Democrats should be riding high after two impressive special election victories this week with promising implications for November. Veteran Democratic lawmaker Tom Suozzi won back his old job representing New York’s 3rd Congressional District, flipping the seat vacated by disgraced Republican Rep. George Santos and engineering a nearly 16-point net turnaround in the district from the 2022 midterm.
And in a Pennsylvania blowout, Democrat Jim Prokopiak won battleground state House District-140 in Bucks County, a critical suburban swing district, by a whopping 35 points, 68% – 32%.
Both of these decisive wins hold valuable lessons for Democrats as we look toward November. Here are five takeaways to keep in mind.
1. The issue of reproductive freedom remains ascendant.
Suozzi bet big on abortion and it paid off. The chief Democratic pollster for the race, Mike Bocian, told The New Republic’s Greg Sargent their polling showed 72% of the district’s voters were pro-choice. But because pro-choice voters in blue states such as New York and California didn’t prove to be as motivated by abortion rights in the midterms as many swing-state voters were, Suozzi’s campaign put a spotlight on the Republican push for a national abortion ban.
“Part of what we did was elevated the risk of a national abortion ban,” Bocian said, adding that the campaign invested heavily in direct mail, digital, and TV advertising.
But importantly, Team Suozzi didn’t elevate abortion to the exclusion of meeting immigration head on.
“We did it without losing the issue of immigration and the migrant crisis, which voters were clamoring for candidates to talk about,” said Bocian.
2. Immigration can be turned into a liability for Republicans if Democrats don’t run from it.
New York City has experienced an influx of some 175,000 migrants from the Southern border, which could have been a drag on a Democratic candidate running in Long Island.
Suozzi’s opponent, Nassau County lawmaker Mazi Pilip, seized on the issue, hammering him with racist anti-immigrant advertising that dubbed him “Sanctuary Suozzi” and an “open-border radical.”
But Suozzi faced the issue head-on, calling for a border shutdown and the immediate deportation of migrants who assaulted two police officers in a high-profile incident in Times Square. At the same time, Suozzi advocated for providing law-abiding immigrants with a path to citizenship and emphasized his willingness to work across the aisle to tackle the issue. The fact that congressional Republicans killed a conservative bipartisan border deal so they could continue to fearmonger on the issue played right into Suozzi’s hand.
Suozzi also invested considerable time and energy into meeting with immigrant communities in the district, with AAPI voters chief among them.
“Asian Americans made up about 18 to 20% of the electorate in Tom’s district, so he went to multiple dim sum events, Korean fried chicken events, visiting South Asian business owners, and houses of worship,” Rep. Grace Meng, from the neighboring NY-06 district, told MSNBC’s Chris Hayes. “He really met people where they were and he talked to them about immigration, he talked to them about being willing to govern and being willing to reach across the aisle to fix things, to get the job done.”
Suozzi’s decisive 8-point win suggests that he not only fought Pilip to a draw on immigration, but won the issue outright.
3. Democrats’ landslide win in lower Bucks County builds on a trend.
Prokopiak, a lawyer and Pennsbury School District board member, campaigned on a combination of lowering the cost of living, funding education, and protecting abortion access to secure state House District-140 and maintain Democrats’ one-seat majority in Pennsylvania’s lower chamber.
In a preelection call with reporters last week, Prokopiak repeatedly emphasized increased funding for education and vocational training, and raising the minimum wage—an initiative being blocked by the Republican-controlled state Senate.
Prokopiak said that when he knocked on doors, voters’ chief concerns were financial security and providing economic opportunities for their children. But as a parent of two girls, Prokopiak pointed out that his Republican opponent, Candace Cabanas, would be a lock to help House Republicans enact a statewide abortion ban.
“It’s a guarantee my opponent would be the deciding vote to pass an abortion ban here in Pennsylvania,” he said during the call, promising to push a “pro-worker, pro-family, pro-woman, pro-education agenda.”
Prokopiak’s win was just the latest for Pennsylvania Democrats in a series of high-stakes contests that could have flipped the state House red.
“Last night’s victory marks the sixth special election victory that has helped Democrats protect our majority since flipping the House chamber in 2022,” the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee wrote in a post-election press release.
The DLCC also celebrated a special election loss in Oklahoma House District 39, where Democrat Regan Raff fell just 5 points short of a major upset in a district Donald Trump won by 18 points in 2020. “The election has already ‘raised alarm bells‘ for the GOP,” wrote the DLCC.
But Raff wasn’t Democrats’ only over-performer—Prokopiak out-performed Biden’s 10-point margin in 2020 by 25 points.
4. The horse race polls are still wonky.
Pollsters predicted a far more competitive race in NY-03, with none of them giving Suozzi more than a 4-point advantage over Pilip.
“As was the case in 2022, the polls had a pro-GOP bias,” wrote data analyst Tom Bonier, CEO of The Tara Group. “While I’m not of the opinion that polling is broken, doing it right is harder than ever.”
Predicting turnout in these ahistoric times is a difficult task in any special election and, presumably, weighting properly for the presidential contest should be at least marginally easier. Even so, all horse race polling should be taken with a grain of salt, particularly in an unprecedented presidential cycle featuring two “incumbent” candidates with dismal favorability ratings, a slew of third-party spoilers, and an electorate that doesn’t like its options.
Some combination of issue polling, focus groups, special elections, and the generic ballot are likely better measures of the political climate heading into November.
The bottom line is: We are living in an era without historical precedent and, as demonstrated by the media’s “red wave” scare in 2022, there’s no silver bullet to predicting the outcome because we’ve never been here before.
5. Republican missteps are Democrats’ best friend.
Suozzi had an already established strategy for neutralizing his GOP rival on immigration, but House Republicans supercharged his solutions-first argument when they killed the high-profile bipartisan border deal at Donald Trump’s behest.
Democrats also have Republicans dead to rights on abortion. In Pennsylvania, Democrats have made staving off a statewide abortion ban central to each of their successive special election wins in the state House.
But even in reliably liberal New York, where some residents feel less urgency about safeguarding abortion rights, Suozzi successfully elevated the specter of a national abortion ban in a district where 7 in 10 residents are pro-choice.
Meanwhile, Trump has consistently bragged about killing Roe v. Wade, an issue the Biden-Harris campaign has already seized on.
Slowly but surely, Republicans are bungling the issues they want to run on, giving Democrats multiple attack avenues to exploit depending on their district. But Republicans aren’t just substantively challenged: They are also tactically challenged after convincing their base that early voting is evil.
As heavy snow threatened to torpedo turnout in the NY-03 race, the GOP’s Congressional Leadership Fund super PAC actually hired snow plows to help clear the streets so that Republican day-of voters could make it to the polls.
Whatever impact the snowstorm may have had, a few snow plows weren’t going to erase Pilip’s 8-point deficit. But Republicans must feel pretty giddy about having to triage Election Day turnout in order to salvage their chances in a district they still lost by 8 points.
Republicans demanded border security, worked on a compromise deal with Democrats, and now want to blow the whole thing up. Biden is promising to remind Americans every day that the Republican Party is at fault for the lack of solutions to the problems they claim are most important.
