Democrats Notch A Win In The Battle For The Suburbs
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In the words of George Santos, there is no such thing as diva down. There is only diva up.

Hello and welcome to this late night special election reaction edition of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast. I'm Galen Druk. It's about a quarter past 11 and the race in New York's third congressional district has already been called for Democrat Tom Suozzi.

According to the latest tallies right now with about 85% of the expected vote in, Swazi leaves Republican Mozzie Pillip by about 10 points, although we expect that to narrow as more of the election day vote comes in somewhere in the range of six or eight points. Although by the time you're listening to this podcast, you may well know what that margin looks like.

Either way, Swazi won pretty decisively. It looks like he will end up beating the limited polling that we had in the district, which showed about a three or four point lead going in. So we're going to talk about it. And here with me to do that is politics reporter Leah Skarnom. Welcome to the podcast, Leah. Good evening, Galen. Also here with us is ABC national politics reporter Brittany Shepard. Welcome back to the pod, Brittany.

Happy to be here. And also joining us is Jacob Rubashkin, Deputy Editor of Inside Elections. Welcome to the podcast, Jacob. It's so good to have you. Thank you, Galen. First time, long time here. Happy to be here. It's always great to have a first timer and very flattered that you're also a long timer. So all three of you have...

either written about this district, spent time in this district. Brittany, you lived in this district. So we really got the ace team on the podcast tonight. And I want to just kick things off with it's a hot take economy out there. You know, the presidential election is feeling like a slog right now. We just got a competitive special election in a

suburban district in a district like those that the House majority is going to run through this fall, maybe the kind of district that could even determine who wins the presidential election. And so lots of folks are weighing in. Jacob, as a first timer, why don't you kick us off? What's your takeaway from tonight's results?

Look, it's good news for Democrats, right? This is an easy call. This is a positive for Democrats, both immediately and in the long term. They only have to pick off five seats in order to take back the House majority heading into tonight, and now they've got one of those. That's 20% job done already, and we're still more than eight months away from Election Day. So this is a good thing for them. They get an incumbent, a seasoned incumbent in a competitive district heading into the

fall. They prove that they're still a viable party out on Long Island and they get a good news event in what has been a pretty disastrous news cycle for them with the past week of stuff coming out of the White House. So all in, this is a good night for Democrats. Republicans still very much in the game, but, you know, they would have preferred to go the other way.

Okay. Notably, no national lessons there. I picked up on that, Jacob. I don't know how intentional that was. I assume it was. Brittany, what are your takeaways? Well, let me introduce a national election take, which we know is probably plastered all over cable news right now. It's more of a question, has Trump solidly lost the suburbs? That's already a claim that we're hearing from both.

the White House and Nikki Haley tonight, actually, that this election was actually a referendum on Trumpism and MAGAism. Relatedly, like, I was spending a lot of time in my home district, because that's where I grew up, where my parents still live. I was there for the last two weeks or so, and I didn't really hear Donald Trump's name mentioned all too much, but...

Nikki Haley really wants to seem like this law doesn't just fall on Mozzie Pillop and the NASA GOP, but also is at the hands of Donald Trump. That's, I think, a message we're going to hear from her a lot tomorrow and the remainder of the week as she tries to show that maybe that there's another way forward. I think we're going to hear a lot of chatter from the political class on X about who are the kind of suburban voters and can Democrats replicate this in November?

Maybe running moderate and pushing anti-Trump will help in a place like this be some kind of winning calculus.

Brittany, it's funny that Nikki Haley is hammering Pillop and trying to tie Trump to her loss. Because when I interviewed Mozzie Pillop two weeks ago, she was very favorable toward Nikki Haley. I asked her about the presidential election and how she felt running as Trump was locking up the nomination. And she was like, oh, you're forgetting about Nikki Haley. Like, I love Nikki Haley and she's really great and we're going to see what she can do with this primary. So, yeah.

