Donald Trump‘s top two presidential rivals lambasted the former president after Democrat Tom Suozzi defeated Republican challenger Mazi Pilip in a high-profile special election Tuesday night, while Trump sought to distance himself from Pilip’s loss.
Voters in New York’s 3rd Congressional District chose Suozzi to replace disgraced former Rep. George Santos after the Republican was ousted from Congress last year. The seat was seen as a prime pickup opportunity for Democrats as Republicans maintain a slim majority in the House.
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President Joe Biden and former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley‘s campaigns painted the loss as Trump’s defeat, which cost the House GOP a key seat and handed Democrats a much-needed win before the November election.
“Let’s just say the quiet part out loud,” Haley spokeswoman Olivia Perez-Cubas said in a statement Tuesday night. “Donald Trump continues to be a huge weight against Republican candidates. Despite the enormous and obvious failings of Joe Biden, we just lost another winnable Republican House seat because voters overwhelmingly reject Donald Trump.”
Haley remains the last Republican primary rival blocking Trump from becoming the presumptive nominee and facing off against Biden in November. The former president is hoping that a decisive victory in the Feb. 24 primary in South Carolina, Haley’s home state, will be the death knell in her presidential campaign.
But the former two-term Palmetto State governor is insistent the GOP is ready for a different direction after the “chaos” of the Trump years. Haley continuously notes that Republicans have “lost the popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections” as more proof the GOP should move away from the brash tactics Trump has come to embody.
“Until Republicans wake up, we will continue to lose,” Perez-Cubas added. “Time for a new generation of conservative leadership that doesn’t turn off the American people.”
Biden’s campaign has long treated Trump as the presumptive Republican nominee in 2024 and continued its diatribes against the former president in a statement Tuesday.
“Donald Trump lost again tonight,” Biden campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez said. “When Republicans run on Trump’s extreme agenda — even in a Republican-held seat — voters reject them. As we saw in 2020, 2022, 2023, and now tonight, when it comes down to the choice between Donald Trump’s chaos and division and President Biden who wakes up everyday working to get things done and make Americans’ lives better, voters are consistently choosing the leadership of President Biden and Democrats.”
Part of Suozzi’s success came from running as a Democrat who would work on common-sense solutions to the growing immigration problem at the southern border.
In contrast, Pilip sought to tie Suozzi to Biden’s endorsement of a bipartisan border deal that Republican senators scuttled at the behest of Trump.
But Suozzi’s win is seen partly as a repudiation of Republican inaction on the immigration deal, which Biden’s campaign highlighted in its statement.
“Trump and the MAGA extremists in the House are already paying the political price for derailing a bipartisan deal to secure our borders and fix our broken immigration system,” Chavez Rodriquez added.
A follow-up email sent Wednesday morning from Michael Tyler, communications director for the Biden campaign, further stressed voters’ rejection of Trump and the “MAGA agenda.”
“Trump’s extreme and unpopular agenda is costing Republicans election after election — including on immigration,” Tyler wrote.
The former president, however, blamed Pilip’s loss on her insufficient MAGA persona in a social media post Tuesday night.
“Republicans just don’t learn, but maybe she was still a Democrat?” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post. “I have an almost 99% Endorsement Success Rate in Primaries, and a very good number in the General Elections, as well, but just watched this very foolish woman, Mazi Melesa Pilip, 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.”
Trump alluded to Pilip’s registration as a Democrat since 2012. Pilip also kept Trump at an arm’s distance as she campaigned for the seat, though she did admit she voted for him in 2020. Neither Biden nor Trump stumped in the state for either candidate despite the race being viewed as a bellwether of voter mood.
The former president was also blamed for preventing Republicans from retaking the Senate during the 2022 midterm elections after endorsing candidates that were popular among the hard right-leaning faction of the GOP but off-putting to general election voters.
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Yet Trump defended his most fervent supporters from criticisms in his social media post.
“MAGA, WHICH IS MOST OF THE REPUBLICAN PARTY, STAYED HOME — AND IT ALWAYS WILL, UNLESS IT IS TREATED WITH THE RESPECT THAT IT DESERVES,” Trump concluded.