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Two days after Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s slate of endorsed candidates — many of them fellow democratic socialists — routed their primary opponents last week, Rep. Tom Suozzi decided it was time to send a message of his own.

The Democratic lawmaker, who represents Eastern Queens and Northern Nassau County, held a Zoom press conference with a handful of other moderates to announce their “Promise to America,” a set of six principles that Suozzi said defines their centrist lane within the party.

Principle number one: “We are capitalist, not socialist.”

Moderate incumbents like Suozzi are seeking distance from Mamdani and his brand of Democratic politics ahead of the general election. The “Promise to America,” is one way Suozzi hopes to remind voters in his decidedly purple district that not all Democrats are ready to overhaul the party.

“ There's a good chance that at some point in the campaign, regardless of how the primaries went the other week, Suozzi would've put out something like this,” said Larry Levy, executive dean of Hofstra University’s National Center for Suburban Studies. “For decades, he's staked out what he would consider the middle ground, the place where you find these moderate swing suburbanites.”

The 3rd Congressional District is very different from the places where Mamdani’s slate picked up its wins in the city. It’s whiter, wealthier and mostly suburban, with more homeowners and drivers.

It’s also a place where Suozzi’s political resume runs deep. He was mayor of Glen Cove on Long Island’s North Shore in the 1990s, years after his father and uncle both held the same role. He was elected Nassau County executive in 2001, ran two unsuccessful bids for governor and has been elected four times to the U.S. House of Representatives.

This year, he faces a challenge from Republican Mike LiPetri, whom he beat two years ago in the general election, after first winning the seat in a February special election. The Cook Political Report lists the seat as “Leans Democrat,” which favors Suozzi, but is far from a sure thing. After all, Republican George Santos was elected to represent the district in 2022. Suozzi won back the seat after Santos was expelled from Congress following an ethics investigation in December.

Democratic political consultant Trip Yang, who has worked for Suozzi’s campaigns as well as more progressive candidates, said the Mamdani-Suozzi Democratic divide is a reflection of their different electorates.

“ [Mamdani] is a messiah figure to young people in New York City, and he's extremely popular overall with New York City Democrats, but his numbers are not great in Long Island,” said Yang. “Suozzi, on the other hand, is the strongest possible Democrat that can win office in Nassau County.”

Yang said the larger question is whose message will resonate with more voters ahead of the open Democratic presidential primary in 2028. He predicted that the race to be Democratic nominee will come down to a progressive and a moderate.

Mamdani has said that the race for 2028 began last week and that the Democratic Party needs to change. His volunteer army has shown again that it’s willing to do the work to support candidates who focus on the needs of working people as part of a growing democratic socialist movement.

As Mamdani stood with his more moderate counterpart City Council Speaker Julie Menin to announce a budget deal Tuesday, the mayor could not resist inserting a pro-socialist jab into his celebratory remarks.

“If these past months have shown us anything, it is that socialists not only understand economics just as well as the capitalists who came before but that we can solve their years of mismanagement through an embrace of our principles. There is nothing fiscally responsible about balancing the budget on the backs of working people,” Mamdani said with a smile, previewing the kinds of critiques he is likely to make more forcefully as he continues pushing the Democratic Party to the left.

Suozzi said his moderate cohort is just finding its voice and has a lot more work to do.

“I think a lot of times people that don’t  agree with the DSA, for example, or don't agree with MAGA, talk to each other and wring their hands at cocktail parties,” Suozzi said on the Zoom call. “So we've gotta just do a better job of organizing, and this is an effort to try and organize.”

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