I guess Haley didn't get that message if she's using her as a tool against Trump now. All right. So Jacob's got the local. Brittany's got the national. Leah, what do you have for us? The weather? Yeah. The atmospheric? Oh, yeah. The exact snowfall. I think that the main takeaway that you are going to see from especially like Democrats are already saying this publicly, like on social media, you know, like, oh, there's Democrats have not lost the suburbs, but like

This is a very different suburb from like the Georgia 6th suburbs that we were looking at in, you know, the 2017 special election before the 2018 wave. So I think the big question going in, knowing that turnout was going to be kind of a crapshoot, you know, like it's a special election. So who knows? Like we don't have comparable data to be like, what do New York—

third district voters do in February of an election year. Like, we don't know who's going to turn out. And then it snowed and that made life difficult. So it's one of those where I feel like if it was a massive victory on either side, a blowout, we could maybe learn some lessons from it. But because

We're seeing right now Swazis carrying the district or winning the district by nine points. Like Jacob said earlier, that will probably narrow. Biden carried the district by eight points. Like what it's telling me is that there hasn't been a massive shift on Long Island since Biden.

It doesn't mean that it hasn't changed, doesn't mean the political environment hasn't gotten harder, but it's not completely new political terrain, which it kind of looked like it might have been after the 2022 election when George Santos won the district and the Republican Senate candidate carried the district, which was just like not a competitive race. Lee Zeldin carrying the district made a lot more sense because in governor's races, voters are more likely to switch parties.

All that's to say it's good news for Democrats, but it's not exactly a sign to Republicans like, oh, don't even try next time, because this is a district that Biden carried by eight points.

Okay, well, being a contrarian here, Leah, since you and Jacob have both said that this was a good night for Democrats, I'm going to have to go ahead and say that it was a good night for Republicans. The candidate who was hawkish on the border, tough on crime, ended up winning the district. The only problem is that that person who was running on the Republican platform was, oh crap, a Democrat.

That's actually why I think this district is so hard to derive national meaning from, because Swazi is very particular. He had about 80% name recognition at the start of this race in the district. He's extremely well-known, so that's one.

Two, he's known to be a moderate. He was a primary challenger to Governor Kathy Hochul of New York, who isn't even wasn't at least once upon a time seen as a particularly progressive governor. But he ran to the right of Kathy Hochul saying, you know, basically she's too progressive for New York.

He also was then hawkish on immigration, hawkish on crime, and emphasized those things, ran ads saying that he was, you know, different from the rest of the Democrats and Joe Biden on these issues. And so when you have a candidate like that who's known so well and so sort of like significantly differentiated from the rest of the party, does his win actually say anything?

much about the Democratic Party on the whole. I mean, maybe it tells them the direction they want to move in if they want to win districts like this. But does it actually say that Democrats are going to, outside of this one situation, do well in places like this? I think you make a good point, Galen.

Because I talked to Tom Swasey last week about this very thing. Like, is there meaning to be mined here? And he told me that his campaign winner, Louie, at the time was a big warning sign for Democrats because he believed that there had to be a lot more Tom Swaseys being run outside of special elections in order to not just inch into Republican margins, but to completely flip the house. He really believes that Biden and the establishment should not be making any concessions to

to the more progressive flank of the party. And he believes it through and through, right? And I am curious if that's a message that will fall on deaf ears or if the election committee is all the national alphabet soup committees in D.C. will hear that, listen to that, and maybe re-tinker the strategy when they're trying to handpick some folks to run for the upcoming elections.

So I don't totally buy that argument. First off, granted, like Swazi is a uniquely suited candidate to do well in this district. Like that was a good recruit. And who knows if he would have gone through, you know, a traditional Democratic primary. He was handpicked by party leadership because it was a special election by local party leadership. But the idea that he's running against the Democratic Party, therefore he's

you know, that's not necessarily a good sign for Democrats. That's just kind of what happens in competitive districts. Like, I think if we go back to 2018, I mean, I wish I had the number on me, but like the number of Democrats who ran saying that they wouldn't vote for Nancy Pelosi for speaker, they weren't Trump supporters, but they at least pushed back on the Democratic Party quite a bit. And they did do the whole, you know, gun rights and immigration and all of that. So I think it's,

It's a sign that Democrats can win in New York despite that messaging, which was not clear before tonight, I think, that state Democrats, especially in New York and New York City Democrats, have not poisoned the well for Democrats running down ballot in a way that prevents anyone else from winning.

