‘We have a tent city around us.’
In November 2022, New York Republicans flipped a handful of historically blue congressional seats thanks to favorable redistricting and independent voters’ frustrations with crime. Roughly a year and a half later, Long Island Republicans are hoping that political blowback from another electoral wedge issue will help them win a February 13 special election for indicted former GOP Representative George Santos’s seat: New York City’s migrant crisis.
Immigration has taken center stage in the toss-up race for New York’s Third red-trending congressional district, which voted for Joe Biden by eight points in 2020 and includes chunks of Long Island and Queens.
“It’s for real,” Nassau County GOP chairman Joe Cairo said in an interview about voters’ concerns regarding immigration. More than 170,000 migrants have entered New York City since the spring of 2022 as of December, filling up migrant shelters, straining the city’s budget, and infuriating local residents. “They’ll physically shove people, they’ll hold people up for money, ask for money, solicit money. And if you don’t give it, what might the consequences be?”
It’s no wonder then that Republican candidate Mazi Melesa Pilip, a Nassau County legislator in the Long Island suburbs, has conducted press conferences in front of migrant shelters like the Creedmoor Psychiatric Center in Queens, where she introduces herself to prospective supporters as a “legal immigrant.”
“We have a tent city around us,” Pilip told National Review in an interview. “We need to secure the border as soon as possible.”
Republicans are betting that Pilip, an Ethiopian-Israeli immigrant and mother of seven who previously served in the Israeli Defense Forces, can keep the seat in GOP hands. But she faces a formidable challenge in former Democratic congressman Tom Suozzi, a former Nassau County executive who represented Santos’s congressional district for three terms before vacating his seat in 2022 to launch an unsuccessful bid for governor.
Both parties are spending millions in the district that is serving as a major bellwether for suburban voters ahead of what’s expected to be a highly competitive presidential election. A Democratic win there would shrink the House GOP’s fractious and already razor-thin majority.
Limited polling suggests the race could swing either way. A Newsday/Siena College likely survey conducted February 3-6 found Suozzi leading likely voters in the district over Pilip by just four points, tracking with an Emerson College poll released on Thursday that found the Democratic former congressman leading by a similarly narrow margin.
Suozzi is feeling the heat on immigration and has spent weeks portraying himself as hawkish on border security on the stump and in campaign ads. But even outside Democratic spending groups are struggling to push back against Republican attack ads that replay comments Suozzi made during a Democratic gubernatorial debate last cycle about U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, when he bragged that while serving as Nassau County Executive, “I kicked ICE from Nassau County.”
The former congressman says those comments are now being taken out of context and pertain to an incident that occurred nearly two decades ago when ICE agents improperly brandished their weapons against local Nassau County police officers and residents during an anti-gang operation. But even short, clipped campaign videos can do a lot of damage in contested political races.
As National Review reported earlier this month, Suozzi claimed on the campaign trail in January that he doesn’t know what the term “sanctuary city” means.
“Sanctuary cities is such a misnomer, okay, what does that mean?” Suozzi said during a January 17 membership meeting of the Plainview-Old Bethpage Chamber of Commerce. “Can you tell me what it means? Can anyone here tell me what that means? No, but it’s this thing that is thrown out there. It doesn’t mean anything. It’s such a misused terminology.”
Suozzi pushed back on criticisms of his record by labeling his Republican opponent as too unvetted, unprepared, and inexperienced for the job. “She has no solutions whatsoever,” Suozzi said on the debate stage last week when discussing Pilip’s positions on border security. “Just there’s a problem, there’s a problem. Oh, by the way, it’s a really big problem. That’s not enough. That’s not how you govern.”
Pilip’s low profile cuts both ways. While it’s true she has little experience in the national spotlight, her recent entrance into politics also means she doesn’t have the baggage that often comes with a congressional record, unlike Suozzi, who voted with Biden 100 percent of the time in the 117th Congress, according to FiveThirtyEight’s vote tracker.
Republicans are hoping Nassau County GOP’s organizational strength will pay major dividends for her in a district where Democrats outnumber Republicans.
“I would argue we are the strongest county committee probably anywhere in this country,” first-term Long Island-area Representative Anthony D’Esposito told National Review in the U.S. Capitol last week. “We have been able to win seats in towns and counties in Nassau County where Democrats outnumber Republicans by a pretty substantial margin.”
Beyond immigration, both candidates have spent the past few weeks talking about public safety and antisemitism. For Pilip, an Ethiopian-born Orthodox Jew whose family fled to Israel when she was only twelve years old, Hamas’ brutal attack on October 7 is deeply personal. Republicans say her story is resonating with the district’s high Jewish population, particularly in Great Neck. “I think the Jewish population is very motivated,” said Cairo, the Nassau County GOP chairman.
Abortion is another hot-button issue that Democrats are hoping will play to Suozzi’s benefit, particularly among independents and suburban women. Pilip has said that as a mother of seven, she personally opposes abortion. She also opposes a federal ban and has said repeatedly that she “would never impose my personal views on any woman.”
In an interview, she railed against Suozzi and outside Democratic spending groups for suggesting she sides with the wing of the GOP that wants to ban abortion with no exceptions for rape and incest.
“It doesn’t matter what I say,” Pilip told National Review. “They will do everything in their power — spend millions — just to show some point that does not even exist.”