Member Newsletter
With the clear light of morning I wanted to do another after-action report on the results out of the special election in New York’s 3rd congressional district. According to the close-to-final results, former Rep. Tom Suozzi beat Mazi Pilip by eight percentage points, 54% to 46%. That is a decisive if not a huge margin.
Notably that’s the identical margin from the 2022 result when the now-expelled George Santos defeated Robert Zimmerman (D). (Suozzi gave up the seat in 2022 to make a truly quixotic run for governor.) So from GOP +8 to Dem +8. Suozzi’s 54% of the vote was also what Biden got in the district in 2020, though it’s important to note that the district lines were redrawn for 2022. So it’s not an apples-to-apples comparison. But it shows that there is one way to look at this race as a completely baseline result, with George Santos’ win in 2022 as a big outlier, and part of a surprisingly strong showing for Republicans across the southern portion of New York State.
We’re hearing a lot of people say this morning that special elections aren’t predictive. In other words, Suozzi winning this seat doesn’t tell us one way or another about whether Joe Biden is going to beat Donald Trump. And that’s true as far as it goes. The dynamics of special elections are different. This is a swingish part of a very Democratic metropolitan area. You have one candidate who is very well known in the district, with a proven electoral track record, versus another who was an almost total unknown.
But the polling data is notable. There were four polls in this race. Suozzi led in all four, with the margins, in chronological order: D+3, D+4 , D+4, D+1. The actual result appears to be D+8. In the world of vibes, this race had been too close to call and the Democrats were moving heaven and earth to stave off a humiliating defeat. That’s fun for post-vote cackling. But we need to sweep it to the side when looking at the polls, which never really showed that. As noted, the big Dem pessimist argument is that recent special elections don’t tell us much because low-turnout special elections are tailor-made for the Democrats’ increasingly educated/affluent constituency which is made up of very consistent voters. That educated/affluent part of the Democratic coalition is the one that has remained most enamored of Joe Biden.
But the delta between the poll prediction and the actual result is a bit different. Special elections can be difficult to survey. But, at least in theory, a standard likely voter screen should make sense of an election in which only very consistent voters show up. But the polls missed the outcome by a significant margin. One poll missing by 4 percentage points is basically the margin of error. But when they all do it’s more than that. They seem to have misjudged each candidate’s support by a small but significant degree. In one race that’s not a huge deal. But this has been a relatively consistent pattern now for going on two years: public polls understating Democratic strength by relatively small but fairly consistent measures.
There was also a flurry of ads about immigration in this race and a lot of press commentary arguing that immigration was going to be the driver of the result. If it was it didn’t stop Suozzi from cruising to victory. He did run ads making clear he was no supporter of open borders. But that’s basically where Joe Biden is right now. He was supporting a very GOP-leaning border compromise that Republicans ended up killing. So while some are arguing that Suozzi put distance between himself and his party on immigration, the whole party is more or less doing the same.
Let’s be clear: In reality, while we’re not in the wild Dems-Are-Doomed world we’d be in if Suozzi had lost, a single special election doesn’t tell us a lot. At one level, for Dems, it’s just nice to have won rather than lost. But this small but notable polling differential is what strikes me as the most significant takeaway. Mostly because it’s been a fairly consistent pattern.