I have to push back a little here. I think there's a big difference between running against a decades-running boogie woman from San Francisco in Nancy Pelosi who has an approval rating that's

massively underwater because her name is associated with the House of Representatives, which no one in America likes, versus the president of the party who won the district by eight points in 2020, right? Like, if Joe Biden is going to win in 2024, he has to actually be doing well in these districts, not be the person that candidates have to run against in order to win in these districts. Agreed. And in a Biden plus eight district, it is a concern. But this is a Biden plus eight district on Long Island, which we have...

Thank you for the correction from end to end, by the way. I want to flag to listeners and viewers that it is all in Long Island. Leah, sorry. No, I'm honored that you caught that. This is a unique district. And in districts that Biden narrowly carried—

or that the sitting president narrowly carried. We have those conversations every year with, you know, is Biden or Obama or Trump or whoever it is going to campaign with these candidates down ballot? And when it comes to those really close districts where maybe Biden carried it by less than five points, I think that's a conversation that is pretty normal to have. You know, should you run with the party? Should you run against the party or just kind of run on your own? And I think

The dynamic, okay, well, maybe you're convincing me because now that I'm thinking about it, like, but he didn't really, no, no, you're not. I take it back because he didn't. Oh, shocks. You almost, but he didn't run against Joe Biden. He ran against Trump.

people who are too far left. He ran against people who are too progressive, who won't compromise. He wasn't running against Biden himself. And I think that kind of running on your own, trying not to associate yourself with a party is pretty conventional for competitive districts. But I take your point. Can I meet you in the middle? I also think that's an important differentiation that

I mean, he tried to distinguish himself as like one of the only Democrats in the House who voted X or Y way on immigration. And so he's he was really differentiating himself in some ways from like 90 percent of the Democratic Party. But I also take your point that he wasn't running directly against Joe Biden. Jacob has been quietly sitting here.

batting his eyelashes, waiting for an opportunity to jump in. Take it away, Jacob. No, look, well, thank you, Galen. I don't think that

Brittany, I think your turn of phrase about the alphabet soup of party committees in D.C., I don't think those guys need any more data points to convince themselves that they need to be running more moderate Democrats in swing districts across the country. I think that has been the M.O. certainly for Democrats over the last four,

for election cycles. And so I think to the extent that there's still any sort of recruitment or thumbs to be placed on scales and primaries across the country, you know, I would continue to imagine that the more moderate candidates would be looked upon more favorably by folks here in Washington. But again, I am just so wary of

nationalizing the lessons of this kind of unique New York media environment. I think there are a lot of lessons to be learned. Say that a couple times more. What was it? Unique New York? Unique...

There are six or seven highly competitive House races in the New York media market, three out on Long Island, three in the Hudson Valley, one in New Jersey. That's the House majority right there. And I know that there's this tendency to try and take lessons and extrapolate them across all 435 districts. And sometimes we can, but sometimes we don't need to. Sometimes we

We can call the majority one way or another based on one state and one media market even. And so I do think that there are lessons for the Democrats in New York. This worked for him in this seat. I don't know if it's going to work for the Democrat running in Omaha or in Des Moines or in the dozen or dozen and a half other districts that are going to be on the House battlefield. I really am not so convinced yet.

