't actually been
in traditional get out the vote events-- also,
all the events I went to for her last week
were in D'Esposito's district in New York four.
I think that's partially because GOP HQ is down there.
But she could have easily had an event in Port Washington
or Glen Cove, where Tom Suozzi is from and born was mayor of,
and didn't do any of those things.
Those sorts of things-- they matter
in an election like this.
Right, guys?
Or am I totally off base here?
I think you're drawing a really important distinction
between having a strong profile and being a strong candidate.
And that's something that I think
has tripped up Republicans a handful of times.
And I personally-- I am not saying that Pilip was
not a strong retail politician.
That's not something that I've heard.
And I think it's just kind hearing what you're saying now
and earlier tonight, we were talking
about how most of her campaign events
in the last couple of weeks have been in the fourth district.
That just doesn't feel like the kind of retail politics
that might work in this kind of district.
It might just be-- it might be one of those--
and we've seen this before, where
you know the profile seems to fit
but the actual candidacy is much harder.
And that is where having an incumbent--
or a former representative rather, in Tom Suozzi--
is going to give you an advantage
because not only does he have the profile,
he also has the connections.
He's proven that he can win over these voters.
And that's just like, Republicans
were at a disadvantage because they
did not have a candidate who you had that kind of experience.
We also got a little bit of breaking news late in the race
on immigration, which was the Bipartisan Border deal that
fell apart under pressure from Trump and more
conservative Republicans.
And I think I, at least, would argue
there was a pronounced shift and even how Suozzi
was talking about the issue.
As soon as that happened, he was able to use it and use Pilip's
opposition to that bill as a cudgel that all of a sudden
was not so aggressive toward Biden,
toward Democrats, but toward the problem of the border.
And so instead of attacking or trying to distance from Biden,
he could actually rein back in and say,
Biden and the Democrats are trying to solve this problem.
And it's the Republicans who aren't fixing the issue.
Now, I don't think that that message had enough time
to sink in this special election,
given that it really only played out in the last week or so.
It never really showed up in paid media.
But I know that in the fall, it is going
to be one of the main ways that Democrats respond
to immigration-based attacks from Republicans, that they
really do believe that this is now their most
effective answer, and that Republicans gave them
a political gift by killing this legislation before it really
got going because it allows them to turn it back
on their Republican opponents and say, you're the ones
who aren't fixing the problem.
You're the ones who are letting it sit and fester
until the next election, not working
with us to get something done.
Yeah, and that was a big part of Suozzi's
victory speech tonight.
He basically said, I want to work with anyone
who wants to solve problems.
And I'm against weaponizing political issues
to try to win elections.
Something else that happened during his victory speech
that segues into something that makes
this district perhaps a little unique
is that there were protesters--
as there are protesters now at a lot of Democratic events,
particularly events for Biden and Harris,
who appeared to be pro-Palestine and opposing Democrats
position on the war in Gaza.
This is a district where that was
a unique issue in some ways.
It has a large population of Jewish Americans.
Mazi Pilip served in the IDF.
How did that issue end up playing out here?
And did it-- once again, we're saying this can't necessarily
be taken as some sort of indication of what
could happen nationally.
How does that make this district unique?
Galen, I also want to add to that list of how it's personal.
One of the Hamas hostages is actually from the Third
Congressional District.
And his parents had a vigil and a rally for him.
And both Suozzi and Pilip showed up together
as a united front to say that--
to demand that the hostages be released.
And it's unique, right?
I don't think there are many other districts in the country
where they're going to actually have
a family who was affected--
and this election come up.
But it made it seem very real and very tangible
in a way for people, just ephemeral,
or they try to block it out when they're watching cable news
or they're doom scrolling and they
can't really wrap their fingers and their brain
around everything.
But Mazi really leaned into her personal background,
saying she was born in Africa and she moved to Israel,
she was an IDF paratrooper, she was strong,
she had seven children, and that she was going
to deliver justice for Israel.
But beyond that, the specifics fell apart.
There wasn't a lot of B-side to that story.
