Democrats keep uneasy winning streak alive in 'warning sign' race for NY-3 Santos seat: ANALYSIS

It was the kind of race the party had no excuse to lose — and in the end, the Democrat won with relative comfort.

The win in the House seat in New York made famous for the duplicity of its ousted former representative reveals an under-the-radar truth: For all the worries of Democratic wipe-outs in the era of an unpopular and elderly president, the party seems to keep winning when voters actually vote.

It's an electoral winning streak that carried the party through the 2018 midterms, the 2020 general election, a 2022 cycle where losses were kept to a minimum and 2023 victories that extended into redder states like Ohio and Kentucky.

Also on Tuesday, Democrats kept control of the Pennsylvania House with a separate special-election victory. It adds evidence to a recent 538 analysis identifying a trend that could bode well for the party's prospects in 2024: Starting in 2023 and going into this week, Democrats overperformed district partisan makeups in US House and state legislative races by an average of seven points.

Yet those same truths that could easily lead the party into a misleading complacency. Democrat Tom Suozzi's win was more of a nail-biter than the eight-point victory would suggest, with Suozzi himself — a former three-term House member — raising alarms about his party's standing across the nation's suburbs.

«I think my whole campaign is a warning sign for Democrats,» Suozzi told ABC News' Brittany Shepherd in the days before Tuesday's special election.

Suozzi faced down a barrage of negative headlines that the rest of his party won't be able to evade this fall: chaos at the border, still-stubborn prices, rising crime, and — inevitably, if indirectly — concerns about the age and mental acuity of President Joe Biden.

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