Long Island and the Limits of Sabotage

Last week, Tom Suozzi won handily in the special election in New York’s Third Congressional District to fill the seat vacated by the serial fraudster George Santos — reclaiming the seat that Suozzi previously held. This was the latest in a series of Democratic victories in special elections, victories that seem on their face to run counter to polls showing Donald Trump leading Joe Biden in the presidential race.

As Nate Cohn, The Times’s lead polling analyst, has been at pains to point out, there isn’t necessarily a contradiction here. Those who vote in special elections aren’t representative of those who will vote in November, and they may be especially motivated by hot-button issues, especially abortion, that have favored Democrats lately. Furthermore, Long Island, on which N.Y.-03 lies, is an unusual place — something I, who mostly grew up there, can personally confirm.

Yet while I make no pretense of expertise in poll analysis, I, like some others, suspect that this election may be more significant than pure number crunching suggests; it may be an early indication that Republicans’ strategy of victory through sabotage won’t work.

The starting point here is that our political system may be unique among democracies in its vulnerability to sabotage by a ruthless opposition party. For voters often judge presidents based on factors over which they have little control.

In some cases, this lack of control reflects the limits of American power in general. For example, the price of gasoline is highly salient politically, yet it mainly reflects crude oil prices, which are set in world markets over which U.S. policy has limited influence.

Beyond this, when voters think about our government, they usually think about the executive branch, sometimes skipping over the fact that there are many things a president can’t do without approval from Congress. Further, we have a bicameral system in which a president can be hamstrung even if the other party controls only one congressional chamber, a problem compounded by the peculiar institution of the Senate filibuster, which often allows a party to block action even if it’s in the minority.