Once seen as a moderate, Stefanik went all-in on Trump’s post-election claims — and is about to win a spot in House GOP leadership.
Once seen as a moderate, Stefanik went all-in on Trump’s post-election claims — and is about to win a spot in House GOP leadership.
I f you talk to anyone who has known or worked with Elise Stefanik since her earliest days in Washington, she is almost invariably described as smart, hard-working, and ambitious. “You could always tell she was going places,” a former colleague of hers tells me.
With a résumé like Stefanik’s, it was hard to think she wouldn’t end up somewhere important someday.
A Harvard grad who worked in the Bush White House straight out of college, Stefanik did stints at a pair of neoconservative think tanks before working on a couple of presidential campaigns.
I first got to know Stefanik a bit in the spring of 2011, during a trip to Israel for journalists and think-tank staffers, and my general impression of her was the same as others’ — bright, personable, going places. The next time I recall running into Stefanik was in August that same year, at the Iowa Straw Poll in Ames, where she was working as a campaign staffer for Tim Pawlenty. She was hauling around a box, if memory serves, of ice-cream treats — one of the perks for attendees of the now-defunct Straw Poll is that campaigns could woo voters with food. Grunt work was not beneath the policy staffer with Ivy League credentials.
A year later, Stefanik was in charge of debate preparation for GOP vice-presidential nominee Paul Ryan, and after the election she worked on the RNC’s Growth and Opportunity Project — a.k.a. the 2012 GOP “autopsy.”
“I always found her to be sharp-minded, quick-witted and extraordinarily nice and easy to work with,” says former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer, one of the co-chairs of the Growth and Opportunity Project.
The GOP autopsy is reviled by many populists and conservatives for its conclusion that the Republican Party needed to embrace comprehensive immigration reform, but Fleischer says Stefanik didn’t have a hand in the substance of the report. “I wrote it,” he said of the section on immigration. “Elise didn’t help write it. It wouldn’t be fair to say that.”
Sally Bradshaw, another co-chair of the Growth and Opportunity Project who had previously served as chief of staff to Florida governor Jeb Bush, also had a glowing impression of Stefanik. “I really respected Elise when we worked together,” Bradshaw told me in an email. “I was proud to contribute to her first campaign for Congress.”
Bradshaw and Fleischer went separate ways in the Trump era: Bradshaw left the GOP and politics for good in 2016 and now runs an independent bookstore in Tallahassee. Fleischer, meanwhile, remains firmly in the Republican fold: He was invited by Kevin McCarthy to give a briefing at the GOP retreat in Orlando this spring. And as their views on Trump and the GOP have diverged, so have their views on Stefanik.
“Her embrace of Donald Trump defies logic. I’ve never seen a more striking case of reverse evolution,” Bradshaw says of Stefanik. “I am saddened to know that she cares about power more than principle, but there is simply no other explanation for her behavior. She’s too smart to be this dumb.”
Many elected Republicans underwent a certain kind of change in the Trump years. Marco Rubio said Donald Trump couldn’t be trusted with the nuclear codes, then voted for him anyway. Lindsey Graham refused to vote for Trump in 2016, calling him “a kook” and saying, “I think he’s crazy. I think he’s unfit to be president.” In November 2017, Graham said that “what concerns me about the American press is this endless, endless attempt to label the president some kind of kook.”
What’s striking about Stefanik’s evolution is the pace at which it occurred: slowly at first — then all at once.
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Stefanik has always had a knack for understanding the nature of the Republican coalition. In 2014, she united the Tea Party and GOP establishment to win a GOP congressional primary against a multimillionaire pro-choice Republican who had been the GOP nominee in 2010 and 2012 and lost the general election each time in part because of dissension on the right. At the age of 29, Stefanik won the general election in a blowout and became the youngest woman ever elected to Congress (a record now held by another member from New York, Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez).
Throughout the 2016 campaign, Stefanik consistently said that she was voting for her party’s presidential nominee, but she also had plenty of criticism for Trump over his denigration of women and his comments bashing a Gold Star family, among other matters. After Trump was elected, she continued to praise him when she thought he was right and criticize him when she thought he was wrong.
Stefanik earns high marks from conservative organizations on the issues of guns and abortion, but she has broken with the Republican Party on some big votes: In 2017, she was one of twelve House Republicans who voted against final passage of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act because it capped the deduction for state and local income taxes. In 2019, Stefanik was one of eight House Republicans who voted for the Equality Act, a sweeping LGBT-rights bill that would, according to one liberal law professor, “crush” religious dissenters. In 2021, Stefanik voted against the Equality Act, saying that the Supreme Court’s 2020 Bostock decision accomplished much of what she wanted from the bill and that she’d always had concerns about it.
She opposed Trump’s 2017 executive order banning travel from several Muslim-majority countries, and in 2019 she voted against allowing Trump to divert money from the military to build the wall on the southern border.
When it comes to Trump, a significant turning point in Stefanik’s career came with the first impeachment trial, in November 2019. On the first day of the House Intelligence Committee’s impeachment hearing, Stefanik was widely praised across the political spectrum as the Republicans’ most effective questioner.
