New York Democrats are worried about Tuesday’s special election. They have good reason to be

Plainview, New York CNN —

How bad were the 2022 midterm elections for Democrats in New York? One way to explain it: Republican George Santos’ victory in the state’s 3rd Congressional District might have been the highlight of their year.

Santos’ troubles began in earnest six weeks after his surprising win, and after a year of scandal and outrage that sullied and undermined leading local Republicans, he was gone – one of only six members to have been bounced from the House and only the third since the Civil War – and the seat was open. Democrats would get another bite at the apple.

But as the special election to succeed the disgraced former congressman has made painfully clear to Democrats, Santos’ victory was not a fluke or anomaly. What had been a safely blue suburban Long Island seat for most of the past three decades is, once again, shaping up to be a political battleground.

Days out now from Tuesday’s expensive and fiercely contested matchup between Democrat Tom Suozzi, 61, a former House member and a staple of Nassau County politics since first being elected mayor of Glen Cove in 1993, against little-known Mazi Pilip, a 44-year-old Ethiopian-born, Israeli American county legislator, the race is widely considered a toss-up. Suozzi’s brand is still strong; he ran the county during some of its best economic times, before his first election to Congress in 2016. But Pilip, though her ideological bearings remain fuzzy and she has been at times hard to find on the campaign trail, has the prevailing political winds at her back – and the opportunity to both put a stamp on the GOP’s restored primacy on Long Island and emerge as an up-and-coming national figure ahead of the fall’s general election.

Ten or 15 years ago,