Photo: Will Waldron/Albany Times Union/Getty Images

On July 2, 2024, her 40th birthday, New York congresswoman Elise Stefanik seemed to be on top of the word. She was in her fifth term in the House after becoming (at the time) the youngest woman ever to be elected to Congress. She had quickly risen to the No. 4 position in the House GOP leadership, serving as Donald Trump’s instrument for purging Liz Cheney from the same position. She had secured a star turn in the House as the designated tormenter of Ivy League schools for their tolerance of pro-Palestinian protesters, legal tender for political success in New York. And she she was on Trump’s vice-presidential shortlist, a spectacular opportunity to become heir apparent to the 78-year-old leader of the MAGA movement who would be a lame duck win or lose.

Soon Stefanik’s heaven-blessed career took a series of detours. She was passed over for veep in favor of J.D. Vance, who was even younger than she was. She also didn’t secure the major Cabinet appointment she might have expected. But she was able to announce on November 10 that Trump had asked her to serve as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, a high-profile, low-responsibility job that had served Nikki Haley well. Then that shiny prize turned to ashes as her confirmation was delayed, and then her nomination was withdrawn out of fears that her poorly timed departure would endanger the GOP’s fragile House majority. But by the time that happened, her House leadership position had been given to someone else, and she looked like the odd woman out at a moment when her party and her president were riding very high.

After mulling over her options and nursing her grudges — particularly against House Speaker Mike Johnson, whom she blamed for the White House decision to force her to remain in Washington — Stefanik has now decided to make up for lost time by an audacious leap into the unknown: a 2026 run for governor of New York, a position no Republican has held since George Pataki left office at the end of 2006. The timing for a challenge to incumbent Democrat Kathy Hochul is arguably suspect, since midterm winds typically blow against the party controlling the White House, particularly when its leader is as unpopular as Trump. Axios explains her thinking:

Stefanik’s team thinks she has a shot at winning in mostly Democratic New York partly because the state shifted further rightward than any other state in the 2024 elections.

Trump got more than 3.5 million votes in New York, more than any GOP presidential candidate since Ronald Reagan in 1988.

Trump received 800,000 more votes than Republican Lee Zeldin got in 2022, when Zeldin lost the governor’s race to Hochul.

Stefanik’s campaign will put a premium on voters who backed Trump but not Zeldin, a person familiar with the campaign says.

Stefanik’s team also is betting that her focus on combating antisemitism will help her in a state with the nation’s highest concentration of Jewish residents — more than 8% of the population.

A lot of this happy talk is dubious. Despite his gains, Trump lost New York by more than 12 points on by far the best day of his political career before or since. He won 800,000 more votes than Lee Zeldin because he was running in a presidential year in which well over 2 million more total votes were cast. There’s no reason to think there are a lot of Trump-Hochul voters out there ready to flip to Stefanik. And while Stefanik definitely exploited Jewish fears about Israel during the war with Hamas, that war is now more or less over with Israel having won despite conduct that has eroded its support among all Americans.

But one other argument cited by Axios for Stefanik ’26 helps explain why she’s apparently waiting to announce her candidacy until after New York’s mayoral election on Tuesday. “Her team believes some New York voters will turn on Democrats after democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani is elected New York City’s mayor next week, as those in both parties expect,” Axios reported, with the damage spreading to Hochul.

Now there’s no question Republicans will try to turn Mamdani into a national bogeyman if he wins; Trump already routinely calls him a communist. But when Stefanik faces voters next November, Mamdani will have had just ten months to “Bolshevize” the city, if that’s what he intends to do, and the odds are good that he will have moderated his image in order to make progress on his popular affordability agenda. But more to the point, Stefanik’s beloved leader in the White House will be dominating the news with his endless power grabs and increasingly unpopular policies, punctuated by threats to states like New York, which seems sure to be the object of intense immigration raids and probably National Guard deployments precisely when the midterm campaign is unfolding.

Stefanik’s camp is touting a new poll from the right-wing Manhattan Institute think tank showing her actually leading Hochul by a point. To call that an outlier is a vast understatement. A September poll from the much more established and credible Siena outfit showed Hochul leading Stefanik by 25 points (52 percent to 27 percent). She has a long way to go in proving herself as a serious threat to win.

The irony is that the House Republican conference Stefanik is abandoning could actually hang onto its majority thanks to Trump’s unprecedented nationwide mid-decade gerrymandering campaign. But in her eyes she has been there and done that, and it’s possible that Trump is promising her whatever she wants in the last two years of his presidency if she performs this party chore in his native state. It’s probably the only play she has to get her once-dazzling political career back on track.

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