Happy Valentine’s Day and a solemn Ash Wednesday to all.
On the menu today: This is going to be another grim one if you’re hoping for big Republican wins in November. Democrat Tom Suozzi’s victory over Republican Mazi Melesa Pilip in the special election in New York’s third congressional district isn’t an enormous shock, but the margin is ominous. The issues of an insecure border and dealing with an influx of migrants were front and center in voters’ minds, and yet the GOP candidate still couldn’t win. Republicans fell short in a Pennsylvania state house election yesterday, too, further evidence that the suburbs — which used to be fertile territory — continue to reject what the GOP is offering. And there’s little sign that anything will change between now and November. But hey, good news: We had a terrific guest on the Three Martini Lunch podcast yesterday.
GOP Losses Continue to Mount
You can over-analyze special House elections. The turnout is low, the electorate is usually not as tuned in as in a November election, and you usually have two lesser-known candidates.
But all things being equal, Republicans would have preferred to win yesterday’s special election in New York’s third congressional district than lose it. (The House now has 219 Republicans; 212 Democrats; one Democratic congressman-elect who will be sworn in soon; and three vacancies: two in GOP-leaning districts, and one in a Democratic-leaning district.)
Yes, this is a Biden district covering parts of Long Island and Queens; the president beat Donald Trump here, 54 percent to 44 percent, in 2020. But in 2022, Republican gubernatorial candidate Lee Zeldin won this district by the same margin, and the infamous and then uninvestigated George Santos won this district last cycle, 53 percent to 44 percent. Republicans can win in New York’s third congressional district, if they just get a bit of wind at their backs.
But as of this writing, it looks like it wasn’t that close. With 93 percent of the votes counted, former Democratic representative Tom Suozzi has almost 54 percent of the vote, and Republican Nassau County legislator Mazi Melesa Pilip has around 46 percent.
Sure, having represented the area in Congress from 2017 to 2023 before choosing to run for governor, Suozzi was a quasi-incumbent. Sure, yesterday’s snow depressed turnout. And if you want to argue Pilip was a less than ideal candidate, you can; she was political newcomer, “a registered Democrat and Ethiopian-Israeli immigrant who formerly served in the Israel Defense Forces and had flipped a local legislative seat in 2021 with the help of local Republicans.” On the other hand, as our Audrey Fahlberg reported, Pilip — as an Ethiopian-Israeli legal immigrant woman — seemed like the ideal candidate to pound Democrats on the issue of the border and illegal immigration:
It’s no wonder then that Republican candidate Mazi Melesa Pilip, a Nassau County legislator in the Long Island suburbs, has conducted press conferences in front of migrant shelters like the Creedmoor Psychiatric Center in Queens, where she introduces herself to prospective supporters as a “legal immigrant.”
“We have a tent city around us,” Pilip told National Review in an interview. “We need to secure the border as soon as possible.” . . .
Suozzi is feeling the heat on immigration and has spent weeks portraying himself as hawkish on border security on the stump and in campaign ads. But even outside Democratic spending groups are struggling to push back against Republican attack ads that replay comments Suozzi made during a Democratic gubernatorial debate last cycle about U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, when he bragged that while serving as Nassau County Executive, “I kicked ICE from Nassau County.”
The former congressman says those comments are now being taken out of context and pertain to an incident that occurred nearly two decades ago when ICE agents improperly brandished their weapons against local Nassau County police officers and residents during an anti-gang operation. But even short, clipped campaign videos can do a lot of damage in contested political races.
As National Review reported earlier this month, Suozzi claimed on the campaign trail in January that he doesn’t know what the term “sanctuary city” means.
“Sanctuary cities is such a misnomer, okay, what does that mean?” Suozzi said during a January 17 membership meeting of the Plainview-Old Bethpage Chamber of Commerce. “Can you tell me what it means? Can anyone here tell me what that means? No, but it’s this thing that is thrown out there. It doesn’t mean anything. It’s such a misused terminology.”
Suozzi made a perfect stand-in for the Biden administration’s policies. During his two years in the U.S. House of Representatives under Biden, he voted with the administration’s position 100 percent of the time.
And somehow . . . the issue of immigration fell short. If the “Democrats have left our borders insecure, and their decisions have left our communities overwhelmed with migrants” message isn’t going to work here, where is it going to work?
Note that yesterday, just as Republicans fell short in a congressional seat in the New York suburbs, they also fell short in a key Pennsylvania state house race in that state’s suburbs:
In the race for the open seat in the 140th state House District, Democrat Jim Prokopiak, a school board member in Bucks County, defeated Republican Candace Cabanas.
Prokopiak’s victory gives Democrats a narrow 102-100 majority in the state House, preventing another tie in the chamber.
