Stay informed with free updates
Simply sign up to the US politics & policy myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.
Democrat Tom Suozzi has captured the congressional seat vacated by George Santos, further narrowing an already-thin Republican majority in the US House of Representatives.
Suozzi prevailed on Tuesday over Mazi Pilip, a little-known Orthodox Jewish candidate, in a race that featured tough talk from both candidates on immigration.
The special election was triggered after Santos, a fabulist caught in a series of lies and exaggerations, was expelled from Congress in December following his indictment on charges that he had defrauded his campaign donors.
Both parties poured huge resources into a contest that was seen as a barometer of attitudes about immigration and abortion in New York’s largely suburban third district that spans from the northern edge of Long Island into a section of Queens.
The contest occurred the same day that House Republicans managed, by a single vote, to impeach Alejandro Mayorkas, the homeland security secretary, for allegedly failing to enforce border laws.
Joe Biden won the district by 9 points over Donald Trump in 2020 — only for Santos, then a little-known Republican, to win it by 8 points in midterm elections two years later.
Suozzi, a centrist Democrat with a strong record of support for Israel, had held the seat before Santos but vacated it to mount an unsuccessful run for governor.
Pilip, by contrast, was a local county legislator who was little known on Long Island before entering the race. She ran largely on a biography that featured her immigration from Ethiopia to Israel, where she served in the army, and then the US.
She hammered Suozzi on immigration, an issue that has become visceral for New Yorkers since Texas began sending tens of thousands of migrants from the border north, straining the city’s budget and prompting dire warnings from its Democratic mayor, Eric Adams.
New York Republicans have made gains in recent years in areas such as Westchester and Long Island by playing up fears about crime and immigration. As Hank Sheinkopf, a Democratic strategist, put it: “The general sense that things are out of control. The sense that the city is seeping into the suburbs.”
In a preview of the coming presidential race, Republican campaign groups aired television advertisements accusing Suozzi of being soft on illegal immigration, and showing long lines of migrants inundating the country.
Suozzi countered by emphasising his own determination to harden the US’s southern border. In a rare move for a Democratic candidate, he also faulted Biden for not providing sufficient support to Adams and other mayors dealing with the migrant crisis.
Suozzi’s victory has shrunk the Republican margin in the House to just six seats.
