Tom Suozzi Ran On Border Enforcement. But That’s Only One Part Of The Story.

Much of the coverage of Democratic Rep.-elect Tom Suozzi’s victory in a special election on Tuesday has focused on the way it might serve as a model for how Democrats ― including President Joe Biden ― can run on immigration.

But some of the post-game analyses have flattened out Suozzi’s positioning, highlighting his support for a tough border bill killed by Republicans in the lead-up to the election and ignoring the nuances of his campaign.

In fact, Suozzi and his allies invested significant resources in outreach to both Asian and Muslim immigrant communities. And the moderate Democrat, who previously represented the district from 2017 to 2023, paired his calls for tougher border enforcement with support for a pathway to citizenship for Dreamers and recipients of temporary protected status.

“I’ll work across the aisle to do what our leaders haven’t ― secure our border. Close the routes used for illegal immigration, but open paths to citizenship for those willing to follow the rules, and pay a fee to help finance it all,” Suozzi said in one of two immigration-focused TV ads.

Sure enough, the business-friendly New Democrat Coalition, which backed Suozzi and has invited him to rejoin them upon his return to the House, released an immigration policy framework on Thursday that combines tougher enforcement with citizenship pathways for Dreamers and TPS recipients.

The pundit class also missed something about Suozzi’s Republican opponent, Nassau County Legislator Mazi Melesa Pilip. For all the gripes about her right-wing positions alienating swing voters, she apparently had the greatest difficulty turning out the Republican base ― and her identity as a woman of color probably had something to do with it.

One in four residents of New York’s 3rd District is Asian American. Those residents are themselves deeply diverse: Chinese Americans, Korean Americans, Indian Americans, Pakistani Americans and Bangladeshi Americans all call the district home.

For a long time, many Democrats took Asian American voters for granted, committing only limited resources to reaching out to them.

Suozzi and his allies, however, left no stone unturned in courting Asian American voters.

“The Democrats finally woke up and figured it out,” said Larry Levy, executive dean of the National Center for Suburban Studies at Hofstra University. “They couldn’t ignore Asians and just assume that every time [former President Donald] Trump dissed Asians, they would show up for Democrats.”

Together with neighboring Rep. Grace Meng (D), New York City’s only Asian American member of Congress, Suozzi laid out a multi-pronged plan early on to both consolidate support among East and South Asian voters and turn them out to vote for him when the time came. The campaign hired a dedicated Asian American and Pacific Islander outreach director. It printed campaign materials in multiple Asian languages. Suozzi gave regular interviews to the district’s dozen-plus Asian-focused media outlets.

And Suozzi showed up ― attending numerous Lunar New Year events, and occasionally trying his hand at a Mandarin turn of phrase. The Mandarin-language news outlet SinovisionNet did a full news segment on Suozzi’s late-January visit to a Bayside dim sum spot, where he declared his shrimp dumpling to be haoshi ― a good thing.

“A lot of these new voters liked how direct he was. He acknowledges how things are bad or good,” Meng said. “They felt that he was very practical.”

In particular, Suozzi’s massive margin of victory in the Queens section of the district, which contains 20% of the district’s voters, suggests his entreaties to East Asian American voters made a big difference. Suozzi carried the Queens part of the district by more than 20 percentage points, compared with his Democratic predecessor Robert Zimmerman’s 4-point edge in that more Democratic part of the district in 2022. Zimmerman’s failure to run up the score in Queens contributed to his 8-point loss to the now-expelled former Rep. George Santos (R-N.Y.).

Suozzi’s strong showing in the district’s Queens region also cuts against recent GOP successes in New York City’s densest East Asian enclaves. Bayside, for example, which is home to many Korean American and Chinese American voters in New York’s 3rd, was among the areas that shifted significantly to the right in 2022.

The burning issues pushing East Asian voters rightward ― violent crime and threats to the city’s selective magnet schools ― were not as salient this year. And Suozzi, a moderate who challenged New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) from the right in 2022, was not one of the progressives whose views on educational equity and criminal justice reform had turned Asian American voters away from the Democratic Party.

“A lot of voters knew Tom already and the stances that he’s taken,” Meng said.

When Suozzi thanked various constituencies in his district during his victory speech Tuesday night, he got granular with different Asian nationalities ― acknowledging his support from the Chinese American, Korean American and Indian American communities.

Then he turned to the Pakistani and Bangladeshi American communities ― and the Muslim community writ large, which, in his district, is more or less synonymous with those two groups.

“I want to thank the Pakistanis and Bangladeshis who stuck with me in this race despite how difficult it was throughout this process,” Suozzi said, eliciting cheers from the crowd. “And the Muslim community that stuck with me in this race! And it wasn’t easy.”

Suozzi was alluding to the coolness of many Muslim voters toward the Democratic Party because of Biden’s staunch support for Israel’s war with Hamas in Gaza, which has resulted in the deaths of more than 30,000 Palestinians, most of them women and children. Suozzi knows whereof he speaks: Pro-Palestine protesters interrupted his victory speech more than once before they were quickly removed.

