Suozzi Land

(Okay, Swaziland is called Eswatini now, but what the heck . . .)

Democrat Tom Suozzi won the special election on Long Island to fill the U.S. House seat vacated by George Santos, the same seat Suozzi himself vacated to run (unsuccessfully, of course) for governor of New York.   

Suozzi, the son of an Italian immigrant, campaigned on immigration issues and stressed his support for the border security bill that House Speaker Mike Johnson wouldn't allow for a vote because it didn't go far enough - I mean, because Donald Trump didn't want it to pass.  Democratic Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut said that Democrats running for Congress should use Suozzi's success as an example of how to run in the general election this November. 

Not so fast.  Part of the reason Suozzi won is because he's a known quantity; he had represented the district in question, New York's Third U.S. House District, for six years prior to stepping down to run for higher office.  Also, Suozzi is a moderate Democrat.  As Speaker Johnson himself noted, Suozzi, when talking about immigration, sounded like a Republican.  Most Democrats don't.  That bill Suozzi said he supported had nothing for allowing children brought over the border by their parents as undocumented immigrants to become citizens, and it offered no paths to citizenship for any other migrants.  A couple of districts over in the Bronx, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez certainly wouldn't agree with Tom Suozzi on the border bill, and she would say also that, in another country, she wouldn't even be in the same party with Tom Suozzi.  And there are more progressive Democrats who would side with her, not Suozzi or Chris Murphy. 

Also, this was a special election to replace George Santos, a special person.  The circumstances of any special election are different from a regular general election, especially a regular general election in which presidential candidates are on the ballot, but for this special election that goes double. 

There was one silver lining in the form of literal storm clouds.  It snowed big time in the Greater New York area, and though there was less snow on Long Island than there was in northern New Jersey, there was still plenty of snow out that there.  Yet Democrats came out to vote, as did many independents.  For so, so long, Republicans have been famous for going out in any weather, no matter how inclement, to vote; they'd go out to vote in a hurricane.  Democrats, being wusses, would stay home in a nagging drizzle.  That's changing now, thanks to Donald Trump.  Trump has become so toxic for many Democrats that they're not going to let a little snow get in their way to vote for one of their own.  If Speaker Johnson was right about the weather affecting turnout on Long Island, that means it was Republicans who saw the winter storm alerts and decided to stay home.

And Joe Scarborough made another point - Long Island voters saw how House Republicans fumbled on the immigration issue and how they tried to weaponize the issue against the Democrats after rejecting a bipartisan Senate border security bill, and they punished the Republicans by awarding Tom Suozzi, the Democrat.  If the Republicans keep acting like this, they could make the polls showing a Trump victory in November irrelevant.

Actually, Suozzi made the polls in his district irrelevant.  Polls showed him winning this past Tuesday's special election narrowly; he won it by eight points.