The election of Congressman George Santos' replacement in New York measures the political temperature ahead of November

New York holds partial elections this Tuesday that will serve as a political thermometer heading into November.

The vote to elect the replacement for Republican George Santos, expelled from the House of Representatives for twenty crimes, including fraud, falsehood and impersonation, is head or tail, between an establishment Democrat

Tom Suozzi, and a newly minted Republican, still registered as a Democrat, Israeli Army veteran Mazi Pilip.

Whatever the result, it will influence the precarious balance of forces in the House, where the Republicans today lead the Democrats by seven seats (219 to 212).

Tied in the polls, the heavy snowfall that fell on New York this Tuesday, the heaviest in two years, will also have consequences on attendance at the polls.

The victory of the fabler Santos in the midterm elections contributed to breaking the Democratic hegemony of New York and, therefore, to granting his party control of the House.

New York had always been a blue state, the color with which Democrats are identified, until a redesign of the electoral map ordered by a judge and the undermining work of Republicans in the suburbs jeopardized that dominance.

The seat that Suozzi and Pilip are competing for corresponds to Orange County and a part of Queens, where the mayor of New York, Democrat Eric Adams, has installed a macro shelter for immigrants.

The immigration crisis that the city is experiencing has given wings to the republican discourse.

Suozzi is a moderate Democrat, well known in Washington: he has been a congressman for three terms.

Pilip, on the other hand, is almost unknown to the average voter.

She was born in Ethiopia and served in the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) before emigrating to the United States. Mother of seven children, anti-abortion, recent supporter of Trump, the candidate has made the immigration issue her main focus. battle, exaggerating the supposed citizen insecurity that Republicans - and some Democrats - link to the presence of foreigners in the Big Apple.

Both parties are closely monitoring the race to find out what issues and messages have the most traction heading into November.

So far, especially regarding the immigration issue, the Republicans are dragging the Democrats along in their doomsday discourse: Queens voters say they feel the pressure of the arrival of foreigners.

Mayor Adams, furthermore, does not stop complaining and last week the head of the Police Department stated that a “wave of migrant crime” had “devastated” the city.

Republicans have spent millions of dollars on ads to blame the

on President Joe Biden and Suozzi, one of his loyalists.

Suozzi, a moderate prone to consensus, and Pilip, who on Saturday skipped a rally he was supposed to be participating in to observe the Sabbath, clash on everything: on the immigration issue, on abortion (the Democrat has said that he will fight to reconsecrate the abortion as a federal right after the Supreme Court's revocation of the

doctrine , while the Republican has spoken ambiguously), on the right to bear arms (the Democrat supports the ban on assault weapons, his rival stands Profile).

On a scale reduced to the constituency that elects them, their contest raises the existential debate that underlies the November elections: two antagonistic visions of the United States. Pilip's defense of Trump's attempts to reverse the result of the November elections 2020 sets the dividing line between both visions: it affirms that it did not commit any crime when it tried to annul the elections that gave victory to Democrat Biden.

Newbie Pilip enthusiastically supported the fallacious Santos when he was presented in 2022, although she later distanced herself as all her lies were revealed.

She now intends, she has explained, to “restore the integrity of the district” that he aspires to represent.

Not even the political embarrassment derived from the

has discouraged the Republicans, who after decades in decline are regaining traction in Long Island, a prototypical suburb that proves the demographic and electoral importance of the so-called suburbs in the United States. And they do so by resurrecting their machinery. old school (mailboxing, door-to-door campaign) and on par with new tools, such as disinformation.

Proof of the latter was the embarrassing spectacle that populist Curtis Sliwa gave a week ago in Times Square, the city's kilometer zero, stoking the “immigration threat” by accusing, without evidence, a passerby with Latino features who passed behind him. him while he was being interviewed live on Fox. The passer-by was a New Yorker from the Bronx, but Sliwa, a residual Republican who once created an urban surveillance patrol, in the style of street justice, called Guardian Angels, called him an immigrant and a thief.

None of the things were true, but the accused was attacked by Sliwa's henchmen before television cameras, in an incident that went viral.

Sliwa is not competing now (he did do so as a candidate for mayor of New York in 2021, without luck) but with his propaganda acts he fuels the candidacy of Pilip, the visible face of the Republican reconquest of the suburbs - not only in New York , but throughout the country.

The Republican Party already controls the three cities of Nassau County, the county executive's office and, until Santos' ouster, the region's four seats in the House of Representatives.

The same ones that helped give the narrow majority to the Republicans.

The failure of serial liar Santos, who faces 23 criminal charges, is hardly a bad memory anymore.

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