has a PVI of D+2 and voted for Joe Biden by 8 points in 2020. The incumbent is Democrat Thomas Suozzi, who was reelected with 55.9% of the vote in 2020. Suozzi declined to run for reelection, instead opting to run for governor. In the general election, Republican George Santos defeated Democrat Robert Zimmerman by 8 points, considered an upset in this Democratic-leaning district. On December 19, 2022, The New York Times published an article reporting that Santos had allegedly misrepresented many aspects of his life and career, including his education and employment history. An attorney for Santos said the report was a "smear" and "defamatory" but did not address the report's substance. Santos did not produce any documents to substantiate his claims, despite several requests from the Times to do so. Other news organizations confirmed and elaborated on the Timess reporting. Gerard Kassar, chair of the Conservative Party of New York State, said: "I've never seen anything like this. His entire life seems to be made up. Everything about him is fraudulent." In the wake of the disclosures about Santos, commentators expressed amazement that no one, save the local North Shore Leader and opposition research by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, had raised questions about Santos's background during the campaign. It was speculated that if what the Times reported had been public knowledge before the election, Santos would have lost. But FiveThirtyEight said that was "unclear", noting that the other two Republican candidates on the ballot districtwide, Lee Zeldin and Joe Pinion, had also carried it. Zeldin's 12 percent margin of victory in the state's gubernatorial race exceeded Santos's, and Pinion's 4 percent margin was impressive given that his campaign for U.S. Senate against Democratic majority leader Chuck Schumer was minimally funded. The site has found that pre-election scandals have on average cost candidates about 9 percent of the vote that they might otherwise have received, and while that might have been enough to throw the election to Zimmerman, "a scandal's impact varies quite a bit from election to election. So we can't just subtract 9 points from that margin and assume that would have been the result if voters had been aware of his deceptions." Nathaniel Rakich observed that "in this era of high partisan polarization, scandals may hurt candidates less than they used to." Democratic nominee Robert Zimmerman, Democratic National Committee member and communications professional Eliminated in