That, you know, let a million Swazis bloom is the winning strategy for for Democrats this fall. What about nine? What about just Swazis in New York? What about that? Like, how many are there? Well, my question was more, does Swazi work for Biden? Like.

for Biden's reelection campaign more than can Democrats win a district in Omaha based on a

homegrown Long Islander who's known by 80% of the folks in Nassau County. So we got a poll from Siena of this race, and it had Swazi up by four. It looks like he'll exceed that a little bit. But it also had Donald Trump up by five among the same sample. That kind of speaks to what you're saying here, that I think there's a perfectly reasonable universe in which this was an electorate

that voted for Tom Swasey that would also vote for Donald Trump or would at very least be tied. I don't think that Swasey winning tonight is a sign that Joe Biden has reclaimed the lost territory on Long Island, at least, you know, let alone the suburbs writ large. I think that there are probably a number of people who voted for Tom Swasey and are going to turn around and vote for Donald Trump because they...

either like both of them or more specifically, they like what both are saying about immigration. Democrats shouldn't get too far over their skis on the Biden angle of all of this, which is why I've spent all this time talking about the House and not so much the presidency.

For sure. And I do want to notice that, like, it could be that they like Swazi, but it could also be that Mozzie Pillip just didn't campaign a ton in this race, at least not traditionally. And we can't overlook that old turnout that we talk about all the time. Obviously, to people like us, it might seem a no-brainer. It all comes down to turnout, right? But—

Perhaps those attacks of Swazi calling Mozzie Pilla basement Mozzie to borrow from Trump's attacks of Biden, an interesting tack. Like maybe there was some truth to that. And I think that maybe he told me he believed that voters saw through her brand and her story.

I wonder if him running digital spots and the messaging around the fact that she actually has quite liberal views on abortion and on owning guns that aren't stronger than what the police run. Also, all the events I went to for her last week were in D'Esposito's district in New York 4. I think it's partially because GOPHQ is down there, but she could have easily had an event in Port Washington or Glen Cove or...

where Tom Suozzi is from and born and was mayor of and didn't do any of those things. Those sorts of things, they matter. I think you're drawing a really important distinction between having a strong profile and being a strong candidate. And that's something that I think has tripped up Republicans a handful of times. And I personally, I am not saying that was not a strong retail politician. That's not something that I've heard. And I think it's

Just hearing what you're saying now and earlier tonight, we were talking about, you know, how most of her campaign events in the last couple of weeks have been in the fourth district. Like that just doesn't feel like, you know, the kind of retail politics that might work in this kind of district. It might be one of those, you know, and we've seen this before where, you know, the profile seems to fit, but the actual candidacy is much harder. And that is where having an incumbent candidate

is, or a former representative rather, in Tom Suozzi is going to give you an advantage. Because not only does he have the profile, he also like, he has the connections, he's proven that he can win over these voters. And that's just like, Republicans were at a disadvantage because they did not have a candidate who, you know, had that kind of experience.

We also got a little bit of breaking news late in the race on immigration, which was the bipartisan border deal that fell apart under pressure from Trump and, you know, more conservative Republicans. And I think, uh,

I at least would argue there was a pronounced shift in even how kind of Swazi was talking about the issue. As soon as that happened, he was able to, you know, use it and use Pillip's opposition to that bill as a cudgel that all of a sudden was not so aggressive toward Biden, toward Democrats, but toward the problem of the border, right?

And so instead of attacking or trying to distance from Biden, he could actually rein back in and say, you know, Biden and the Democrats are trying to solve this problem and it's the Republicans who aren't fixing the issue. Now, I don't think that that message had enough time to sink in in this special election, given that it really only played out in the last week or so. It never really showed up in paid media. But I know that in the fall, it is going to be one of the major

main ways that Democrats respond to immigration-based attacks from Republicans, that they really do believe that this is now their most effective answer and that Republicans...

gave them a political gift by killing this legislation before it really got going, because it allows them to turn it back on their Republican opponents and say, you're the ones who aren't fixing the problem. You're the ones who are letting it sit and fester until the next election, not working with us to get something done.