And Suozzi maintained from the beginning
that he was also a very strong ally of Israel,
and tried to walk that tightrope of also
making sure he made inroads with Muslim voters in the area.
And I think that piece about Muslim voters
wasn't something that we actually heard
from Mazi Pilip all too much.
And listen, I haven't seen the individual town
totals come back.
I'd love to actually dig into that more.
But it might show that there was turnout in Jewish areas.
I think it's the highest Jewish voting district.
Jacob, Leah, is that true?
I think I saw around at least 11%?
Yeah, maybe the Nadler and the Goldman districts
might be up there as well.
But it's definitely top five, maybe top three.
Right.
So of course, there are going to be towns, like Great Neck where
she's from or the parts of the South Shore,
of high concentration of Jewish Democrats
and some Jewish unaffiliateds, untethered.
That could have pushed this in Suozzi's direction.
The first thing Suozzi did after he became
the Democratic nominee in this special was get on a plane
and go to Israel.
That was how he kicked off his special-election bid,
was going to Israel because he knew
that this was going to be an issue because of the district.
And it was especially going to be an issue because of who
the Republican nominee was.
Driving through the district when I was there,
Suozzi had his normal yard signs.
And then he had "Tom Suozzi Stands With Israel" yard signs.
And those were the two options that voters had.
It was very clear this was something
he was taking seriously.
He was not going to let himself be outflanked by an opponent
that he knew was going to be using that angle
to the greatest degree.
Yeah, I'm kind of interested also in looking
at the age of the district.
And I should have looked this up before.
I do wonder, with this district, is a helpful case study
of Democrats' criticism of Biden over his handling
over the Israel-Hamas war because it
is unique in a lot of ways, like the ways
that Brittany and Jacob already mentioned.
There's a significant Persian-Jewish
community that has--
the Iranians who left-- the Jewish Iranians
who left happened to be-- a lot of them are in New York.
And there are also a lot of Israeli refugees.
So it is a unique district in a whole bunch of ways.
I think the fact that there is a high population
of Jewish voters is one of many of those unique things
about this district that makes it, again,
maybe a better harbinger for the US
House in 2024, which goes through New York,
than the race for President.
Yeah.
What kind of data do we have-- we've been talking
about broader themes here--
but about turnout and about maybe,
specifically, who turned out?
I know that we have it was low.
Actual day-of-vote totals, I'm still
waiting to see from the Board of Elections in Nassau.
They were sheepish to let it out.
But I have a sense that it was much lower than expected,
even for a special election, which is,
of course notoriously low turnout.
I'm curious to see how many Asian-Americans voted,
especially in Queens.
Suozzi deployed a lot of strong surrogates,
in fact, even partnered up with AAPI Victory Fund, who
did mailers that linked Trump to Santos to Mazi in Hindi
as well, for the South-Asian voters in the district.
And I think that South-Asian and East-Asian
and Asian-American voters broadly are under
looked in some of these national stories
about voting blocs that matter.
They're just, I think, often sideswiped to just--
at all other minorities, nonwhite voters.
But if you've ever been to Queens,
you know this is a sizable, impactful voting bloc.
Right.
I think it approaches-- it approaches 20% or something
like that, of the district--
I wouldn't be shocked.
--is of Asian descent.
And look, I think one of the things that made Suozzi
such an attractive pick is because he
has this demonstrated history of retail politics.
And he really subscribes to an older-school method
of politicking that means that he is very
attentive to different voting blocs
and the different ethnic communities in the district.
I thought it was fascinating to see--
there was a weekend recently where he
was posting his daily routine.
And in the span of one morning and afternoon,
he did that rally with Pilip about the hostages
held by Hamas in Gaza.
Then he went to a dim sum.
He went to a Korean church.
He went to a Tibetan lunch.
And he finished the day off with a meeting with Indian leaders
at an Indian restaurant in Queens.
So he really made an effort not to let
anyone feel like they weren't being
spoken to across the District.
And I think that seems to have paid off.
I realize that we did have this number of reportable,
that we have over 78,000 people voted early,
either by mail or in person.
