The race to succeed George Santos in Congress has put the national spotlight on his former Long Island district, a suburban battleground where both parties will get a chance to test their messages, fundraising and organizing prowess ahead of the 2024 elections.
As I reported last week in The Wall Street Journal with Katy Stech Ferek, the Feb. 13 matchup will mark the first prominent clash between the parties in 2024, offering a test of their strength before the November elections. The race also could impact the short-term functioning of the House, where the GOP holds a tenuous 221-213 majority, and can lose no more than three votes if all Democrats are opposed.
“This will have more energy and more attention than most because of the razor-thin majority,” said Steve Israel, a Democrat who represented the New York City-area district from 2001 to 2017 and spent four years running his party’s campaign arm in Washington.
The contest: Republican nominee Mazi Melesa Pilip, a former member of the Israel Defense Forces, versus Democrat Tom Suozzi, a former Nassau County executive who previously represented the area in the House.
Pilip was born in Ethiopia but immigrated to Israel as part of Operation Solomon, an airlift to rescue Jews. She was educated in Israel and moved to Long Island in 2009. She has seven children and was an active volunteer at her synagogue before she ran for the Nassau County Legislature in 2021. She is a registered Democrat who flipped a seat in Democratic territory with GOP support.
In Suozzi, Democrats tapped a known quantity. The son of a state judge who emigrated from Italy, Suozzi was elected as a small-city mayor at age 28. He served two terms as Nassau County executive, losing unexpectedly to Republicans in 2009. He has twice run for governor—including an unsuccessful primary challenge to Gov. Kathy Hochul last year that created an open seat in the House, which Santos won by eight points.
That’s February. There will be even more drama regarding New York’s congressional races in November after the state’s top court ordered a commission to draw new congressional district boundaries ahead of the 2024 elections.
(I know, I know. Redistricting. Again. I’m sorry, I thought I was done writing about it for the decade. Alas. Read my latest article here and while you’re at it eat your broccoli.)
This ruling delivers a potential boost to Democrats and throws out district maps drawn for 2022 that Republicans sought to keep in place. Both parties were already girding for several contested seats in New York, where five districts had been rated as tossups by the nonpartisan Cook Political Report.
This is the latest twist in a legal saga that has lasted more than a year and resulted in a set of district lines that were drawn by a special master last May. The Court of Appeals ruled in April 2022 that lines drawn by state legislators—after the bipartisan Independent Redistricting Commission deadlocked—violated an anti-gerrymandering provision in the state constitution.
The ruling directs the IRC to develop a new map “on the earliest possible date, but in no event later than February 28, 2024.”
UPDATE: My old friend Matt Friedman, who writes the Politico Playbook covering New Jersey, reports that the proposed casino smoking ban that I wrote about recently is “all but dead for the lame-duck session.”
Advocates for the measure blamed a local Republican senator who they thought was in their corner, but who now is working on a compromise measure with amendments favored by casino owners.
A final protest: lighting up during a committee hearing when the bill again failed to advance. “You can smoke in our workplace, right? But here it’s not appropriate,” said Daniel Vicente, regional director of UAW which represents dealers.
THE QUESTION: What are your favorite holiday traditions?
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THE LAST ANSWER: The largest states where non-compete clauses are banned is California.