Yeah, and that was a big part of Swazi's victory speech tonight. He basically said, you know, I want to work with anyone who wants to solve problems and I'm against weaponizing political issues to try to win elections. Something else that happened during his victory speech that segues into something that makes this district perhaps a little unique is that there were protesters protesting.

as there are protesters now at a lot of Democratic events, particularly events for Biden and Harris, who appear to be pro-Palestine and opposing Democrats' position on the war in Gaza.

This is a district where that was a unique issue in some ways. It has a large population of Jewish Americans, Mazi Pilip, served in the IDF. How did that issue end up playing out here? And did it, once again, we're saying this can't necessarily be taken as some sort of indication of what could happen nationally. How does that make this district unique?

Galen, I also want to add to that list of how it's personal. One of the Hamas hostages is actually from the third congressional district and his parents had a vigil and a rally for him in both Swazi and Pillip showed up kind of together as a united front to say that, you know, to demand that the hostages be released immediately.

And it's unique, right? It made it seem very real and very tangible in a way for people, just ephemeral. Or they try to block it out when they're watching cable news or they're doom scrolling and they can't really wrap their fingers and their brain around everything. But Mazi really leaned into her personal background, right? Saying she was born in Africa and she moved to Israel. She was an IDF paratrooper. She was strong. She had seven children.

And that, you know, she was going to deliver justice for Israel. But beyond that, like the specifics kind of fell apart. Right. There was not like a lot of B-side to that story. And Swazi maintained from the beginning that he was also a very strong ally of Israel and is trying to walk that tightrope of also making sure he made inroads with Muslim voters in the area. And I think that that's that that's

That piece about Muslim voters wasn't something that we actually heard from Mozzie Pillowball too much. And listen, I haven't seen the individual town totals come back. I'd love to actually dig into that more. But it might show that there was turnout in Jewish areas. I think it's the highest Jewish voting district. Jacob Leah, is that true? I think I saw around at least 11%.

Yeah, maybe the Nadler and the Goldman districts might be up there as well. But it's definitely top five, maybe top three. Right. So, of course, like there are going to be be towns like Great Neck where she's from or the parts of the South Shore of high concentration of Jewish Democrats and some Jewish unaffiliated untethered that could have pushed us in Swazi's direction.

I mean, the first thing Swazi did after he became the Democratic nominee in this special was get on a plane and go to Israel. You know, that was how he kicked off his special election bid, because he knew that this was going to be an issue for...

because of the district, and it was especially going to be an issue because of who the Republican nominee was. You know, driving through the district when I was there, Swazi had, you know, his normal yard signs, and then he had Tom Swazi stands with Israel yard signs. And those were the two options that voters had. It was very clear this was something he was taking seriously. He was not going to let himself be outflanked

by an opponent that he knew was going to be using that angle to, you know, the greatest degree. Yeah, I'm kind of interested also in if this district is a helpful case study of Democrats' criticism of Biden over his handling over the Israel-Hamas war. It is a unique district in a whole bunch of ways. The fact that there is a

high population of Jewish voters is one of many. That makes it, again, maybe a better harbinger for the U.S. House in 2024, which goes through New York, than the race for president.

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What kind of data do we have? We've been talking about broader themes here, but about turnout, specifically who turned out. I know that we have. It was low. Actual day of vote totals, I'm still waiting to see from the Board of Elections in Nassau. They were sheepish to let it out. But I have a sense that it was much lower than expected, even for a special election, which is, of course, bad.

notoriously low turnout. I'm curious to see how many Asian-Americans voted, especially in Queens. Swazi deployed a lot of strong surrogates, in fact, even partnered up with AAPI Victory Fund, who did mailers that linked Trump to Santos to Mazi in Hindi.

