Here’s what’s happening in the New York suburbs right now: homeowners in Westchester are paying property taxes that have increased by double digits since 2020. The Nassau County DA’s office is prosecuting a gang-related shooting that happened three miles from Tom Suozzi’s district office. And immigration — the flow of asylum seekers into the city’s shelter system — remains a daily front-page story in the tabs that suburban commuters read on the Long Island Rail Road.
None of these issues have been resolved since 2022, when they collectively produced the most stunning political reversal in the country: a Republican wave in the New York suburbs that handed the party a House majority by flipping seats that hadn’t been competitive in a decade. In 2024, Republicans largely held those gains. In 2026, both parties are trying to figure out whether that suburban anger is a durable realignment or a specific reaction to specific conditions that might fade.
The evidence, so far, suggests it’s durable.
What Happened in 2022, and Why It Didn’t Unhappen
The conventional Democratic explanation for 2022 in New York is that Kathy Hochul ran a terrible campaign, the Bail Reform Act was genuinely unpopular, and Eric Adams hadn’t yet become a liability. These things are all true and also insufficient.
The deeper story is that the suburban New York electorate shifted because the issues that were driving it — crime, cost of living, housing affordability, immigration — are structural, not cyclical. Bail reform wasn’t a messaging problem; it was a policy that a significant portion of the suburban electorate genuinely opposed and blamed on Democratic legislators who were further left than their constituents. The city’s response to the asylum seeker surge involved busing migrants to suburban communities in ways that created real local friction. And the cost of living in Nassau, Westchester, and Rockland counties — driven by property taxes, housing costs, and commuting expenses — has been a genuine economic squeeze that Democrats have no clean answer to.
Hochul’s post-2022 posture acknowledged some of this: she supported additional public safety funding, tried to reform bail reform at the margins, and made noise about housing. But the legislative session produced less than promised on housing (the 2023 zoning reform collapsed), and the core dynamics haven’t shifted.
In 2024, the suburbs moved a little more toward Republicans at the presidential level. Tom Suozzi won his district (PVI EVEN) by 3.6 points; Kamala Harris carried it by less than a point. The gap — Suozzi outrunning Harris by roughly 3 points in his own district — tells you that voters were making distinctions. They trusted Suozzi on local concerns in a way they didn’t trust national Democrats. That’s the slim margin he’s working with.
Suozzi’s Position in 2026
Suozzi is doing something specific that most House Democrats aren’t: he’s making SALT the center of his economic identity. The federal cap on state and local tax deductions — imposed by the 2017 Republican tax law — is a genuine pocketbook issue for upper-middle-class homeowners in Nassau County and Queens who pay high property taxes and used to be able to deduct them. Suozzi has pushed aggressively for SALT restoration in Democratic infrastructure legislation, and he positions it as the single most concrete thing Democrats have done (or are trying to do) for suburban New York economic interests.
It’s a narrow play — SALT relief disproportionately benefits higher-income households — but it’s politically shrewd in a district where the homeowners who vote reliably are the exact people who’ve been hit by the cap. In 2026, he’ll need to expand that message to also credibly address crime and immigration in ways that don’t alienate his Democratic base.
His $4.2 million fundraising in 2024 gives him a foundation, but the race will require substantially more if a serious Republican challenger emerges. He won a special election in 2024 by 8 points in a favorable environment, then won the general by 3.6 — the gap signals that his baseline is closer to 3-4 points than 8, and 3-4 points is uncomfortable.
Lawler’s Unusual Situation
Mike Lawler in New York’s 17th (PVI D+1, won by 6.3 points in 2024) is a different calculation because he’s running for Senate in 2026. If he vacates the seat — not yet decided, but increasingly treated as likely — that creates an open seat scenario in Rockland/Westchester/Putnam that dramatically changes the competitive landscape.
An open D+1 seat in a favorable Democratic environment is a genuine pickup opportunity. Without Lawler’s incumbent advantage — the brand he’s built as a Problem Solvers co-chair, the bipartisan credibility that lets him outrun his partisan baseline in a district that keeps voting for Democrats statewide — a Republican hold becomes significantly harder. The DCCC has already identified this as a top acquisition target if Lawler runs for Senate.
But Lawler in the seat is a different story. He’s spent two cycles proving he can win a D+1 seat by 6 points while Harris carries the district by less than a point. That’s outrunning your baseline by 5+ points, which is extraordinary. His 2022 win over DCCC chair Sean Patrick Maloney suggested the committee didn’t take him seriously enough; they won’t make that mistake again.
The Through-Line
What connects the Suozzi and Lawler situations is that both men are operating in a suburban environment that has genuinely shifted — not temporarily, but structurally. The voters who moved toward Republicans in 2022 and 2024 haven’t come back. They’re not waiting to be persuaded by the right national message; they’ve recalibrated their local political identity.
Democrats’ path back to dominance in the New York suburbs runs through fixing the conditions that drove the shift: housing costs, public safety perception, and the sense that state Democrats prioritize ideological commitments over practical governance. There’s no sign that’s happening on a timeline that helps in 2026. The suburbs are still angry. The clock is running.
Sources
- 2026 New York gubernatorial election — Wikipedia — gubernatorial race overview
- New York Governor’s Race Narrows But Hochul Still Leads — Bloomberg — Hochul vs Blakeman polling
- Mike Lawler — Ballotpedia — voting record and election history
- Tom Suozzi — Ballotpedia — legislative record and SALT issue focus
- The State of New York in an Election Year, February 2026 — Marist Poll — public opinion polling on New York political issues