In New York Win, Democrats Sense a Pivot on Immigration and Border Politics

A victory in a New York special election on Tuesday injected Democrats with fresh optimism that the party might have found some of the basic ingredients to neutralize immigration and the border as political issues, which party officials have privately seen as among their deepest areas of vulnerability in 2024.

The success in the race for a House seat by former and now future Representative Tom Suozzi — a Democrat whom Republicans had pilloried as “Sanctuary Suozzi” — came in a corner of the country, Long Island, that had been increasingly hostile to Democrats in the last two years. And Mr. Suozzi won after he frontally and repeatedly addressed a topic that his party has sometimes tried to shy away from.

With border crossings surging to record highs in recent months and more than 170,000 migrants arriving in New York City, Republicans had hoped to use immigration to paint Mr. Suozzi as unacceptably beyond the mainstream. The leading G.O.P. super PAC spent roughly $3 million on two television ads that said Mr. Suozzi had “rolled out the red carpet for illegal immigrants.”

But in the final 10 days of the race, an analysis from AdImpact, the media-tracking firm, showed that Democrats were actually airing more ads than Republicans on immigration, with Mr. Suozzi’s campaign running clips of an appearance he once made on Fox News in which he was introduced as “one of the Democrats” backing I.C.E., the immigration enforcement agency.

Mr. Suozzi’s victory came only days after congressional Republicans had torpedoed bipartisan legislation on Capitol Hill that would have cracked down on unlawful migration across the border with Mexico. Donald J. Trump, the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination, had lobbied aggressively against the bill, insisting that its passage would help Democrats as he hoped to preserve the border crisis as a cudgel to hit President Biden with this fall.

That bipartisan deal’s failure did not feature prominently in advertising in this House race. But Mr. Suozzi did speak about it as he took some unusually hard-line stances for a Democrat, including calls to temporarily shut down the border and deport migrants who assault the police.

Other Democrats have sought distance from the White House on the issue, most notably New York City’s mayor, Eric Adams. Last fall, Gov. J.B. Pritzker of Illinois, a Democrat, whose state will host the Democratic National Convention this summer, wrote that the influx of migrants was becoming “untenable,” as Republican governors bused migrants to Democratic-run cities and states.

Democratic leaders on Wednesday said they believed that the Suozzi win on the heels of Republicans’ killing a bipartisan border-security package represented an important moment that signaled Republicans bear at least some of the blame for the troubles at the border.

“We have now made the border an issue where Democrats are on their front foot, whereas before all this happened, we were on our back foot,” Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the majority leader, said in an interview on Wednesday. “Trump almost handed us the issue on a silver platter when he said he didn’t want to do it for political purposes after saying the border is an emergency.”

Mr. Schumer called New York’s third congressional district, which covers parts of Queens and Nassau County, one of the 20 districts in the United States where border issues are most salient, making the loss more worrisome for the Republican Party.

It is not that most Democrats think the border is suddenly a winning issue for them so much as one that they could fight to more of a political draw, while winning over voters on topics like abortion.

“It has been turned from a negative issue to a positive issue,” Mr. Schumer said of the border issue for Democrats, adding, “Not totally positive, but overall positive.”

The House speaker, Mike Johnson, Republican of Louisiana, downplayed the significance of the special election, saying that Mr. Suozzi had “sounded like a Republican” on immigration and that his success was not repeatable.

“That is in no way a bellwether of what’s going to happen in the fall,” Mr. Johnson said in a news conference on Capitol Hill.

But, overall, Democrats were feeling bullish.

Senator Chris Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, had been his party’s lead negotiator on the collapsed border package. He wrote in a memo to his colleagues on Wednesday that the package’s demise presented Democrats “with a unique, unprecedented opening to go on the offensive on border security” and that the special election outcome was “proof” that the political climate was shifting.

“The politics of the border are changing before our eyes,” Mr. Murphy wrote.

Whatever the long-term lessons of the special election, the Democratic victory immediately narrowed the already tenuous Republican grip on the House, making governance harder in the coming months and the task of the party holding the chamber more challenging in the fall.

Once Mr. Suozzi is sworn in, Republicans will hold 219 seats, and Democrats will have 213.

Mr. Suozzi, however, had distanced himself from the White House at times in the race, questioning Mr. Biden as the party’s nominee in a television interview on the eve of the election when he said that “the bottom line is he’s old” and that he will “likely” support the president “if he ends up being the Democratic nominee.”

For his part, Mr. Trump blamed the Republican candidate on Long Island, Mazi Pilip, for not embracing him more fully, calling her “foolish” for trying to “straddle the fence.”

Special elections are often overinterpreted for their importance, and this particular election was especially, well, special.

The congressional opening came only because of the expulsion of a scandal-plagued Republican, former Representative George Santos, who had drawn national attention for his fabulist tales and eventually a federal indictment. Democrats had a ready-made recruit for the tight timeline of the special election in Mr. Suozzi, who represented the region for years before making an unsuccessful run for governor, and who had an established centrist reputation.

Democrats also outspent Republicans roughly two to one. The race was held in a district that Mr. Biden carried by about the same margin as Mr. Suozzi appeared on pace to win, though the region had drifted rightward since 2020.

“The result last night is not something in my view that Democrats should celebrate too much,” Mr. Johnson, the House speaker, said.

In a sign of the stakes of both the result and how it is interpreted politically, top officials in both parties wrote dueling memos on Wednesday framing how immigration had played out.

The National Republican Congressional Committee argued that their immigration advertising barrage had “moved numbers,” even in a loss, releasing some private survey data, including that 45 percent of voters in the committee’s final poll viewed immigration as the top issue.

“Imagine what we will do to any candidate without the institutional advantages Suozzi brought to the race,” the N.R.C.C.’s memo read.

The main Democratic super PAC involved in the race, the House Majority PAC, wrote in its own memo that about 20 percent of the group’s paid communications — television spots, mailers, digital ads — had mentioned immigration (abortion still appeared nearly twice as often). The memo likened the topic to the party’s vulnerability in 2022 on the economy and inflation, and argued that it was imperative for candidates to address those topics directly.

Democrats had sought to inoculate Mr. Suozzi on immigration from the very start, with the House Majority PAC running a digital ad in early January promoting Mr. Suozzi’s record on four issues that Republicans are typically more likely to focus on: border security, the migrant crisis, supporting the local police and crime rates.

“The messaging is on our turf — crime and border security!” wrote Parker Hamilton Poling, a veteran Republican strategist who has worked on House races, in January, “Uphill battle to convince swing voters that a Dem is going to be better on those issues.”

But Mr. Suozzi and his allies consistently addressed immigration, and party strategists called it a blueprint going forward.

On Wednesday, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee began a modest and symbolic online advertising campaign in Texas and Florida, where two Republican incumbents are up for re-election, saying that Republicans are the ones who “won’t secure the border” and won’t “crack down on fentanyl trafficking.”

J.B. Poersch, the president of the largest Democratic super PAC involved in Senate races, said on Wednesday in the aftermath of the special-election win that immigration would be an important part of the advertising strategy in the key battlegrounds this fall.

“Republicans made a fatal error by capitulating to Trump’s calculus that leveraging the border as a campaign issue is more important than solving the problem,” Mr. Poersch said. “Democrats can and will communicate their efforts to solve this crisis despite Republicans’ political cowardice.”