The Democratic strategist was right about George Santos. He just didn’t realize how right. Back in early November, one week before the midterms, I asked him to assess the contest between Santos, the Republican nominee, and Robert Zimmerman, the Democrat, in New York’s Third Congressional District. “It’s a race where the national Republican Party should be investing, and it isn’t,” he said, sounding puzzled. “The only thing I can determine is that Santos is truly a nut.”
That has hardly been disqualifying in recent American politics—and Santos went on to beat Zimmerman by eight points. It wasn’t until a mid-December New York Times story, however, that Santos’s nuttiness and lies were extensively documented. Since then, the revelations and allegations have unspooled almost daily: from the Seinfeld-ian (“I never claimed to be Jewish.… I said I was ‘Jew-ish,’” he told the New York Post) to the academic and athletic (Santos lied about graduating from Baruch College and starring on its volleyball team) to his employment history (Santos never worked, as he claimed, for either Goldman Sachs or Citigroup) to the possibly criminal (a 2008 fraud charge in Brazil, a multitude of $199.99 charges to his congressional campaign account) to the highly offensive (asserting, falsely, that his mother was in the 9/11 attacks and that his grandparents fled the Holocaust). Bruce Blakeman, a Republican who is the Nassau County executive, has gone from being somewhat wary of Santos last year to being appalled now. “He came out of nowhere, and he had this story about his life,” Blakeman says. “To conjure up a tale about his family and the Holocaust, to me, is diabolical. We’re talking about somebody who needs professional help. He’s not normal.” Santos has admitted only to “embellishing” his résumé, and his congressional office says it does not comment on campaign or personal matters.
Now, though, federal and local prosecutors are circling Santos. The state’s mainstream Republicans continue to try to isolate him, with the latest salvo a Times op-ed by former congressman Peter King, who is calling on Republicans to make clear they want Santos gone. A close ally of Kevin McCarthy is said to have been worried that Santos would be exposed as a fraud during the 2022 campaign, and the House Speaker has recently claimed that he “always had a few questions” about Santos’s résumé, but McCarthy has refused to call for Santos’s ouster. Next week a progressive Democratic group, Courage for America, will try to turn up the heat by distributing, in the congressional district and on Capitol Hill, an “annotated résumé” detailing Santos’s falsehoods. The congressman has insisted he won’t resign, but New York pols in both parties talk as if Santos is already gone. The maneuvering to prepare for another battle over the seat—either in a special election later this year or in 2024, on the standard cycle—is well underway. “There will be a long line of qualified and competent and trustworthy candidates we will have to run,” says Blakeman, the Long Island Republican leader. “I’m not concerned about holding the seat.” Among the names in the mix are Jack Martins, a state senator, and Alison Esposito, a former Republican candidate for lieutenant governor.
“We are getting into position,” says Jay Jacobs, the chairman of New York’s Democratic Party. “There’s talk, but we’re not ready to begin vetting candidates.” Zimmerman says his focus is only on assembling a bipartisan coalition to remove Santos. Other players aren’t waiting. David Greenfield, a former New York City councilman, has tried to stake out some early ground for an ally, Dan Rosenthal, by floating the 31-year-old state assemblyman’s name on Twitter. “He is a true moderate who voted against bail reform and congestion pricing, which polling shows are two of the most critical issues on Long Island,” Greenfield tells me. Tom Suozzi represented much of the district in Congress for three terms (and beat Santos soundly in 2020) before leaving to run for New York governor in 2022. “I think there will be a lot of pressure on Suozzi to run,” a Long Island Democratic consultant says, “especially if Santos resigns and there is a special.”
Special elections in New York play by peculiar rules. There are no primaries. Leaders of the two major parties each select a candidate. For the Democrats, Governor Kathy Hochul would essentially do the choosing; the governor also gets to pick the date of the election, with some restrictions. “It’s very strange because you’re running, essentially, an inside-outside race,” a New York Democratic hand says. “You’ve got to convince the insiders they should appoint you their party’s candidate, then win actual voters.” Special elections are typically low-turnout, weirdly unpredictable affairs. Local concerns like crime and tolls would still be issues, but the narrow partisan balance of the House would nationalize the dynamic, attracting massive amounts of outside campaign money. “Special elections are bad! We don’t want a special election!” a top New York Democratic strategist says. “We want an election on Election Day in a presidential year. That’s easier to win. I hope Santos doesn’t quit.”
Chris Smith
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