Now that Taylor Swift has single-handedly delivered a House election to the Democrats, George Santos is congratulating himself for writing all her songs.
But seriously, folks.
Democrat Tom Suozzi’s decisive special election victory in New York’s third congressional district (part of Queens and Nassau County) is proof – yet again – that moronic MAGA is on thin ice. Less than two years ago, voters in this Republican-trending district propelled fraudster Santos to an eight-point win; last night, with the seat vacant and Santos gone, Suozzi posted an eight-point win. That’s quite a big swing in sentiment. I wonder why that happened…
(1) Top Trump toadies, Speaker Mike “Moses” Johnson and Elise Stefanik, stumped in person with Republican candidate Mazi Pilip. (2) Pilip said in an election eve interview that in 2020 she’d voted for Trump. (3) Suozzi touted abortion rights, Pilip did not. (4) Suozzi repeatedly lambasted Johnson’s House Republicans for burying the tough-on-migrants border bill – the bill that Trump has commanded them to bury because he thinks border chaos will help him in November.
Ah. There you have it.
Flipping this House seat from red to blue has put the screws to Johnson. His Republican majority is now thinner than a shred of dental floss; on any piece of legislation, he can afford to lose only two GOP votes. But let’s focus on the big picture: The MAGA brand continues to be toxic at the ballot box.
Thanks to Trump’s dead weight, Democrats took the House in the 2018 midterms. Democrats took the White House and Senate in 2020. Democrats boosted their Senate majority in 2022. Pundits predicted that “red wave” would power Republicans to a massive House majority in 2022, but when the dust cleared, they barely won the chamber. Meanwhile, in special elections big and small, in House and state legislative contests, Democrats have won (including a Pennsylvania House race last night); and in races and referenda where abortion rights were highlighted, Democrats have cleaned up – in red Ohio, red Kentucky, red Kansas, in swing Wisconsin, and last fall in Virginia, where the Republican governor campaigned for abortion curbs and lost both state legislative chambers. (Credit Trump with those debacles, thanks to the erasure of Roe v. Wade. Which he cointinues to brag about.)
And last night’s New York tally – which should terrify the six NY Republican congressmen who sit in districts that went blue in the ’20 presidential election – is further proof that Trump is wreaking havoc inside his cult. Democrat Suozzi correctly calculated that voters are fed up with the MAGA doctrine of dysfunction. Mike Johnson’s decision to tank the Senate’s bipartisan border bill, at Trump’s behest, gifted Suozzi with a golden opportunity to say, in essence, “I too want to be tough on the border, there’s bipartisan support for being tough on the border, but these House Republicans refuse to govern.” That message resonated with the Nassau County college-educated voters, who pay attention to what’s actually going on in Washington because they have brains in their heads.
Stuart Stevens, a veteran GOP strategist who’s in touch with reality, tweeted today: “Republicans who are asking why they keep losing elections are like the guy who walks into the ER with a nail in his head, asking why he has a headache. A party led by a rapist that believes it can fix its problem with women by attacking Taylor Swift, with weird little creeps like Mike Johnson as a public face in Congress…Is there really any question why this party is losing?”
And has Donald Trump learned anything from his latest humiliation? As if.
As soon as he learned that Mazi Pilip was soundly beaten, he attacked her. On social media he called her “this very foolish woman” – woman, of course, being one of his favorite pejoratives. He said that she lost because she hadn’t been sufficiently MAGA and sufficiently adoring of him (this quote is real: “I WANT TO BE LOVED!”).
It’s a long road to November, but my advice to Trump is simple: You do you.