Democrat Suozzi wins US House election in New York, eroding Republican majority

NEW YORK: Democratic former congressman Tom Suozzi won a special election in New York on Tuesday, Edison Research projected, narrowing an already razor-thin Republican majority in the US House of Representatives that has struggled to pass legislation.

The contest became necessary after the House took the extraordinary step of expelling Republican George Santos, whose dizzying array of lies about his biography led to his indictment on fraud charges.

Suozzi, who previously held the seat before stepping down to run for governor, defeated Mazi Pilip, an Ethiopian-born Republican county legislator who served in the Israeli military.

The district includes a small corner of New York City and some of its eastern suburbs.

The result leaves Republicans with a 219-213 majority that has already proven hard to manage, illustrated by the chamber’s failure last week to pass a measure to impeach President Joe Biden’s top border official, Alejandro Mayorkas, which fell short by one vote when a few Republicans voted no.

The House approved the measure on Tuesday, after No. 2 Republican Steve Scalise returned from cancer treatment to cast a decisive vote.

Meanwhile, Democrats retained their slim majority in the Pennsylvania state House of Representatives on Tuesday after winning a special election in a Philadelphia suburb.

Republicans, who already control the state Senate, would have taken over the House with a victory.

The New York district, which supported Biden in 2020 before flipping to Republicans in the 2022 mid-term elections, has served as a testing ground for both parties’ messaging ahead of the fall election, when the presidency and control of both chambers of Congress will be at stake.

“This race could be a bellwether for swing suburban districts around the country that are going to decide who controls the gavels of Congress,” said Lawrence Levy, executive dean at Hofstra University’s National Center for Suburban Studies.

US Senate passes $95bn aid bill for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan

Turnout, already expected to be light for a special election in February, was further depressed by a winter storm that blanketed the region on Tuesday morning with several inches of heavy snow, prompting both campaigns to offer free rides to polling places in the afternoon.

Immigration was a central issue, as it has been elsewhere in the country ahead of an expected rematch between Biden and former President Donald Trump in November.

Pilip repeatedly hammered Suozzi and the Democratic Party on the issue, accusing them of failing to control crossings at the southern border with Mexico. Pilip was endorsed by a labor union for Border Patrol officers.

“I kept migrants from being sent to Nassau and will secure the border when I get to Congress,” Pilip wrote in a Facebook post, referring to New York state’s Nassau County.

Suozzi, who represented the congressional district for six years before stepping down and running unsuccessfully for governor, called Pilip’s attacks against him misleading and said she has been short of specifics on how she would address border security.

He touted his own bipartisan immigration compromise and criticized Republicans for rejecting a border security deal negotiated in the Senate, which collapsed after Trump urged Republicans to spurn it.

“Ms. Pilip points out there’s a problem, there’s a problem, there’s a problem. She has no solutions,” Suozzi said in the election’s only debate.

He also attacked Pilip on abortion, an issue that Democrats have put front and center since the US Supreme Court eliminated a nationwide right in 2022.

Pilip said she is personally against abortion but did not support a federal ban.