Democrats see New York election win as model for tackling immigration issue

Weeks before Tuesday’s special House election in New York, Republican Mazi Pilip staged a press conference outside a migrant shelter in Queens to assail Democrats’ handling of the humanitarian crisis at the US-Mexico border that has led tens of thousands of people to seek refuge in the state.

When she finished, her opponent, Democrat Tom Suozzi, was on the scene, preparing a rival press conference to directly address “this immigration crisis that is affecting so many families” and “rebut” some of Pilip’s claims about his views on the matter.

Related: New York special election: Tom Suozzi wins seat vacated by George Santos in boost for Biden

Suozzi defeated Pilip 54%-46% in the fiercely contested race to replace the Republican congressman George Santos, the serial fabulist who was expelled from Congress in December after he was charged with more than 20 counts of fraud.

Immigration was a central issue in the campaign for this Long Island-based congressional district, where a rise in new arrivals has strained resources in New York City and fueled angst among residents of the suburban battleground.

Suozzi’s decisive victory, Democrats say, presents their party with a formula for overcoming one of Joe Biden’s biggest political vulnerabilities and confronting Donald Trump’s core campaign message in America’s looming – and historically important – presidential election.

“Like Suozzi, Democrats can and should go on the offense on the border. Everywhere,” wrote Senator Chris Murphy, who served as the lead Democratic negotiator on a bipartisan border bill abandoned by Republicans. “Republicans’ idiotic decision to kill the bipartisan border bill is a huge opening. Suozzi saw it, and he flipped a seat.”

Stretching across Nassau county and into Queens, New York’s third congressional district is viewed as a political bellwether for the November general elections. The affluent, mostly suburban battleground was one of 18 districts that Biden won in 2020, but voted for a Republican House representative in 2022.

In a post-election memo to his party, Murphy applauded Suozzi’s ability to “flip the narrative” on immigration and said it should serve as a “roadmap” for Democrats in November. That morning, the campaign arm of Senate Democrats announced that he had launched a new ad by attacking two Republican senators over their opposition to the border deal. “It’s happening,” Murphy declared.

In the final days of the campaign, Suozzi seized on Republicans’ rejection of the border security deal struck in the Senate that included many of the hardline policies conservatives had demanded. When Pilip said the plan amounted to “the legalization of the invasion of our country”, Suozzi went on the attack, accusing her of playing politics with an issue that she herself insisted was a matter of national security.

In a statement, the White House spokesman Andrew Bates called Suozzi’s victory a “devastating repudiation of congressional Republicans” and the party’s decision to derail the bipartisan deal that would overhaul the asylum system and closing the border if there are too many attempted crossings.

“The results are unmistakable,” Bates said.

House speaker, Mike Johnson, disagreed. As New Yorkers voted to trim his thread-bare majority by one on Tuesday night, House Republicans narrowly voted to impeach the homeland security secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas.

But Johnson insisted that Tuesday’s outcome was not a sign of frustration with Republican intransigence but an endorsement of the party’s immigration agenda.

“Their candidate ran like a Republican,” Johnson told reporters. “He sounded like a Republican talking about the border and immigration because everybody knows that’s a top issue.

“That is in no way a bellwether of what’s going to happen this fall.”

To be sure, immigration was not the only dynamic shaping the outcome of the special House race. Suozzi was a household name running in the district he used to represent, which helped blunt Republican attempts to cast him as a leftwing extremist. By contrast, Pilip was a political newcomer attempting to win over an electorate still shocked by the stunning unraveling of the disgraced Republican it sent to Congress.

Pilip’s reluctance to discuss her views on abortion, which she personally opposes, and Trump opened the door for Democrats to cast her as evasive and out of step with the voters of the district, who backed Biden by eight points in 2020.

A snowstorm almost certainly dampened election day turnout. A Republican Super Pac, the Congressional Leadership Fund, hired snowplows to clear the streets around voting sites in Nassau county’s reddest precincts while Democrats racked up an early and absentee vote lead.

But immigration was a dominant theme.

In New York, as in the rest of the country, Americans say they are concerned by the record levels of migration at the southern border. Immigration and border security consistently rank as top issues, while surveys have found deep cross-party dissatisfaction with Biden’s handling of the situation.

“I think both parties looked at the polling, and basically, the Democrats embraced abortion rights and the Republicans embraced immigration,” said Mike Dawidziak, a Republican political consultant based in Long Island. “But I think that immigration ended up being something of a drawback, with the Senate killing the bipartisan bill right on top of this election.”

Republicans spent millions of dollars hammering Suozzi as weak on immigration. His campaign responded with an ad calling those attacks “a lot of nonsense” and featured footage of the candidate on Fox News defending Ice agents.

Lis Smith, a New York-based Democratic operative, contrasted Suozzi’s approach to immigration with the way Democrats handled the issue of crime in 2022.

“Crime was a top issue for voters, but Dems ignored that and tried to change the subject to abortion. Came across as out of touch,” she wrote on X. “Same dynamic could’ve unfolded in this race. Suozzi could’ve ignored immigration, dismissed voters’ concerns about migrants, tried to change the subject. But he didn’t.”

His decision to aggressively confront the issue “turned what could have been a devastating political liability into an advantage”, she said.

Lawrence Levy, executive dean of the National Center for Suburban Studies at Hofstra University and a former chief political columnist for Newsday, said Trump and congressional Republicans handed Suozzi a political “gift” when they torpedoed the bipartisan border bill.

“They gave Suozzi a chance to say: ‘Hey, whatever you feel about immigration, about who’s at fault, we need to come to compromise, and I’m that guy, I’m someone who tries to find a middle ground,’” he said.

He said Suozzi’s victory offered a model for how Democrats can win in suburban swing districts across the country.

“Moderate candidates who have a history of bringing political and community people together, who have had experience at the local level, as well as in other areas, is the sort of package that will play,” Levy said. “By the same token if Maga Republicans keep winning primaries in communities like this, they’re going to lose these districts.”

Congressional Democrats’ sudden willingness to adopt border enforcement policies they denounced during the Trump years has alarmed immigration advocates. But some said Suozzi’s willingness to confront the issue “head-on” was a positive step after years of ceding the debate to Republicans.

“Lean in, call out Republican gamesmanship, and be for border security and for legalization,” said Vanessa Cárdenas, the executive director of the pro-immigration group, America’s Voice.

She urged Democrats to articulate an immigration plan that pairs an “orderly border with strong support for citizenship” while continuing to call out and condemn anti-immigrant and bigoted Republican rhetoric.

Referring to comments and policies promoted by Trump, she added: “‘Poisoning the blood’ and promising mass roundups to purge the country of the foreign-born are policies that weigh down GOP candidates.”