Suozzi leans on the problems of migrants and smooths the election year for the Democrats

In the heart of Long Island, where Republicans have won every major election in the past three years, Tom Suozzi fought through ripping political headwinds to claim victory Tuesday in a special House election, capturing a coveted swing district held belonged to George Santos. .

The outcome flipped one of the five House seats Democrats need to regain the majority in November, giving the party a much-needed dose of optimism. But Mr. Suozzi’s campaign also provided something that could be more valuable: a playbook for candidates across the country competing in areas where President Biden and his party remain deeply unpopular.

The strategy went something like this: Challenge Republicans on issues they usually monopolize, like crime, taxes and especially immigration. Flash an independent streak. And galvanize the Democratic base with attacks — in this case, nearly $10 million in ads — on the abortion issue and former President Donald J. Trump, the likely Republican nominee for the White House.

“It's a very interesting lesson for Democrats that the way to escape your opponent's attacks on immigration is not just to focus on the issue, but to address it,” said Steve Israel, a former congressman from the district that once led the House Democrats' campaign. arm.

“Rather than trying to sidestep the issue, he jumped into it,” Mr. Israel added.

One of the most vivid examples came in the final weeks of the race. Mr. Suozzi was on his way to a rally one morning and heard that his Republican opponent, Mazi Pilip, was about to hold an event at a migrant shelter in Queens, blaming him for the nation's growing border crisis.

The situation had everything to do with a political storm for the party in power — a storm that other Democrats might have written off as a lost cause. But Mr. Suozzi steered his car through heavy traffic, stopped just in time to follow Ms. Pilip in front of the TV news cameras and threw himself right into the fray.

“You want to try to respond to what people are hungry for,” he explained at the January event. “This is what people are hungry for.”

Suozzi's victory was not the only good news for Democrats on Tuesday evening. She also won a special election to maintain control of a state House seat in a key battleground, Pennsylvania's Bucks County.

In both cases, the Biden campaign released statements labeling the Democratic victories as defeats of Trumpism — a view echoed in part by a spokeswoman for Nikki Haley, Trump's last major, if long-awaited, Republican primary challenger.

“We just lost another winnable Republican House seat because voters overwhelmingly reject Donald Trump,” spokeswoman Olivia Perez-Cubas said. “Until Republicans wake up, we will keep losing.”

Mr. Trump, for his part, distanced himself from Ms. Pilip, a registered Democrat who never fully embraced him as a candidate, deriding her as a “very foolish woman.” In a statement on TruthSocial, he wrote in all caps: “MAGA, most of the Republican Party, stayed home – and always will unless it is treated with the respect it deserves.”

Political strategists of all stripes warn against drawing sweeping conclusions from special elections. The contests can provide a snapshot of the political energy at a given moment, but they are far from predictive.

To be sure, not everything about Mr. Suozzi's victory will be replicable. After three decades in local politics, he had the advantage of a strong personal brand, plus a largely unknown opponent and a Republican predecessor who was universally reviled after his expulsion from the House of Representatives in December.

And while Suozzi's campaign has spared Democrats an election-year panic attack, it has also exposed the extent of the party's challenges. Mr. Suozzi, a longtime ally of Mr. Biden, distanced himself from the president and the national party at almost every opportunity. That will prove much more difficult for candidates running in the presidential election — and some of Mr. Suozzi's positions could risk pushback from the Democratic base in other, less moderate districts.

“Joe Biden won this district by eight points, Democrats outnumbered Republicans two to one, and our Democratic opponent spent decades representing these New Yorkers — yet it was still a dogfight,” said Rep. Richard Hudson of North Carolina, Speaker of the House of Representatives. Republican campaign arm, said in a statement. “Republicans still have multiple options to grow our majority in November.”

Still, Democratic candidates and operatives in New York and Washington were clearly buoyed by Mr. Suozzi's ability to tackle a powerful set of issues that typically hobble the party.

Immigration was by far the most important. The number of illegal border crossings reached a record high in December. The arrival of more than 170,000 asylum seekers in New York City, straining budgets and police departments, has brought a sense of chaos close to home.

Republicans bombarded Mr. Suozzi with millions of dollars in attack ads portraying him as a Biden flunky who favored open borders. At one point, the Pilip campaign called him the “godfather of the border crisis.” Data from private surveys have shown that a clip in which Mr. Suozzi boasts that he “kicked ICE out of Nassau County” was particularly damaging.

Republicans had used similar fears over a neighboring issue, crime, to fuel notable victories in New York's suburbs since 2021, especially on Long Island. Their successes there in 2022, at a time when Republicans were underperforming across the country, almost single-handedly secured the party's margin in the House of Representatives.

But this time, Mr. Suozzi, watching fellow Democrats all but concede the issue to Republicans that year, was determined not to repeat the mistake.

So over the course of the two-month race, he broke with party orthodoxy, calling on Mr. Biden to close the southern border and demanding that migrants accused of attacking police officers in Times Square be deported. But his primary focus was bipartisanship, with the message that “solutions are not sound bites.”

When Ms. Pilip rejected a bipartisan Senate deal to boost deportations and fortify the border, Mr. Suozzi turned the tables, arguing that she was putting basic politics ahead of national security.

Opinion polls in the final days of the race showed Ms. Pilip still ahead among voters concerned about the border issue, but Mr. Suozzi narrowed the confidence gap.

Mr. Biden himself has begun testing a similar approach to the issue, blaming Mr. Trump for undermining the bipartisan deal in the Senate. The message is echoed by other Democrats who portray Republicans as extreme and uninterested in solutions to pressing problems.

“This was such a stark, clear choice: Do people want members of Congress who are going to engage in fear mongering or who are going to solve a whole bunch of problems,” said Rep. Pat Ryan, a New York Democrat who is preparing to defend a nearby country. Hudson Valley swing seat. “We have had a year of chaos, division and dysfunction in the House. And for me this is a clear rejection of that.”