The party had a one-seat majority, 102-101, before Democratic Rep. John Galloway resigned after he won a judgeship in November.
His departure created a tie. But another resignation Friday, by Republican Joe Adams, gave Democrats a fresh 101-100 advantage.
Republicans control the state Senate, while Democrats hold the governorship.
The win in Bucks County — a purple slice of the northern suburbs of Philadelphia — was hailed as positive news by national Democrats, some of whom had viewed the contest as an early bellwether of the party’s fortunes among suburban voters ahead of the 2024 election.
It was not close in Bucks County yesterday, with more than a two-to-one margin for the Democratic candidate.
You can see the signs that 2024 is looking a lot like 2022, an environment where the public is frustrated with Democrats and Republicans should be romping to victory, but they don’t — in large part because the Trump-loyalist leaders of the party look like the characters in the Star Wars bar scene instead of competent, professional, clear-eyed problem solvers. Suburbanites, generally speaking, don’t like parties whose leaders embrace kooky conspiracy theories. They don’t like relitigating elections that they see as having been resolved years ago. They don’t like tirades on social media. QAnon, January 6, belief that Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce are a “psyop” — this stuff is disqualifying, and light-years away from the issues that are on the mind of the typical suburbanite.
Pennsylvanians will elect a Republican like Pat Toomey, but they won’t elect a Republican like Doug Mastriano, who won 41.7 percent in 2022. Marylanders will elect a Republican like Larry Hogan, but they won’t elect a Republican like Dan Cox, who won 32.1 percent in 2022. Michiganders in the third congressional district will elect a Republican like Peter Meijer, but not a Republican like John Gibbs, who won 41.9 percent in 2022. There are states and districts where the little-known kooky Trump-loyalist candidates run ten to 15 percentage points behind what a “normal” Republican gets.
I can hear it now — those buttoned-down policy wonks aren’t exciting, and they don’t always do what Trump wants them to do! There was a blue wave in 2018, there was a blue wave in 2020, and Republicans fell well short of expectations in 2022 and in 2023. How many more times do Republicans want to do this?
Trump, of course, claims Pilip lost because she didn’t endorse him, running in a district he lost twice, first by six percentage points, then by ten percentage points. Over on Truth Social, Trump literally declared “I WANT TO BE LOVED”:
MAGA, WHICH IS MOST OF THE REPUBLICAN PARTY, STAYED HOME – AND IT ALWAYS WILL, UNLESS IT IS TREATED WITH THE RESPECT THAT IT DESERVES. I STAYED OUT OF THE RACE, “I WANT TO BE LOVED!” GIVE US A REAL CANDIDATE IN THE DISTRICT FOR NOVEMBER. SUOZZI, I KNOW HIM WELL, CAN BE EASILY BEATEN!
Maybe that’s a Valentine’s Day plea.
It’s not like the crime issue went away. It’s not like the migrant crisis, at the border and in America’s biggest cities, went away. Sure, the inflation rate is lower than it was a year or two ago, but it’s not like any of your friends and neighbors feel like things are affordable.
You think Donald Trump is going to come across as warm, cuddly, and sane to all those suburban soccer moms in November? Oh, hey, Andy McCarthy reminds us that the Stormy Daniels trial appears likely to start in six weeks, retelling everyone of the allegation that Trump was canoodling with a porn star while Melania was pregnant.
You think Kari Lake’s going to do well in all those Phoenix suburbs this year as the GOP’s Senate candidate in Arizona? Will she tell Republicans who voted for John McCain to “get the hell out” again?
It takes big, broad, diverse coalitions to win big states. And a lot of MAGA candidates just aren’t interested in building big, broad, diverse coalitions.
ADDENDUM: Yesterday, Greg Corombos and I welcomed just the fourth guest in the history of the Three Martini Lunch podcast — a reflection of our high standards for guests, and my laziness in booking them. Our guest was former White House Press Secretary Dana Perino, who is now co-host of The Five and America’s Newsroom on the Fox News Channel. She was also a moderator for one of the Republican presidential-primary debates.
We began with a discussion of the White House press office, how Perino approached the job during the final years of the George W. Bush administration, how Karine Jean-Pierre is handling the duties, and where the blame properly lies for the communications problems within the Biden White House.
Next, we turned to the 2024 presidential campaign and why Perino believes the report from special counsel Robert Hur amounts to the “death knell” for Biden’s reelection campaign. We also examined how to maintain viewer interest when the major-party primaries are very one-sided, and heard her thoughts after seeing the results of the Nevada GOP primary.
Finally, we asked Perino’s opinion about what she saw and learned while co-moderating one of the Republican primary-presidential debates, what it was like to be in the middle of the fray, and why she believes the current format of debates no longer serves the public well.