How Elise Stefanik lost a House race she wasn't even running in
The reason Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) is cooling her heels in the House instead of heading to the United Nations to give them hell at Turtle Bay is that Republicans have gotten a case of the nerves.
Depending on what happens in a few elections being held Tuesday, their condition is about to get a lot worse or a lot better.
Stefanik is a kind of House of Representatives version of Vice President Vance. She started out as an old-fashioned Republican national security hawk, working in former President George W. Bush's White House after Harvard, then the Romney-Ryan campaign in 2012. When a loss blocked that path forward, she went home to Albany and looked for another way.
The House district just north of where she grew up had been redrawn after the 2010 census to include everything from above Albany all the way to the Canadian border, basically the right side of the 'Y' shape of the Empire State. Former Rep. Bill Owens, a moderate Democrat, had flipped the old district in a special election in 2009, but quit after the new district took shape for the 2014 midterms.
That opened the way for Stefanik, then just 30 years old, to become the youngest woman ever elected to Congress. She was the dark horse in the primary, but tapped the deep pockets of the Bush political universe to win. Then, as her party changed, she changed right along with it. In the span of less than eight years, she went from Bush-Cheney wunderkind to the woman who knocked off Dick Cheney's daughter, Liz, to become the No. 4 member of the Republican House leadership.
Her unflinching defenses of President Trump won her lots of cred in a MAGA world skeptical of her hawkish, Bushie past. But it was her evisceration of the then-president of Columbia University and other administrators of elite schools in the spring of last year over the anti-Israel protests on their campuses that won her a spot on the shortlist to be Trump's running mate.
Vance, who had emerged and reinvented himself even more swiftly and thoroughly than Stefanik, got that gig. Her consolation prize, though, was a good one. Ambassador to the United Nations is a job with Cabinet-level visibility but located a comfortable 232 miles away from destructive White House drama.
When Trump tapped Stefanik, however, he was plucking other Republicans from the House, including Mike Waltz of Florida—now famous as the father of the indiscreet airstrike chat—to be his national security adviser. When Trump also chose Matt Gaetz, a man with all of Stefanik's ambition and none of her self-control, for an abortive bid to be attorney general, it made three sitting members of Congress to be yanked out of what was already the narrowest House majority in history.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) was in charge of setting the replacement elections for Waltz and Gaetz, which made the timing no problem. And Gaetz's district on the Flora-Bama Coast is so Republican that the GOP could put up a conch shell with an American flag pin and still win by 10.
Waltz's district on the other side of the state is almost equally red. And if they had gone with a patriotic conch shell over there, Republicans would have probably been OK. Instead of OK, they got Fine.
Randy Fine 'semi-retired' in 2016 at the age of 40 from his work in the casino industry to set up shop near Melbourne Beach and ran for a seat in the Florida House. His bomb-throwing ways there won him few friends, but Fine deployed his personal wealth in 2024 to win an open seat in the state Senate, which made him an appealing recruit for Washington Republicans.
But Fine did not initially self-fund, and given his many fraught relationships and the uncompetitive district, he did not find donors beating a path to his door. Democrat Josh Weil, a middle school teacher, quickly tapped into the network of Democratic small-dollar donors and raised heaps of cash for a long-shot bid. And as early voting began, the race in a district that went for the GOP by more than 30 points last year looked like a tie.
Republicans probably caught it in time. Weil's early overperformance might have been sufficient in an ultra-low turnout election, but that success brought attention and money from Washington, including from President Trump and his right-hand man, Elon Musk. Even nudging up turnout by 10 percent would probably be enough to save the Republican.
Fine will probably be, well, you know, fine. The loser isn't going to be Weil, though. It's Stefanik. The ramming-speed schedule in Congress as Republicans try to get their package of tax and spending cuts through means there won't be a good time anytime soon to be down another member. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul would have 90 days to call an election if Stefanik resigned, giving the Democratic governor plenty of time to delay while Republicans in Washington scrambled for votes.
And given what Republicans are seeing with Fine and elsewhere, it's hardly a sure thing that the GOP could hold the seat in a special election. If they're sucking wind in Florida now, how much worse might things look in New York by the end of summer?
The expectations game is a funny thing, though. If Fine wins by, say, 15 points after all this, it will look like a show of strength for the GOP. If the race had never looked competitive, Democrats would have been crowing about Fine's underperformance compared to 2024.
If Fine cruises in Florida and Musk's massive spending in a Wisconsin state Supreme Court race can deliver a win there, Republicans will be feeling a lot more chipper about their chances. That would be an especially bitter pill for Stefanik, who came so close to the Cabinet. But if her story tells us anything, she'll be back.
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