(Molly Bruns, Headline USA) The Republican party blew two special elections Tuesday: one state-level election in Pennsylvania and another for the former Rep. George Santos’s seat in New York, resulting in the loss of control of the state’s House and an uncomfortably slim margin for Republicans in the U.S. House.
Republicans lost 2 critical elections today. One was a US House seat (Santos seat). The other was control of the PA House.
Democrats outsmarted the GOP again with a strong mail-in & early voting operation.
The GOP was relying on strong Election Day turnout, but a snowstorm in…
— End Wokeness (@EndWokeness) February 14, 2024
Democrat Jim Prokopiak won the purple Bucks County, Pa., race, giving the state’s Democrat party a narrow 102-100 majority in the House and preventing a tie, according to NBC News.
“With control of the state House on the line, Pennsylvanians again defeated Republicans’ anti-abortion agenda and voted for Jim Prokopiak, a Democrat who has stood up for women and working people,” Biden campaign manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez said.
Other election officials stated that the win bodes well for the up-and-coming presidential election in 2024.
Whether or not it is a bellwether for voter trends, it is certainly another strong indicator of how the mail-in voting policies that Pennsylvania Democrats may have illegally implemented in 2020 are going nowhere fast having since been codified by the courts and buffered by the Democrat majority in the legislature.
They previously used the strategy to deliver a shocking win to John Fetterman in the 2022 senatorial race, despite his having had a stroke several months prior that left him virtually incapacitated for much of the campaign against celebrity doctor Mehmet Oz.
Although it proved to be one of Democrats’ only notable seat flips during the midterm election cycle, it was enough to deliver then outright control of the evenly-split Senate, which Republicans optimistically had hoped to reclaim.
Meanwhile, Democrats have already regained control of one of the most prominent GOP seat flips from the 2022 race in New York’s 3rd Congressional District, and managed to do so thanks to Republicans’ uncanny knack for self-sabotage after 105 GOP House members joined Democrats in December to oust Santos in an unprecedented move for a fellow member who had yet to be convicted of a crime.
Santos, the first openly gay Republican elected to Congress, had quickly become a target of the Left, which painted him as a serial fabulist and flamboyant eccentric.
Prior to becoming the first Republican ever forcibly removed from the House, he had been federally indicted amid allegations of campaign finance fraud and various other abuses, and was excoriated for his refusal to cooperate with an investigation by the House Ethics Committee. He is expected to strike a plea bargain with federal prosecutors.
Rep. Tom Suozzi, whom Santos had defeated, comfortably reclaimed his old seat in the special election against RINO candidate Mazi Pilip—who spent much of her campaign attempting to distance herself from former President Donald Trump, refused to admit whether she was pro-life and, according to some reports, may still be a registered Democrat.
“There’s two Democrats on the ballot, and the option is do we get a Democrat or a Democrat-Republican-lite version of a Democrat,” Santos said in an interview with CNN.
“I will not bring myself to vote for a registered Democrat, period,” he added. “It’s just against what I believe in.”
After the announcement of the results, Santos responded with a brief tweet.
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— George Santos (@MrSantosNY) February 14, 2024
Trump criticized Pilip’s campaign on Truth Social, as well.
“Republicans just don’t learn, but maybe she was still a Democrat?” he said. “[I] 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 could have easily WON if she understood anything about MODERN DAY politics in America.”