In truth, there is not much daylight, if any, between Suozzi and Biden on U.S. policy toward Israel and Palestine. But Suozzi, who previously represented a district with roughly the same boundaries and was Nassau County executive before that, has relationships with Muslim leaders and a history of delivering for the community on constituent matters.

In the special election, his campaign had a dedicated Muslim outreach coordinator who identified a universe of 18,000 Muslim voters in the district using an algorithmic analysis of last names. The coordinator recruited a team of 300 volunteers within the community to knock doors and make phone calls to those voters.

Those volunteers’ message: Pilip would simply offer a redux of Santos’ amateurish and irresponsible governance. Convincing Muslim voters that Suozzi would be marginally better than Pilip on Israel-Palestine was made easier by Pilip’s service in the Israel Defense Forces, and her harsher tone when discussing Palestinians.

“Tom Suozzi was advocating for a two-state solution. He wants peace in the Middle East,” said Imran Pasha, an Indian American software engineer from Levittown who was among the 30 most active volunteers of the Muslim outreach effort. “I didn’t hear that from Mazi.”

Pilip did not completely ignore the Muslim community, meeting with the American Pakistani Public Affairs Committee, which declined to endorse a candidate in the race. And there are a number of prominent Muslims in Nassau County’s Republican government, including Chaudhry Akram, a top adviser to county Executive Bruce Blakeman. But Pilip lacked Suozzi’s level of grassroots support.

The Suozzi campaign’s Muslim outreach efforts also got a boost from the AAPI Victory Fund. The liberal Asian American super PAC mounted a low-cost, high-value campaign of advertising, direct mailers and robocalls targeted exclusively at South Asian and Arab American voters.

The group’s mailers in Hindi, Urdu, and Arabic tied Pilip to Santos and Trump. One particular item, written in English, Arabic and Urdu to target the district’s Arab American and Pakistani American communities, referenced Trump’s travel ban on majority-Muslim countries and threats of a Muslim registry, alongside Pilip’s words praising the former president. Another mailer, in the same three languages, quoted Pilip’s comments to an Israeli newspaper: “I know there will be a handful of Muslims who won’t like seeing [me] running for Congress, it will deter them.”

“With how extreme the Republicans are talking about the Middle East conflict, the Israel-Hamas conflict, doing negative [advertising] on Republican candidates works with Arab and Muslim voters,” said Trip Yang, the Democratic strategist who ran AAPI Victory Fund’s initiative in the special election. “You don’t necessarily need a Democrat calling for a cease-fire, but you do need to do negative on the Republican.”

At the same time, Suozzi’s refusal to countenance stricter conditions on U.S. aid to Israel, and his decision to visit the Jewish state during his campaign, kept him in the good graces of major pro-Israel groups, and likely limited the attrition of non-Orthodox Jews who had the option of voting for a Jewish candidate. Democratic Majority for Israel, a major pro-Israel super PAC that has defeated a number of left-wing Israel critics, spent a relatively modest sum boosting Suozzi in local Jewish community news outlets, and touted his victory as proof that “being pro-Israel is not only wise policy but also winning politics.”

When Nassau County Republican Party Chairman Joe Cairo picked Pilip, a Nassau County legislator who’d flipped a Democrat-held seat, as the GOP nominee for New York’s 3rd in mid-December, it seemed like a stroke of genius.

How would Democrats run against a Black Jewish woman ― Pilip is an Ethiopian-born Israeli immigrant ― much less one who promised to oppose a “national abortion ban”?

But after Pilip lost to Suozzi by 8 percentage points, far more than both public and internal polls had predicted, a Long Island Republican strategist now wonders whether Pilip was the “right fit for the district.”

The GOP strategist’s reservations are not exactly the same as those of Pilip’s moderate and liberal critics who fault her for failing to clarify the full spectrum of her views on abortion policy, gun control and immigration.

Instead, the strategist, who requested anonymity so as not to jeopardize professional relationships, argued that Pilip, a registered Democrat, failed to elicit enough turnout from the Republican base in strongholds like Massapequa, Farmingdale and Levittown. While Pilip took heat from Democrats for warming to Trump toward the end of the race, she initially refused to say whom she voted for in 2020, and ruled out supporting Trump if he were convicted of a crime (a stance she later reversed).

“Her position on President Trump probably hurt her,” the Nassau GOP strategist said.

Asked whether Pilip’s identity as a Black woman with a thick foreign accent hurt her ― particularly in contrast to an Italian American member of local political royalty ― the GOP strategist was diplomatic.

“I would say identity politics definitely played a role in the usually Republican parts of this district,” the strategist said.

Pilip’s quandary speaks to the challenges of getting support from a Republican base that is less flexible than its Democratic counterpart. Suozzi was comfortable distancing himself from Biden ― and Democrats still showed up to vote for him.

“I would like the president to do a better job regarding immigration,” Suozzi told CNN in a Feb. 4 segment.

And while Suozzi said in that interview that he approved of “a lot of things” Biden has done, he blanched when asked whether he would welcome Biden to campaign for him.

“I can pretty much guarantee that the president is not going to be coming here,” he said.