Polls close in Long Island special election between Tom Suozzi and Mazi Melesa Pilip for George Santos’ seat

NEW YORK — Polls have closed in the ultracompetitive special congressional election for former Rep. George Santos’ seat, after a day of voting in snowy, sloppy eastern Queens and Long Island.

Tom Suozzi, the Democratic nominee, is seeking to wrest the district back into Democratic hands after the truth-challenged Santos captured the seat in the midterm elections. Suozzi, a centrist who represented the district for three terms before giving it up to run for governor, faces Mazi Melesa Pilip, a Nassau County lawmaker and a figure virtually unknown before the race.

The campaign, fought in large part over immigration, offers a symbolically weighty test of voting trends in a swing suburban district ahead of the nationwide November elections. But it also has significant practical implications: A win by Suozzi, 61, would cut further into the fractious Republican House majority, leaving the party with just two votes to spare.

The Ethiopian-born Pilip, a 44-year-old registered Democrat running on the Republican line, has sought to keep the seat in GOP control by depicting Suozzi as soft on immigration. Suozzi, in turn, has argued he would be stronger on the border, pointing to her opposition to a bipartisan border security deal negotiated in Washington.

Suozzi and Pilip spent Tuesday crisscrossing the district’s snow-socked streets, seeking to push voters to polls in a race that both parties saw as exceptionally close. Democrats expressed hope that the weather was playing to their advantage, because Democrats outvoted Republicans in early voting, requiring Pilip to catch up on Election Day.

About 8 inches of snowfall was reported in Glen Cove, Suozzi’s hometown, on the northern side of the district. In Massapequa, in the southeastern corner of the district, about 3 inches of snow fell, according to the National Weather Service.

Both campaigns rushed to offer voters rides to the ballot box through slick conditions.

Pete King, the Republican who represented a version of the district from 1993 to 2013, said in the afternoon he could not recall an election playing out in such difficult weather conditions.

“I don’t even recall a bad storm,” said King, an active Pilip supporter, adding that it was fair to assume that the snow “probably helped Democrats more than Republicans.”

But he added that snow had cleared, and that Republicans were optimistic, saying that turnout seemed roughly even between the parties, and that GOP polls have shown Pilip picking off more than 20% of district Democrats.

As of 6 p.m., about 20,000 people had cast ballots in the Queens section of the district, according to the city Board of Elections.

The chair of the state Democratic Party, Jay Jacobs, told reporters at Pilip’s election night party that Democrats were clearly outvoting Republicans in Queens, and that Democrats were within about 1,400 votes of Republicans in Nassau County. He said Democrats outvoted Republicans by about 12,000 in the district during the early voting period.

“I’m feeling good, but you don’t know what the outcome is going to be until you see how the voters actually vote,” Jacobs said. “Coming into Election Day, the concern was: Were we going to get swamped by a Republican vote? That didn’t happen.”

“That doesn’t mean that we know the outcome, because of course about 25% of the vote or so percent of the vote is unaffiliated,” added Jacobs, who is also the Nassau County Democratic chair. “How they vote is going to be determinative.”

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