As well for the South Asian voters in the district. And I think that South Asian and East Asian and Asian American voters broadly are like kind of underlooked in some of these national stories and about like voting blocks that matter. They're just, I think, often a sideswipe to just all other minorities, nonwhite voters. But like this is if you've ever been to Queens, this is a sizable, impactful story.

you know, voting bloc here. Right. I think it approaches 20% or something like that of the district is of Asian descent. And look, I think one of the things that made Swazi such an attractive pick is because he has this demonstrated history of retail politics and he really subscribes to an older school education

of politicking that means that he is very attentive to kind of different voting blocks and kind of the different ethnic communities in the district. I thought it was fascinating to see. There was a weekend recently where he was kind of posting his daily routine. And in the span of one kind of morning and afternoon, he did that rally campaign.

with Pilip about the hostages held by Hamas in Gaza. Then he went to a dim sum. He went to a Korean church. He went to a Tibetan lunch. And he finished the day off with a meeting with Indian leaders at an Indian restaurant in Queens. So he really made an effort not to let anyone feel like they weren't being spoken to across the district.

We have over 78,000 people voted early, either by mail or in person. And both Swazi and Mazi hit social and the field to push out voters to vote early. But of course, we know typically those votes are going to break Democrat. And there seemed to be at least at the beginning half of the night, right? And we saw those votes pour in from the early vote for about a week.

A lot of them favored Swazi. And I think that especially with all the weather today, the much ballyhooed about storm, having over 78,000 people take advantage of early voting in New York and being able to have easy access to the voting precincts definitely helped him in the end.

Yeah, I mean, all things considered, I think the low turnout, like because of the reasons we keep going over, it's hard to make a big conclusion about that, whether it's because, you know, she wasn't maybe if she had embraced Trump more, maybe like Trump supporters would have come. Like, I don't know. It keeps coming back to this idea for me that the election is.

a lot of the status quo. It reaffirms what Democrats have been doing in order to win this kind of district. It reaffirms what Republicans have been doing to be competitive in a Biden district and the unique circumstances that explains the margins, right? So it was a super interesting election. It was, I mean, after some of these primary races where there hasn't been quite as much to say and the presidential race, it's

It was really interesting to hear different candidates and introduce themselves and hear about different issues that make it like not just nationalized issues, but like how national issues affect local populations. It was fascinating.

That was really nice to kind of move our attention to that. But now I do think we go back to the status quo again. According to the former president, it's breaking news here. The reason why Mazie Pillop lost was, quote, a very foolish woman, Mazie Melissa Pillop, running in a race where she didn't endorse me and tried to straddle the fence when she would have easily won if she understood anything about modern day politics in America.

So that's the take from Queens man, Donald Trump. So do you think that Mozzie Pillip could have won a conventional Republican primary in that district? And second question, do you think that New York Republicans who could face a tough reelection race today,

The redistricting thing, just a reminder for everyone that there is a very high likelihood that the congressional maps will be redrawn in New York before November. So this could change. But is it concerning for Republicans running in Biden districts, these freshman Republicans in New York, six of them, who might need to run with some distance from Trump in order to win reelection? Yeah.

I mean, 2022 says, yeah, it's hard that candidate quality matters. I mean, maybe candidate quality matters less in a presidential election year because everyone is turning out for the top of the ticket anyway. And there just aren't that many split ticket voters. And so if people are going to be turning out for Trump,

They're voting for the Republican. But like, yeah, in 2022, Trump endorsed a bunch of people who were bad candidates and lost their races. And honestly, all the conversations that we're having about in Congress right now wouldn't be happening because had they not run candidates, Republicans would have a majority in the Senate and they would have a larger than five seat majority in the House. So this entire situation is because of Donald Trump. And I just think it's important to

Like of all the differences that we're talking about in this district, of all the ways this race was unique, let's really focus in on the fact that these two candidates were picked by the local party to be the strongest candidates in a general election. They did not face an electorate that and did not face a competitive primary that often pushes candidates to the far left and far right.

And can we talk about I feel like the biggest elephant in the room we haven't addressed yet is our content creating boss, George Santos, who is now doing back of the napkin math on Twitter, maybe auditioning for a job at 538. And he basically didn't come up in this election at all. Right. Like, can we put money can we put money on like the cameo price for tomorrow? Is he going to run?

