Earlier this month, Republican Speaker of the House Mike Johnson spoke on the Fox Business channel about Mazi Pilip, the party’s nominee to replace George Santos in New York’s 3rd Congressional District.

“She’s gonna get that job done,” he said, predicting a victory that would reverberate across the country. “It’ll send a strong message to the Democrats that, coming into this election cycle, we have great candidates. We’re feeling really bullish about the future.”

Two weeks later, Pilip lost her race to Democrat Tom Suozzi by a nearly 8-point margin. Johnson, speaking at the Capitol on Wednesday, now expressed a different view about whether the race had national implications.

Pilip’s loss “is in no way a bellwether of what’s going to happen this fall,” he said, and “has nothing to do on the efforts going forward.” Johnson argued that the race’s dynamics wouldn’t pertain to other swing-district elections because Democrats spent so heavily on advertising and ran a candidate who agreed with Republicans that the influx of migrants at the southern border constitutes a national crisis.

“They spent about $15 million to win a seat that President Biden won by 8 points; they won it by less than 8 points,” he said. (Technically correct: It was 7.8 points.) “Their candidate ran like a Republican—he sounded like a Republican, talking about border........

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