And both Suozzi and Mazi hit social and the field
to push out voters to vote early.
But of course, we know typically,
those votes are going to break Democrat.
And there seemed to be-- at least
in the beginning half of the night,
we were all in that chat.
And we saw those votes pour in from the early vote
for about a week.
A lot of them favored Suozzi.
And I think that, especially with all the weather today,
the much ballyhooed about storm, having over 78,000 people
take advantage of early voting in New York
and being able to have easy access to the voting precincts
definitely helped him in the end.
Yeah.
All things considered, I think the low turnout--
because of the reasons we keep going over,
it's hard to make a big conclusion about that, whether
it's because she wasn't--
maybe if she had embraced Trump more,
maybe like Trump supporters would have come.
I don't know.
It keeps coming back to this idea for me
that the election preserves a lot of the status quo
because Democrats have been running on--
it reaffirms what Democrats have been doing in order
to win this kind of district.
It reaffirms what Republicans have
been doing to be competitive in a Biden district.
And the unique circumstances notwithstanding,
that explains the margins.
So it was a super interesting election.
Actually, after some of these primary races, where there
hasn't been quite as much to say and the presidential race,
it was really interesting to hear different candidates
and introduce themselves and hear about different issues
that make it--
not just nationalized issues, but how local issues affect--
or how national issues affect local populations.
That was really nice, to move our attention to that.
But now I do think we go back to the status quo
again, which is where we've been.
Well, according to the former president--
this is breaking news here--
the reason why Mazi Pilip lost was,
quote, "a very foolish woman, Mazi Melesa Pilip,
running in a race where she didn't endorse me,
and tried to straddle the fence when she would have easily won
if she understood anything about modern-day politics in America.
So that's the take from Queen's man, Donald Trump.
So do you think that Mazi Pilip
could have won a conventional Republican primary
in that district?
And second question, Do you think that New York Republicans
who could face a tough reelection
race, the redistricting thing-- just a reminder
for everyone that there is a very high likelihood
that the Congressional maps will be redrawn in New York
before November.
So this could change.
But is it concerning for Republicans running
in Biden districts, these freshman Republicans in New
York, six of them, who might need
to run with some distance from Trump
in order to win re-election?
2022 says, yeah, it's hard, that candidate-quality matters.
Maybe candidate quality matters less
in a presidential-election year because everyone
is turning out for the top of the ticket anyway.
And there just aren't that many split-ticket voters.
And so if people are going to be turning out for Trump,
they're voting for the Republican.
But yeah, in 2022, Trump endorsed
a bunch of people who were bad candidates
and lost their races.
And honestly, all the conversations
that we're having in Congress right now wouldn't be happening
because had they not run any candidates, the Republicans
would have a majority in the Senate.
And they would have a larger than five-seat
majority in the House.
So this entire situation is because of Donald Trump.
And I just think it's important to--
of all the differences that we're
talking about in this District, of all the ways this race was
unique, let's really focus in on the fact
that these two candidates were picked by the local party
to be the strongest candidates in a general election.
They did not face an electorate that--
and did not face a competitive primary
that often pushes candidates to the far left and far right.
And can we talk about--
I feel like the biggest elephant in the room we haven't
addressed yet is our content-creating boss, George
Santos, who is now doing back of the napkin math on Twitter,
maybe auditioning for a job at FiveThirtyEight.
And he basically didn't come up in this election at all.
Right? - How?
Can we put money--
can we put money on the cameo price for tomorrow?
[LAUGHS]
Is he going to run?
Is he-- is he running?
I will say that he does relate to a lot of Nassau County
people I know, by loving Hermes and Botox.
That is very relatable to a Third Congressional District
voter, and if you go out to the Hamptons,
an Eastern Long Islander-- in a way.
So I feel like maybe there's room there for him.
I don't know.
I think that voters saw Santos as such an aberration
that it didn't stick when Democrats
tried to use him as a cudgel in this special election.
Voters understood that Republicans were just
as duped as everyone else was about who
he really turned out to be.
