Don’t Forget Who Really Gave Us George Santos in the First Place

George Santos’ brief and benighted stint in Congress may come to an end this week. His colleagues are planning a vote for his ouster—and, after a damning House Ethics Committee investigation and report, the votes on both sides of the aisle seem to be stacking up against him. Santos is in rare company; only five other representatives have ever been expelled.

Naturally, Democrats have taken to the Santos saga gleefully. (Earlier this week, the liberal activist group MoveOn debuted a 15-foot inflatable balloon of the congressman outside the Capitol.) Santos’ fabulous corruption has made for a tidy point of comparison for Dems, despite the fact, of course, that he only ended up in Congress by defeating them in the first place.

But while Democrats have cheered his rightful possible removal—and though they would never admit it openly—they are really going to miss Santos when he’s gone. And nowhere will that be truer than in New York.

According to every road map in existence that must be used to get Democrats back to a House majority in 2024, Santos’ district (New York’s 3^rd Congressional District) is the very first to flip—the definition of a must-win.

But that flip got a little more difficult when Santos announced this month that he wouldn’t run for reelection; it will get more difficult still if Santos is gone from the chamber entirely. There could be no easier villain to run against than Santos. Indeed, Democrats in that race will likely continue to shadowbox Santos on the campaign trail no matter who the subsequent Republican candidate is. But with Santos expelled, a special election will be held, and New York Democrats seem to have learned nothing from the saga that resulted in an obvious con man running away with a congressional seat in a district Biden won handily in the first place.

During the 2022 midterms, New York saw Democrats’ worst underperformance in the country, and it cost Dems the House. In Long Island, the party’s electoral fates have continued to be dreadful, despite Democrats’ prospects perking up in local and special elections all over the country and even in New York’s Hudson Valley. The much-maligned New York Democratic Party Chairman Jay Jacobs, who is supposedly a Long Island specialist, has refused to take any accountability for his role in the dismal midterms. There’s no indication he has suddenly figured it out.

Meanwhile, the Democratic field has coalesced around a retread candidate to run for Santos’ vacated seat: Tom Suozzi. Self-styling as a devout centrist, Suozzi himself left that very seat in 2021 to engage in a preposterous run for New York governor against Kathy Hochul, another devout centrist. He attempted to run from her right—and there was already precious little daylight on the Democratic spectrum to Hochul’s right. Suozzi finished third in the Democratic primary in that race.

For a moment, in all of the uproar this year over Santos, it seemed as if the Democrats might at least embrace the possibility of a new, or younger, challenger: Zak Malamed, the 29-year-old hopeful who sprinted out of the blocks with some substantial fundraising totals. At a fundraising event I attended, he had some stern and correct words about the failures of the old guard of New York Democrats who helped lose the seat to Santos in the first place. But recently, Malamed dropped out and endorsed Suozzi, and the field has effectively been cleared. Suozzi, critically, has a yucky record on the all-important issue of abortion. In the past, he has opposed rolling back restrictions on Medicaid funding for abortions and directed millions of dollars to church groups for abstinence-based sex ed. He has been criticized routinely by major pro-choice groups and has never won an election in the post-Dobbs era. He also never released his full financial details when he ran for governor—and still hasn’t!

A candidate who brings nothing to the table other than replacement-rate pro-business policies and a little bit of name recognition would probably be fine in a contest against George Santos, but Suozzi will not be running against George Santos. He’s more likely to be running against a replacement-rate Republican, who could be a formidable opponent for him.

Meanwhile, Santos’ antics have also provided cover for other members of the New York delegation, including the recently much-protested freshman representative Dan Goldman. For the bulk of the session, Goldman has fixated on Santos: He introduced the House Ethics Committee complaint in January that led to the damning, recently published report. He has been involved with several failed efforts to chastise Santos. And he has grandstanded constantly about Santos’ turpitude on TV. On Tuesday, Goldman introduced a resolution to expel Santos not long after Republican Ethics Committee Chair Michael Guest introduced … a resolution to expel Santos, a duplicative move that has been charitably taken as an attempt to force Republicans’ hand. It was not the first time Goldman has introduced that resolution.

In short, Goldman has gone to incredible lengths to sell himself as the anti-Santos and a tireless accountability bringer. (He built his reputation as a lawyer on the first Trump impeachment, a mismanaged and ultimately failed made-for-TV campaign that nevertheless delighted liberals and raised lots of campaign funds for Dems, so this makes sense.) But the truth is that Goldman needs Santos to look this good: He is well to the right of his very blue district of lower Manhattan and parts of Brooklyn, which he won because of his massive personal fortune, a four-way split, and a divided progressive field. Oh, and a last-minute cash infusion from the Republican-aligned American Israel Public Affairs Committee.

Goldman’s commitment to the Santos bit, to ingratiate himself to some liberals, has helped distract from the fact that he is out of step with his very progressive district. On the campaign trail, he outed himself as having limited support for abortion rights. On the very rare occasion he’s been called to actually do something in this do-nothing Congress, he’s done things like vote with all but eight House Republicans to censure Democrat Rashida Tlaib, the sole Palestinian American in Congress, a stunning move coming from one of the bluest districts in America. That has resulted in sustained protests from his constituents. Better to focus on how bad George Santos is.

Goldman is not the only one. Right alongside him in the Tlaib censure vote was New York Democrat Ritchie Torres, whose Bronx district is even bluer than Goldman’s—arguably the bluest in the entire country. In January, Torres and Goldman teamed up to introduce the Stopping Another Non-Truthful Office Seeker—or SANTOS—Act. Pause briefly to roll your eyes.

The SANTOS Act stipulated that “a candidate who knowingly and willfully provides false information would be punished with a $100,000 fine, one year in prison, or both.” Needless to say, this bill never got anywhere close to becoming a law.

In July, Torres again teamed up with Goldman to introduce a privileged resolution to censure Santos for “conduct unbecoming of a member of Congress, including repeatedly lying to voters in his district, donors, and the American public about material aspects of his personal and professional life.” That vote passed. (Torres has also co-bylined all of the aforementioned expulsion resolutions with Goldman.) When Torres hasn’t been going after Santos, he’s been busying himself not by stumping for the reinstatement of the popular child tax credit, which he was closely involved with implementing in 2021, but by doing things like spreading misinformation and attacking the president of the liberal Zionist group J Street for insufficient loyalty to Israel.

For the New York Democratic Party, the Santos experience has been less scarlet letter than an effective sideshow, a distraction from a top-to-bottom failure to win elections against Republicans and also to support effective, aligned representatives in appropriate districts.

If the veil is ripped away, the failures of the party—and its unwillingness to correct course—will resurface. Purging Santos does not equate to purging those responsible for New York Democrats’ face-plant, nor does it do anything to prevent it from happening again. For Democrats and Santos both, the party might be over, then the hard part begins.