I think he raised negative money in his last quarter in Congress. It's a tough place to start from. I think that voters saw Santos as such an aberration. It didn't stick when Democrats tried to use him as a cudgel in this special election. I think

Voters understood that Republicans were just as duped as everyone else was about who he really, you know, turned out to be. And so what I heard in my reporting was that the candidates and the, you know, the players here looked at, you know, could we use George Santos effectively in this election? And it didn't play because he was so far afield, right? The things he was doing were

were so crazy that voters didn't think of him as the Republican George Santos. They thought of him as that crazy guy, George Santos. And so he exists kind of outside of partisanship in a way that made it less effective to attack Republicans based on the fact that he too was a Republican.

Yeah, I guess he was both his own boat and his own iceberg, in a way. He was the entire story all in one person. Swazi also said that you can't take a chance on somebody you don't know that well. Like, that's...

And that was kind of the one way George Santos was inserted into this race was like, well, last time you weren't so sure. But with me, you know exactly what you're getting because you've already had three terms of it.

We call it the devil you know versus the devil you don't know. And often people in these kind of situations go with the devil they know. It's a safer Vegas gamble. And Pilla played into that with the sheltered nature of her campaign. I think there's a universe in which she was much more out there. She was doing more press, more interviews, more retail campaigning, and

And was more effectively able to rebut the notion that she was hiding, that she had something to hide. But she ran the race that she did, and that allowed Democrats to press the message implicitly about Santos and contrast it with the very deep ties that Swazi has to the district.

I will say, too, you know, I interviewed both Swazi and Pillip, and my parents are both still voters in the district. And, you know, in our chit chat before and after, Mazi didn't really ask me so much about it. But Swazi would not hang up the phone until and unless I actually gave him my folks' contact information.

Because he was adamant many times he asked me because he was adamant on reaching out to them himself to make a pitch to try to get them to turn out for him. My parents were very swazzy, skeptical. They're actually Democrat-Republican swing voters and immigrants, both of them from different places in the world. So an interesting cross-section of New York three voters.

And I thought that it's so tiny and anecdotal, but if he was doing that with me, maybe he was doing that with other people too. And those are the little things that matter, those personal touches. And I do think that if you meet someone from New York and they're very prideful, I want no comments about me talking right now, but we're very prideful people who are obsessed with loyalty. Does that ring a bell by any other famous New York politician you might know? And...

And having it be your guy, your person, whether or not you hate their guts, but they know you and you know them, and you can fight in the same schoolyard, I think that matters a lot to Long Island voters. Well, now that we're really playing into stereotypes, I think it's time to go to bed. And I just looked back.

because I was reminded of this whole saga. And one of our first podcast episodes in 2023 was called What the Debt Ceiling and George Santos' Career Have in Common. Ooh, what was the answer? What was the answer? I don't remember, but I think we can say that now both have been thoroughly raised. Oh!

Oh, look at you. Did you just come up with that? I sure did. I sure did. I'm so impressed. It's like midnight, too. Although I'm sure that Andy Cohen is talking to someone at Bravo about having him run this fall and just turning it into a reality TV show. Andy Cohen needs to be hosting the debates. That's my, I will die on that. The only way Trump will show up.

The Swazi-Santos debates or the Trump-Biden debates? All of them. All right. Thank you, Brittany, Jacob, and Leah. Thank you. Thank you. Happy Valentine's Day, everyone. It is officially. We're past midnight. You are all my valentines today.

Thank you. And you are mine. Thank you. I guess it's not mutual. Just me and you. No, all of you as well. My name is Galen Drake. Tony Chow is in the control room. Our producers are Shane McKeon and Cameron Trotavian. And our intern is Jayla Everett. You can get in touch by emailing us at podcasts at 538.com. You can also, of course, tweet us with any questions or comments. If you're a fan of the show, leave us a rating or review in the Apple Podcast Store. Better yet, tell someone about us.

Thanks for listening, and we will see you soon.