It is possible that the win of Tom Suozzi, which came after Republicans in Congress defeated a bipartisan border security measure, may offer Democrats with a road map to bolstering two political vulnerabilities.
Tuesday’s win in a special election in New York gave Democrats new hope that they might have found some of the basic ingredients to stop using immigration and the border as political issues. Party officials have privately seen these issues as some of their most vulnerable areas in 2024.
Democrats were called “Sanctuary Suozzi” by Republicans, but Tom Suozzi, a former Representative and now Representative, won a House seat on Long Island, an area of the country that has become more unfriendly to Democrats over the last two years. Mr. Suozzi won because he talked about a problem head-on, even though his party has tried to avoid it in the past.
In the past few months, record numbers of people have crossed the border, and more than 170,000 have come to New York City. Republicans wanted to use immigration to make Mr. Suozzi look like he was too far from the norm. A major Republican super PAC spent about $3 million on two TV ads that said Mr. Suozzi had “rolled out the red carpet for illegal immigrants.”
AdImpact, a company that tracks ads in the media, found that Democrats were running more immigration ads than Republicans in the last 10 days of the election. For example, Mr. Suozzi’s campaign showed clips of an appearance he had on Fox News where he was introduced as “one of the Democrats” supporting I.C.E., the immigration enforcement agency.
A few days before Mr. Suozzi’s win, Republicans in Congress killed bipartisan legislation on Capitol Hill that would have made it harder for people to cross the border illegally with Mexico. The Republican presidential nominee, Donald J. Trump, fought hard against the bill, saying that passing it would help Democrats and that he wanted to use the border problem as a club to hit Vice President Biden with this fall.
The failure of that nonpartisan deal wasn’t a big part of the ads for this House race. Even so, Mr. Suozzi did talk about it, and he took some very strong positions for a Democrat, such as calling to temporarily close the border and remove migrants who attack police.
Some Democrats, like Eric Adams, the mayor of New York City, have tried to stay away from the White House on this subject. In the fall of 2017, Democratic Gov. J.B. Pritzker of Illinois wrote that the “untenable” flow of migrants to Republican-run cities and states was getting out of hand. This summer, the Democratic National Convention will be held in Illinois.
Democratic leaders said on Wednesday that they thought Suozzi’s victory, which came just a few days after Republicans killed a joint border security bill, was a big sign that Republicans are at least partly to blame for the problems at the border.
In an interview on Wednesday, Senator Chuck Schumer, a Democrat from New York and the floor leader, said, “We have now made the border an issue where Democrats are on the front foot. Before all this happened, we were on the back foot.” “Trump pretty much gave us the problem when he said he didn’t want to deal with it because it was political, after saying the border is an emergency.”
The Republican Party is even more worried about the loss because Mr. Schumer said that New York’s third congressional district, which includes parts of Queens and Nassau County, is one of the twenty districts in the US where border problems are most important.
Few Democrats think that the border is now a winning issue for them. Instead, they see it as an issue that they can fight to a political draw while winning over people on issues like abortion.
“It has been turned from a negative issue to a positive issue,” Mr. Schumer said of the border problem for Democrats. “Not just positive, but positive overall,” he added.
The Republican speaker of the House, Mike Johnson of Louisiana, played down the importance of the special election by saying that Mr. Suozzi had “sounded like a Republican” on immigration and that he would not be able to repeat his success.
At a news gathering on Capitol Hill, Mr. Johnson said, “That is in no way a sign of what’s going to happen in the fall.”
But Democrats felt good about things in general.
The Democratic Senator from Connecticut, Chris Murphy, was in charge of negotiating the border deal that fell apart. The defeat of the package gave Democrats “a unique, unprecedented opening to go on the offensive on border security,” he wrote in a memo to his coworkers on Wednesday. He also said that the result of the special election was “proof” that the political climate was changing.
“We are seeing the politics of the border change right in front of our eyes,” Mr. Murphy wrote.
No matter what the long-term lessons of the special election are, the Democrats’ win instantly made it harder for the Republicans to control the House. This will make government harder in the coming months and harder for the party that controls the chamber in the fall.
The Republicans will have 219 seats and the Democrats will have 213.
While running for office, Mr. Suozzi had times stayed away from the White House. In a TV interview on the night before the election, he questioned Mr. Biden’s choice as the party’s nominee, saying that “the bottom line is he’s old” and that he would “likely” support the president “if he ends up being the Democratic nominee.”
Trump, for his part, said that Mazi Pilip, the Republican candidate on Long Island, wasn’t fully supporting him and called her “foolish” for trying to “straddle the fence.”
People often think that special elections are more important than they really are, and this one was, well, extra special.
The opening of Congress was only possible because former Representative George Santos, a Republican who was embroiled in a scandal, was kicked out. Santos’s lies had garnered national attention and led to a federal charge. Democrats had a ready-made candidate for the special election in Mr. Suozzi, who had been representing the region for years before his failed run for governor and had a reputation for being a moderate.
Also, Democrats spent about twice as much as Republicans. The race took place in a district that Mr. Biden won by about the same amount that Mr. Suozzi looked like he would win, even though the district had moved to the right since 2020.
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Republican Mazi Pilip in Massapequa Park, New York, on Tuesday. Pilip is running in a special election in New York. Trump, who was president from 2016 to 2018, blamed her for not accepting him more fully.Thank you…I wrote this for The New York Times.
“I don’t think Democrats should be too happy about what happened last night,” Mr. Johnson, the speaker of the House, said.
Some of the most important people in politics are writing opposing memos about how immigration has turned out on Wednesday. This shows how important the outcome and how it is understood are.
The National Republican Congressional Committee said that their flood of ads about immigration had “moved numbers,” even though they lost. They released some private survey results, showing that 45 percent of voters in their final poll thought immigration was the most important problem.
“Think of what we’ll do to any candidate who doesn’t have the institutional advantages Suozzi brought to the race,” the N.R.C.C. memo said.
The House Majority PAC, the main Democratic super PAC in the race, said in its own memo that immigration was talked about in about 20% of its paid messages, such as TV spots, mailers, and digital ads. Abortion was still talked about almost twice as often. The note compared the issue to the party’s weakness in 2022 when it came to the economy and inflation, and it said that candidates had to talk about those issues directly.
Democrats tried to protect Mr. Suozzi from the start when it came to immigration. In early January, the House Majority PAC ran a digital ad praising Mr. Suozzi’s track record on four issues that Republicans tend to focus on more: border security, the migrant crisis, supporting local police, and crime rates.
“The messaging is on our turf—crime and border security!” wrote Parker Hamilton Poling in January. Poling is a Republican strategist with a lot of experience who has worked on House races. “Dems will have a hard time persuading swing voters that they are better on those issues.”
But Mr. Suozzi and his supporters always talked about immigration, and party leaders called it a plan for the future.
The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee started a small but symbolic online ad campaign on Wednesday in Texas and Florida, where two Republican incumbents are running for re-election. The ads say that Republicans “won’t secure the border” and “won’t crack down on fentanyl trafficking.”
After the special election win on Wednesday, J.B. Poersch, head of the biggest Democratic super PAC that is involved in Senate races, said that immigration would be a big part of the campaign ads in the key battlegrounds this fall.
Mr. Poersch said, “Republicans made a fatal mistake when they gave in to Trump’s logic that using the border as a campaign issue is more important than fixing the problem.” “Democrats will talk about their plans to solve this crisis, even though Republicans are politically cowardly.”
