More than twice as many Democrats as Republicans voted early by mail in the race to represent the 3rd Congressional District in the U.S. House, a Gothamist analysis of the voter data for the special election found. And about a third more Democrats than Republicans opted for in-person early voting ahead of Election Day.
The high early voting turnout was a key factor in Democrat Tom Suozzi’s victory in the 3rd Congressional District last month. Suozzi, who previously served in Congress, defeated Republican nominee Mazi Pilip by eight points, making the turnout ahead of that snowy Election Day a critical buffer that helped secure his victory.
New York state has seven competitive congressional races that could ultimately decide which party controls the U.S. House of Representatives, and Republicans in New York are acknowledging that they have an early voting problem that needs to be fixed ahead of November’s elections.
“We had President Trump basically in 2020 telling us not to do early voting, certainly downplaying it, and I think too many Republicans are still caught on that,” said Peter King, a former Republican congressmember from Long Island for three decades.
King, who stepped down from his seat in 2021, said he never experienced a race where early voting and voting by mail played as crucial a role in the election as what he observed in the “Mazi Suozzi race.”
In-person early voting took effect in New York in 2019, which gives voters nine days to vote before Election Day. The special election in the 3rd Congressional District was the first congressional election to also use the state’s new early vote-by-mail law, which meant nearly 1,000 votes had been cast a full month before the election.
While King says he’s personally not a fan of early voting, likening it to picking the most valuable player in June, long before the baseball season ends, he also stressed, “you got to play the game by the rules that are there, and the rules are now that early voting is becoming more and more important of a factor.”
“We just have to up our game,” he added.
Rep. Michael Lawler, whose Hudson Valley district is on that list of potential swing House seats in New York, said his campaign was taking a very deliberate approach to all aspects of voter engagement, including early voting.
“We need to embrace it and make sure we are banking our vote,” Lawler told Gothamist.
He said his campaign already has a track record of out-performing other Republicans in early voting.
In this election, he said the campaign will use a host of campaign tools including text messaging, robocalls, emails and digital ads to reach “low propensity voters.”
“The objective is to get them to go vote,” said Lawler. “The reality is if the other side is going to utilize early voting and absentees to bank your vote, you can’t walk into Election Day with such a huge gap.”
Nationally, Republicans have been reckoning with how to make up their early voting gap since last summer when the Republican National Committee launched an initiative called “Bank Your Vote,” which encouraged Republican voters to vote early in upcoming elections.
The program was backed by former RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel, who stepped down from her post on Friday. It’s unclear how much the RNC plans to push the “Bank Your Vote” initiative under its new leader, Michael Whatley, the head of the North Carolina Republican party and a close ally of the party’s presumptive presidential nominee Donald Trump.
A spokesperson for the RNC did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
Savannah Viar, a spokeswoman for the National Republican Congressional Committee did not comment directly on the Bank Your Vote initiative or early voting.
“The NRCC is excited to continue working together with the RNC to win in November,” Viar said.
The 3rd Congressional District, which stretches from eastern Queens through the northern part of Long Island, was an early bellwether test of early voting and the outweighed influence that casting a ballot ahead of Election Day may have. The district has more active registered Democrats than Republicans, according to state voter enrollment data, but even then, Democrats turned out in greater numbers than expected.
Democrats make up just under 40% of active registered voters but accounted for 44% of in-person early votes and a whopping 55% of early votes by mail, according to Gothamist’s analysis.
On top of the early voting deficit Republicans faced ahead of the Feb. 13 special election, voters also confronted one of the few major snowstorms of this winter.
The weather was so bad that a spokesperson for the Congressional Leadership Fund, a super PAC that aims to elect Republicans to the U.S. House, told Gothamist at the time that they hired extra snow plows to help clear streets in Republican portions of the district that day.
After the polls closed, Nassau County GOP Chairman Joseph Cairo told Gothamist that he believed the snow depressed turnout on Election Day, though not enough to decide the race.
His spokesperson did not respond to requests for comment about how the party has analyzed other factors that led to their loss and how much they plan to emphasize early voting going forward.
The New York state GOP launched its own version of the “Bank Your Vote” campaign last September with GOP Chairwoman Rep. Elise Stefanik. The program targets voters based on GOP data who are likely to vote before Election Day and asks them to apply for a mail ballot or pledge to vote early.
State GOP spokesperson David Laska told Gothamist that the state party still plans to build on the momentum of the RNC’s Bank Your Vote’ campaign, “because when Republicans vote early, we win.”
“We will defend our majority-making Congressional delegation in 2024 with President Trump and his endorsed candidate Mike Sapraicone at the top of the ticket,” Laska added, in reference to the Republican party’s U.S. Senate candidate running against Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, a Democrat who is up for re-election this year.
Jon Campbell and Michelle Bocanegra contributed reporting.
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