And so what I heard in my reporting
was that the candidates and the players here looked at,
Could we use George Santos effectively in this election?
And it didn't play because he was so far afield.
The things he was doing were so crazy
that voters didn't think of him as the Republican, George
Santos.
They thought of him as, that crazy guy, George Santos.
And so he exists outside of partisanship in a way that made
it less effective to attack Republicans based on the fact
that he, too, was a Republican.
Yeah, I guess he was both his own boat
and his own iceberg in a way.
He was the entire story all in one person.
Suozzi also said that he-- one of his arguments that he made
at the debate-- and I don't know if you guys-- or Brittany,
if you heard this elsewhere from him,
but you can't take a chance on somebody
you don't know that well.
And that was the one way George Santos was
inserted into this race was like, well,
last time, you weren't so sure.
But with me, you know exactly what
you're getting because you've already had three terms of it.
We call it the devil you versus the devil
you don't know.
And often people in these kinds of situations go with the devil
they know.
It's a safer Vegas gamble, I think.
Yeah.
And Pilip played into that with the sheltered nature
of her campaign.
I think there's a universe in which she was much more
out there, she was doing more press, more interviews, more
retail campaigning, and was more effectively
able to rebut the notion that she was hiding,
that she had something to hide.
But she ran the race that she did.
And that allowed Democrats to press the message implicitly
about Santos, and contrast it with the very deep ties
that Suozzi has to the District.
And I will say too--
I interviewed both Suozzi and Pilip.
And my parents are both still voters in the District.
And you know in our chit chat before and after,
Mazi didn't really ask me so much about it.
But Suozzi would not hang up the phone until and unless I
actually gave him my folks' contact information
because he was adamant.
Many times, he asked me-- because he
was adamant on reaching out to them himself to make a pitch
to try to get them to turn out for him-- my parents are
very Suozzi skeptical.
They're actually Democrat-Republican swing
voters and immigrants-- both of them, from different places
in the world.
So an interesting cross-section of New York Three voter.
And I thought that it's so tiny and anecdotal.
But if he was doing that with me,
maybe he was doing that with other people too.
And those are the little things that matter,
those personal touches, the ones that matter.
His wife went to the same all-girls high school I did.
And he asked me if I was a Dodd or Stripe, which
is only something you would know of if you're from Long Island.
And I do think that if you meet some someone from New York--
they're very prideful.
I want no comments about me talking right now--
but we're very prideful people who are obsessed with loyalty.
Does that ring a bell about any other famous New
York politician you might know?
And having it be your guy, your person,
whether or not you hate their guts, but they know you
and you know them, and you can fight in the same schoolyard,
I think that matters a lot to Long Island voters.
Well, now that we're really playing into stereotypes,
I think it's time to go to bed.
And I just looked back because I was
reminded of this whole saga.
And one of our first podcast episodes in 2023 was called,
What the Debt Ceiling and George Santos' Career Have in Common.
I guess--
Ooh, what was the answer?
What was the answer?
I don't remember.
But I think we can say that now both
have been thoroughly raised.
Oh, look at you.
Did you just come up with that?
I sure did.
I'm so impressed.
It's like midnight too.
Although I'm sure that Andy Cohen is talking to someone
at Bravo about having him run this fall
and just turning it into a reality TV show.
Andy Cohen needs to be hosting the debates.
That's my-- I will die on that.
It's the only way Trump will show up.
The Suozzi-Santos debates or the Trump-Biden debates?
All of them.
[LAUGHTER]
All right, thank you, Brittany, Jacob, and Leah.
Thank you.
Happy Valentine's Day, everyone.
Officially, you are all--
you are all my valentines today.
Thank you.
And you are mine.
Thank you. Again, I guess it's not mutual.
Just me and you--
And, no, all of you, as well.
[LAUGHTER]
My name is Galen Druke.
Tony Chow is in the control room.
Our producers are Shane McKeon and Cameron Chertavian.
And our intern is Jayla Everett.
You can get in touch by emailing us
at podcast@fivethirtyeight.com.
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with any questions or comments.
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Thanks for listening.
And we will see you soon.
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