On Tuesday, former Nassau County Executive Tom Suozzi announced that he had formed an exploratory committee for New York’s swingy 3rd Congressional District. Suozzi, a Democrat, says that he’ll be thinking about whether or not to get in over the next month or two, though he’ll also be raising money during this time. About half of this district is in Nassau County, so Suozzi would start out with some name recognition.
Suozzi was once a very influential figure in Empire State Politics. In 2001, he became the first Democrat to win the county executive post, and he decisively won a second term four years later. But since then, very little has gone right for him politically. Suozzi ran against Elliot Spitzer in the 2006 gubernatorial primary and got crushed 82-18, and he lost Nassau 59-41. In 2009, Suozzi lost re-election to Republican Ed Mangano by 386 votes in a complete and utter shocker. Suozzi had $1 million left in his warchest after that campaign, so he clearly didn’t take Mangano seriously.
The state seized control of Nassau’s finances in 2011 and when Suozzi kicked off his comeback attempt against Mangano two years later, he initially looked like the man to beat. However, Suozzi lost by a brutal 59-41 margin, demonstrating that his popularity hadn’t recovered at all. Maybe a little more time and presidential year turnout will give Suozzi a better shot in November if he gets the Democratic nod, but Team Blue doesn’t get much room for error in this 51-48 Obama seat.
And there’s no guarantee that Suozzi will be Team Blue’s pick if he runs. Two Democrats, Suffolk County Legislator Steve Stern and North Hempstead Town Councilwoman Anna Kaplan are in, while lobbyist and self-described “Andrew Cuomo Democrat” Brad Gerstman has formed an exploratory committee. While the district’s Nassau residents outnumber Suffolk’s denizens 50-33 (the remaining 19 percent live in Queens), Suozzi, Kaplan, and Gerstman all hail from Nassau. The field is still shaping up but if a mob of Nassau politicians get in, it could give a Suffolk politician like Stern a leg up.
And given Suozzi’s poor electoral record, he may have a tough time emerging from the primary even if geography doesn’t turn out to be a deciding factor. Way back in 2006 when Suozzi launched his quixotic campaign against Spitzer, David Nir described Suozzi as “manifestly impatient, to the point that it's very dangerous to his own dreams,” and added that “[p]oliticians do dumb stuff all the time. Most of the time (perhaps sadly) those stupid mistakes can be overcome. Tom Suozzi is about to embark on a different kind of mistake, though—the kind which can't be repaired or forgiven, and which will never be forgotten.” It would seem that when it comes to Suozzi, the only thing that’s changed over the last decade is that this time, he has nothing to lose.
P.S: GOP pollster Harper Polling is out with a new survey giving a generic Republican a 4-point edge over a generic Democrat. While we can quibble with the numbers, there’s little doubt that the general election will start out close here.
