New York 3rd District special election: Suozzi projected to defeat Pilip

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.

Latest Developments

Feb 13, 11:16 PM

Answer: Democrats will be making hay, but circumstances were too special to glean much

The Dems will certainly point to tonight as evidence of all kinds of predictors for November (see Leah’s earlier post) but the reality is this was such strange circumstances and such a small pool of voters that it’s not going to tell us very much concrete about the general election. The only narrative I am willing to accept about tonight is the fact that this muddies any claims that NY-03 had shifted firmly to the right based on the last few elections, where Santos, Zeldin and Pinion (Chuck Schumer’s challenger) won the district. It’s still a swingy area that will be one to watch in 10 months time!

—Kaleigh Rogers, 538

  Feb 13, 11:07 PM

Answer: Special elections are special

I’m always skeptical of reading too much into the results of special elections. I mean, just remember Democrats’ blockbuster night in August of 2022 in New York, when they won one competitive special and narrowly flipped another solid Republican seat. Those results didn’t translate into Empire State success that fall. But I do think it tells us something about Long Island, namely, that Democrats can still win there. That wasn’t a given; the party has lost pretty much every competitive election there for the past three years, with candidates who have tried both tacking to the left and right. Now that we know Democrats can still win over voters there, the two other potential pickup opportunities on Long Island (the Suffolk-based 1st District and Hempstead-based 4th District) become that much more believable. And with just 4 seats separating Democrats from the majority, that’s a big deal.

—Jacob Rubashkin, Inside Elections

 Feb 13, 11:05 PM

Answer: A single special election with low turnout is very ¯_(ツ)_/¯

I don’t want to dismiss tonight’s result as meaningless, because it’s not. However, we should be careful not to over-interpret it as a signal for what could happen in November. My main reason for saying this? Turnout. ABC News’s current expected vote projection is about 185,000 total voters. To put that in perspective, 271,000 voters cast ballots in the 2022 3rd District race in what was a high-turnout midterm (for the most part). And in 2020, 398,000 voters would’ve cast ballots for president in the 3rd District under its current lines, according to Daily Kos Elections’ calculations. To be fair, the 2020 presidential race was the highest-turnout election in modern times, but despite the tepid excitement about a likely Biden-Trump rematch, I anticipate another relatively high-turnout presidential contest. So there will be a lot more voters voting in November than in a February special election that also featured inclement weather. Just how the multitude of more marginally-engaged voters who show up in 9 months respond to the electoral environment is an open question.

—Geoffrey Skelley, 538

 Feb 13, 11:04 PM

Answer: This election shouldn’t change our priors

I don’t think this result was ever going to tell us much about November. First of all, as Leah wrote in her preview of the race, this district is weird — it voted for Biden by 8 points, but is also much more Republican down the ballot, so what’s the proper baseline to measure against? Second, the snowstorm probably messed with turnout to the point where it wasn’t indicative of a normal election (if it ever|[ever> was going to be)>. Third, no matter what the result was tonight, it wouldn’t have changed the overall pattern for the cycle of Democrats doing really well in special elections.

—Nathaniel Rakich, 538

 Feb 13, 11:02 PM

Question: Does this tell us anything about November?

We’ve talked about the fact that tonight’s race was between an unusual pair of candidates, under unusual circumstances (special elections, Santos, snow storms, oh my!). But would we be election analysts if we didn’t debate … Does tonight’s result tell us anything about November?

—Tia Yang, 538

 Feb 13, 11:00 PM

The polls are looking pretty accurate in NY-03

After that first dump of votes from Nassau County about half an hour ago it looked like Suozzi could have pulled off a double-digit win over Pilip. But with more votes coming now, it looks like those were Democratic-friendly early votes, meaning the Democrat’s margin will end up in the mid-to-high single digits.

That is higher than, but really not so not so different from, the polls. The four polls we got of the race with the final set of candidates had Suozzi up by an average of 3 points. So if he wins by 6-10 points, we’ll have a 3-7 point polling error in terms of the margin between the candidates.

That’s a lot less than the average error for a House general election poll, not to mention polls of House special elections (which tend to be even less accurate). So, maybe this a good reminder for everyone: trust the polls, not the vibes (within reason).

—G. Elliott Morris, 538

 Feb 13, 10:53 PM

Suozzi calls for unity on immigration, Israel-Hamas and taxes

As he began his victory speech in front of supporters, Suozzi was briefly interrupted by a protester who accused him of supporting a genocide in Palestine. He used the moment to pivot to what he saw as the message of his campaign, one that’s of course standard in politics: unity over division. “There are divisions in our country where people can’t even talk to each other,” he said, adding that the solution was to stop bickering and political infighting and come together to solve problems ranging from immigration to local taxes. It was a message he said would reverberate throughout the country as we head to November.

—Monica Potts, 538

 Feb 13, 10:52 PM

The messaging wars begin again

We’re seeing Democrats take a victory lap. And what they learn from this election is likely to inform how they frame their messaging in key races later this year, even if that’s not necessarily sound political analysis. Here’s a sampling of what I’m seeing Democrats saying publicly so far:

-Abortion is still a salient issue for Democrats in 2024, and so is the argument that the Republican Party has become too extreme.

-Republicans can’t make every congressional race a referendum on Biden’s handling of immigration.

-Trump has lost the suburbs, while Democrats still appeal to working-class voters.

—Leah Askarinam, 538

 Feb 13, 10:47 PM

Sweet Victory

Valentine’s Day came early with a election night ending before 11 p.m.

—Brittany Shepherd, ABC News

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New York 3rd District special election: Suozzi projected to defeat Pilip