In beating Republican challenger Mazi Pilip in Tuesday’s special election to replace disgraced ex-Rep. George Santos (R-N.Y.) Tom Suozzi did more for President Biden and Democrats than flip a critical seat and narrow Republicans’ advantage in the House.
Suozzi’s 8-point win, in a swing district no less, provided crucial lessons for President Biden on how to win in areas where voters remain deeply skeptical of him — and the Democratic Party’s leftward shift — although it is doubtful Biden will heed them.
Competing for a district where Republicans have dominated in recent years, Suozzi moved to the center, preached bipartisan solutions and challenged his opponent on issues Republicans have historically used to their advantage: immigration and crime.
Or, as Speaker of the House Mike Johnson put it while trying to downplay his party’s loss, on the border, Suozzi “sounded like a Republican.”
Not only did Suozzi move towards the center on those key issues and embrace bipartisanship while Pilip criticized it, Suozzi took the progressive wing of his party to task for their unpopular ideas on the border and crime, publicly accusing the “progressive left wing of the Democratic Party” of “hurting Democrats throughout the country” with their approach to crime.
Specifically on immigration — which has become a substantial political vulnerability for Biden and Democrats — Suozzi preempted any attempts to link him to the left flank of the Democratic Party by calling on Biden to shut down the border and even pushing for the deportation of migrants who assaulted NYPD officers.
In some ways, Suozzi took a page from an argument I have previously made, as recently as one week ago. In that column, my coauthor, Andrew Stein, and I noted that Biden had failed Democratic mayors and governors with his progressive-driven approach to immigration and called on the president to reverse course with a more centrist approach, lest Biden and Democrats suffer at the ballot box.
Specifically, we called on Biden to take action to freeze immigration at the southern border, tighten asylum rules, cap the number of border crossings and end “sanctuary city” laws, which have saddled cities like New York with unmanageable burdens on local finances and law enforcement, and which prevent local law enforcement from working with federal agencies to deport migrants who commit crimes such as opening fire and shooting at NYPD officers.
While Suozzi may not have completely adopted this approach, he went further than most Democrats. By simply referring to the current surge of illegal migrants as an “invasion,” and emphasizing that House Republicans killed the bipartisan border bill by putting politics over what is good for the country, Suozzi distanced himself from progressives and flipped the tables on Republicans who have long been successful at weaponizing the issue against Democrats.
Indeed, a considerable plurality (41 percent) of Americans trust Republicans, rather than Democrats, to handle the issue of immigration, while less than 3 in 10 (29 percent) Americans trust Democrats, per NBC/Marist polling.
However, by tacking to the right on immigration and crime and shunning progressive dogma, Suozzi was able to win back independents in his district, who all but abandoned Democrats in 2022 over the party’s refusal to even address immigration as a problem, leading to Santos’s 8 point win just 15 months ago.
Recognizing Suozzi’s successful strategy, Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) described Suozzi’s win as solid proof that Democrats can win on immigration, saying, “The politics of the border are changing before our eyes.”
What Murphy didn’t say was that the politics will only change in Democrats' favor if they distance themselves from the progressives’ open border and soft-on-crime policies in favor of commonsense approaches that prioritize border security, a pathway to citizenship for migrants already here and cracking down on the epidemic of violent crime which has plagued cities across the country.
Put another way, whether or not Murphy is correct largely depends on whether Biden and, to some extent, other Democrats replicate Suozzi’s strategy of pushing back hard against perceptions that all Democrats are open-border advocates who put social justice concerns over voters’ real and legitimate worries about public safety, crime and uncontrolled immigration.
The problem for Biden and Democrats is that it remains highly unlikely that the president, or his campaign team, will heed the lessons of Suozzi’s campaign, namely that the country has little appetite for far-left approaches to crime and immigration, but will enthusiastically back moderate, real solutions, whichever candidate proposes them.
Far too often, Biden has shown himself to be a victim of the far-left flank of his party. For example, when polls showed progressives turning on Biden over his initial support for Israel’s war against Hamas, Biden took a hard left turn, even dispatching an aide to tell Arab-Americans in Michigan that the administration regretted its “missteps” in initially offering Israel its full support.
In that same vein, Biden has been pulled left even when it would alienate voters he should have been trying to win over. His fight to cancel billions of dollars in student loan debt following progressive pressure was sure to anger working-class Americans who have no student loans and rightfully ask why they are bailing out people who knowingly took on tens of thousands in debt.
Even as deep-blue areas like New York City and Illinois have been overwhelmed by migrants and have increasingly criticized the administration, Biden has refused to go further than supporting the bipartisan Senate bill, and progressives even slammed him for that.
All of this is to say that if history is any guide, Biden will likely ignore any lessons from Suozzi’s campaign, namely the lesson that shifting to the center on quality of life issues is a winning strategy.
Of course, what Biden should do, if he wants to avoid following progressives down a losing path is learn the lessons of Suozzi’s campaign: Close the border immediately, tighten up the asylum process, enforce Title 42, end sanctuary cities, take a tougher stance on crime — including pushing cities to scrap cashless bail — and do everything possible to avoid left-wing tax-and-spend policies which will only increase the financial burdens Americans are facing.
To be clear, this is not to say Biden would have an easy reelection campaign even if he shunned progressives immediately, there are other legitimate concerns on voters’ minds, chiefly inflation, the economy, and Biden’s mental fitness. Additionally, Suozzi benefitted from name recognition in the district versus a relative unknown.
However, it cannot be ignored that Suozzi rode a moderate, commonsense approach to the border and crime to a landslide victory in a contested district. For Biden, who must win roughly half a dozen contested states, there are lessons to be learned, if only the president chooses to listen.
Douglas E. Schoen is a political consultant who served as an adviser to President Clinton and to the 2020 presidential campaign of Michael Bloomberg. His new book is “The End of Democracy? Russia and China on the Rise and America in Retreat.”
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