Elise Stefanik’s Bad Bet on MAGA Politics
For a promise of power, she has let herself be yanked around. Now she’s launched a Trumpian campaign for governor of New York.
ELECTION DAY WAS AN INDISPUTABLY bad day for Donald Trump. But at least one Republican candidate is already running as if Trump is a winning role model in her newly official campaign for the top job in New York.
Gov. Kathy Hochul is “the Worst Governor in America.” New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani is “the raging Defund the Police, Tax Hiking, Antisemite, Communist who will destroy New York.” This is not Rep. Elise Stefanik on Fox News. It’s the way she announced her candidacy for governor in a blast email.
Her official entry into the race Friday capped months of snarky (and false) Stefanik references to “Commie Mamdani” and ridiculously over-the-top insults for him and other foils. She sounds like a playground bully, age 10 or so, going after smaller kids and making clear that anyone who crosses her is doomed—to a barrage of humiliation, at the least. All that’s missing is a ™ symbol and a hat tip to the Trump School of Belligerent Capital-Letter Nicknames.
It’s been quite an education in how Stefanik would work and play with others, either as governor with Mamdani leading America’s largest city or as United Nations ambassador dealing with U.S. enemies, frenemies, and whatever friends we have left. That was Trump’s original plan for Stefanik, and I’d say the world had a narrow escape.
There are at least two ways Republicans could react to their electoral drubbing last week. One is to double down on Trumpian rudeness, crudeness, and fictions. For instance, this cartoonish headline at RedState.com: “NYC Falls to Communism, Elects Mamdani Mayor.”
To the contrary, says Adam Wasserman, a retired CIA political analyst who studied the Soviet Union and its breakup. People like Mamdani and Sen. Bernie Sanders “are social democrats, who want a stronger government role in regulating the private sector and providing services for citizens,” he writes at the “Steady State,” a group newsletter focused on national security. “They do not call for the end of capitalism. They do not call for suppression of political opponents. They do not call for a one-party state. They are not ‘radicals,’ except in the rhetoric of today’s MAGA movement.”
The other path is to take honest positions on Trump’s policies, judgment, and competence. Former Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), says he sees signs of MAGA “defections” already. “Trump’s imitators have not fared well,” he wrote Friday in the Washington Post. “Without the president on the ballot, candidates who rely on grievance and spectacle will find it even harder to win statewide races.”
Or local ones—for instance, the suburban Nassau County legislature outside New York City, where Republican Jennifer Gallub Pravato sent voters several photoshopped mailers of Democratic incumbent Arnold Drucker looking chummy with Mamdani and called them “extremist brothers” with “insane policies.” Never mind that Drucker had denounced Mamdani as “unapologetic, divisive and frankly antisemitic,” while his attorney said he had never met Mamdani and filed a lawsuit calling the mailers “completely fabricated, false, and defamatory.” Drucker won re-election last week.
STEFANIK WAS NOT ALWAYS a self-described “ultra-MAGA” disciple with a record of 100 percent support for Trump (as she has this year). She worked in the George W. Bush administration and has represented New York 21, a sprawling upstate House district known for dairy farms and Fort Drum, since 2015.
The district was purplish back then, and she was a moderate. Her rating from the conservative Heritage Foundation for 2017-19, the first half of Trump’s first term, was a fractional 24 percent. Among the many reasons why: She voted for a border bill that would have put 1.8 million immigrants on a path to citizenship, provided money for energy research, and paid for disaster aid for four hurricanes.
She did not vote to defund biofuel and energy subsidy programs, an environmental justice program, or gender transition treatment for members of the military. She also opposed a farm bill that stiffened work requirements for food stamps, and even voted against H.R. 1 (the signature 2017 tax law prioritized by Trump and her party) out of concern about its cap on state and local property tax deductions.
By 2021, Stefanik’s district had moved rightward, and so had she: She was firmly into the Trump-MAGA camp, and House Republicans—after ousting Trump critic Liz Cheney from the no. 3 job in party leadership that spring—elected Stefanik to fill it. She was a Trump defender and loyalist right through January 6th, his impeachments, and his legal troubles.
Double standards required? No problem. This was especially galling after August 2021 findings that then–New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo had sexually harassed eleven women. “We need to make sure that there is equal justice under the law. And whether you’re the most powerful elected official in New York state, laws apply to you just like they do to every other New Yorker,” Stefanik said of Cuomo back then. But as I wrote at the time, “like most of the GOP, she apparently supports a separate justice system for Trump.”
Stefanik endorsed Trump in the 2024 race before he even announced he was running. And while she did not get the vice presidential slot, he did nominate her for U.N. ambassador.
She quit her House leadership post and was preparing to leave for her new job in Manhattan when Trump, worried about his shrinking House majority, changed his mind. House leaders then created what Politico called an honorary position for her as chair of House Republican Leadership.
The Hochul campaign has taken to calling Stefanik “Sellout Stefanik” as she embarks on a puzzling Plan B for resuming her upward career trajectory. Sure, Stefanik may well get a Trump endorsement and win the primary. But after that, the climb is steep.
New York has not elected a Republican governor since George Pataki in 2002. It hasn’t elected a Republican senator since Al D’Amato in 1992. And it has not gone for a Republican presidential candidate since Ronald Reagan in 1984. Newly re-elected Nassau County executive Bruce Blakeman, a Republican who claims he has broader appeal than Stefanik, is already weighing his own race. But he, too, is a Trump ally.
The last Trump loyalist who ran for New York governor and lost, Stefanik’s former House colleague and fellow 2020 election denier Lee Zeldin, now heads the Environmental Protection Agency and helps lead Trumpian efforts to erode U.S. climate and energy policy. (As Semafor put it in an all-too-on-the-nose headline, “EPA gives up.”)
Stefanik’s choices are less puzzling if she sees the race as yet another way to demonstrate her fealty to Trump, with the prospect of a Zeldinesque soft landing in his administration if it doesn’t work out. Not a bad Plan C—except that trusting Trump can be risky, and she knows that better than most.
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