Stefanik’s opposition to impeachment didn’t make her unusual — not a single House Republican voted to impeach Trump the first time around — and her defenses of Trump were usually (but not always) based on factually sound arguments. But the episode did make Stefanik “a new Republican star,” according to a tweet at the time from Donald Trump. She raised half a million dollars in two hours after an appearance on Hannity.
If the first impeachment trial was a turning point for Stefanik, January 6 was more like a point of no return.
On the same day as Stefanik’s breakout performance at the first impeachment trial, Time published its “100 Next” list of emerging leaders. In his appraisal of her for the magazine, former speaker of the House Paul Ryan wrote, “Elise isn’t just the future of the Republican Party. She is the future of hopeful, aspirational politics in America.”
On January 3, 2021, Ryan issued a statement: “Efforts to reject the votes of the Electoral College and sow doubt about Joe Biden’s victory strike at the foundation of our republic. It is difficult to conceive of a more anti-democratic and anti-conservative act than a federal intervention to overturn the results of state-certified elections and disenfranchise millions of Americans.”
The overwhelming majority of Senate Republicans — including Rubio, Graham, and Tom Cotton — rebuffed efforts to reject the certification of the Electoral College. But Stefanik went all-in on Trump’s post-election claims. On January 6, she joined a majority of House Republicans in rejecting certification of the Electoral College results.
“Today, I will respectfully object to contested electors from the states of Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin,” Stefanik said in a statement issued that morning.
Like Senators Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley, Stefanik pointed to the doubts on the part of some Americans about the election’s legitimacy as a reason to reject certification of the results. But then she went a step further to assert as fact that widespread voter fraud had actually occurred.
In a written statement, Stefanik said that in Georgia “more than 140,000 votes came from underage, deceased, and otherwise unauthorized voters — in Fulton County alone.”
If Stefanik’s statement were correct, that would mean that more than 25 percent of all ballots cast in Fulton County, home to Atlanta, were illegitimate. Last week, the Georgia secretary of state’s office called Stefanik’s claim “ludicrous.”
“The Georgia Secretary of State’s office knows the age of everyone who voted because they had to be registered in order to vote, and there were no underage voters,” a spokesman for Brad Raffensperger, the Republican who holds that office, said in an email to CNN. “Across the state, we found only 2 votes credited to dead voters. The suggestion that one fourth of all ballots cast in Fulton County in November were illegal is ludicrous.”
In the Capitol on Wednesday, I asked Stefanik if she stood by her claim that 140,000 votes cast in Fulton County were illegitimate.
“I stand by my statement on the House floor in January, and I stand by my statement that there are serious issues related to election irregularities in the state of Georgia, as well as Pennsylvania, Michigan, [and] Wisconsin,” she replied.
What’s the basis for Stefanik’s claim that 140,000 votes were illegitimate? “The basis for that is that was filed in a court case.”
Does she still think 140,000 votes in Georgia were illegitimate? “I think there are questions that are important for the American people to hear answers to,” Stefanik replied.
But again, Stefanik did not present the wild claim of widespread voter fraud in Georgia as a question in January — she asserted it as a fact, and gave it as a reason that she opposed certification of Georgia’s electoral votes. Now she says she both “stand[s] by” her January statement while suggesting she’s just asking questions.
If you believe House minority leader Kevin McCarthy, however, those questions aren’t being raised anymore. “I don’t think anybody is questioning the legitimacy of the presidential election,” McCarthy told reporters on Wednesday.
McCarthy wrote in a letter to GOP colleagues on Tuesday that Wyoming representative Liz Cheney had to be removed from her post as House Republican Conference chair because she was “relitigating the past,” but he now wants Cheney to be replaced by Stefanik, who is standing by her statement about voter fraud in Georgia. On Steve Bannon’s podcast last week, Stefanik also endorsed the Arizona GOP’s election audit. The audit “makes us look like idiots,” one Arizona GOP state senator, who initially supported the audit, said last week. “Looking back, I didn’t think it would be this ridiculous. It’s embarrassing to be a state senator at this point.”
If talking about Trump and the 2020 election is so much of a distraction that it renders one unfit to serve in House GOP leadership, then Stefanik would be just as ill-suited to the job as Cheney. Of course, McCarthy’s real problem with Cheney was that she was defending the legitimacy of the 2020 election in response to Trump’s ongoing efforts to convince Americans that it was stolen.
“The president has been our strongest supporter of any president when it comes to standing up for the Constitution,” Stefanik told Steve Bannon last week, referring to the former president.
Some who have known Stefanik over the years have been puzzled by her decision to put all of her chips on Trump, but the bet has certainly paid off for her career in the short run. Despite grumblings among some House conservatives over her relatively liberal voting record, she is virtually certain to ascend to House GOP Conference chair.
Stefanik’s bet on Trump may pay off for her career in the long run, too: In five of the last seven presidential elections, the GOP vice-presidential nominee has been a former House GOP Conference chair. The main cost to Stefanik, so far, has been saying things that she cannot possibly believe are true and casting a vote — in the words of her mentor Paul Ryan — to “strike at the foundation of our republic.”