Returning former Democrat congressman Tom Suozzi to Congress in New York’s 3rd Congressional District highlights the fecklessness of Washington Republicans. Calling them the stupid party may be overstating their intelligence.
If they expected applause and recognition by forcing out George Santos for lying, they were mistaken. A supermajority of Americans believe most congressmen lie. When they make choices about politicians, the lying of congressional candidates is already factored into the price lobbyists have paid for them. Unlike the GOP, the public knows this, and they have little respect for a party that whittles away its bare majority in such an absurd goody-goody way.
This is a district that loved Bill Clinton. Have the Republicans still not realized that Clinton changed the way flawed politicians are viewed in this country? Voters intuitively understand now that we are governed by a poorly packaged reality TV show.
The Democrat attempt to turn the 2024 elections into a new season of Judge Judy in courtrooms across the country is based on an accurate reading of their “audience.” It is about more than putting their opponents in jail. It is about selling “unreality TV” on a national scale.
The once-vaunted Nassau County, N.Y., GOP, known in the past as the Republican version of the sharp-elbowed Cook County Chicago machine, struggles these days. Some are now coming after the godfather of the operation, Republican County Chairman Joe Cairo, who plays hardball with the best of them.
He was the one who put in Santos and was applauded for winning back a Biden district. In fact, in a blast from the past, for the first time in decades, all Long Island members of Congress were Republicans.
Now Cairo is being blamed for the district’s return to the Democrats. The district is the third wealthiest in New York and the fourth wealthiest in the nation, so it is a natural fit for “lunch bucket” Joe Biden’s hedge fund Democrats. More and more Main Street Republicans are being taxed out of the district by sky-high property taxes.
The good news/bad news is that Suozzi has to start running for re-election in November immediately. That is the good news. The bad news is he out-fundraised the Republicans by about $7 million to win the seat. Since the United States, with a bipartisan agreement of the smart party and the dumb party, is a one-dollar, one-vote “democracy,” Suozzi has all the money he needs to stay on top.
There will now be plenty of new money to support more of the Suozzi TV attack ads that flooded one of the largest media markets in the country. If you believed the recent barrage of attacks, his opponent, Mazi Pilip, was an anti-abortion extremist, a MAGA extremist, a tax cheat, etc., etc.
When I first wrote about this race, I was told about Mazi Pilip because she had a “great story.” An Ethiopian Israeli who had served in the Israeli Defense Forces, she is a successful mother of seven. She was elected to the county legislature in a Democrat District. In fact, she was a registered Democrat. A skeptic of “good stories,” I considered it too far-fetched to list her as a contender in my story. I was wrong, wrong, wrong.
Joe Cairo and his team knew Suozzi would be tough to beat. So they opted to violate one of the first rules of politics. Paratroopers landing in an election spot rarely do well. She was a newbie in a small elected position and had zero name recognition. Since she wasn’t even a registered Republican, this made the race essentially a Democrat primary.
As it turned out, she wouldn’t be running her campaign. She was to be the show pony with the “great story,” and the party hoped to push her across the finish line. She appeared with many well-known politicians, like a former congressman from the district, Peter King. Unfortunately, a lot of the “wallpaper” around her at the photo ops were political heavy-hitter men, like Cairo and King. More women may have softened her image as she faced a feminist barrage of political attacks.
In New York, ethnic politics is alive and well, and the obvious reason the GOP went with Pilip was that she was Jewish. And the North Shore of Long Island is a very heavily Jewish district. She was an Israeli at a time when Israel was under heavy attack. They presumed this would cause enough registered Democrats to cross the aisle to push her over the top. Although, as an Orthodox Jew, she may have been viewed with suspicion by other more liberal Jews.
The question was whether the Jewish vote would go for the pro-Abortion Catholic or the pro-life Jew. While they say blood is thicker than water, in this case, abortion was thicker than both. According to a Pew Poll, Jewish American support for Abortion in almost all cases is 83%. It’s a huge number, and with his campaign focused on abortion, Suozzi won the votes he needed. The fact that Suozzi is a Joe Biden lite “centrist” and Biden’s support of Israel is a muddle hardly mattered. Suozzi easily carried the demographic groups he needed to win.
The numerous stories over the last year that Jews will migrate to the Republicans like the one here and here are overrated. If the Democrats plan on making abortion the issue in the upcoming election and many major Jewish organizations are lining up to support abortion, they will likely continue to hold onto the Jewish vote.
This poll, showing strong Jewish support for Biden, was taken before the war on Oct. 7, 2023, in Israel. But it may point in the direction of more realistic expectations in the November elections, with the abortion issue being a key driving wedge for the Jewish vote, as in this election.
In addition, Pilip was about as weak a “pro-life” candidate as you could find. She said, “Abortion is a very personal decision,” and “I am pro-life. However, I’m not going to push my own beliefs on any woman.”
And like most Republican candidates, rather than pushing back on the abortion-up-to-birth extremism of Democrats, she played the milquetoast defense, saying she would not support a national abortion ban. Needless to say, she was clobbered in pro-abortion TV ads every hour on the hour with little public effort to mobilize pro-life support.
And the Democrats, in their new 2024 strategy, gave Suozzi a school hall pass so he can roam the halls of Congress gently complaining about the border to fool the yokels into thinking he will help team Biden fix the problem and remove homeless encampments from New York.
Early voting is allowed in New York, and unlike cities like Miami, where the GOP has learned how to master early voting, in this race, the Democrats had the majority they needed before election day. The fact that it snowed that day is almost immaterial. Statistically speaking, election day is too late these days to win an election. A party that can’t compete in early voting can’t expect to make up ground in the marathon with some sudden burst of last-minute speed.
Related: The New York Special Election Was No Bellwether
George Santos won his election because he was glib enough to win his debate. Pilip lost her debate with Suozzi. Her heavy Ethiopian accent didn’t make her the best public communicator.
The Republicans have a lot to learn from this election. Early voting, money, and candidates matter. And if they expect to hold their own on abortion without making their case, they will embolden their enemies and immobilize their friends, who are already skeptical of a party that has disappointed them for decades with cheap talk and little action.