At a candidate forum for Democrats preparing to challenge Congresswoman Elise Stefanik of New York, the youngest woman in Congress, one of the candidates proclaimed, “I probably deserve to be called a sexist,” did not back down from calling the congresswoman “a little girl” and went on to call her “a child.”
Democrat Steve Krieg, a Plattsburgh City School Board member, declared: “I have been accused of being a sexist for calling Elise a little girl. Uh, and I probably deserve to be called a sexist. I think most of us if we admit it have some of sexist in us, racist within us. It’s something that if we’re decent people, we recognize in ourselves and we struggle with it all of our lives. But Elise [Stefanik], I recognize her, I’m not going to say as a little girl, I recognize her as a child. And it has nothing to do with her age. I see her as a child because she’s a child. She thinks like a child. She has people set things up for her, she has people put their words in her mouth and she happily repeats them. And I think recognizing her, I would go after her in that way. And I apologize if that’s mean but that’s how I would do it.”
It’s worth noting that none of the other Democratic candidates on the stage objected to that language or characterization. Once again we see the consistent principle of, ”it’s only sexism when someone in the other party does it.”
Earlier in the year, the National Republican Congressional Committee noted that the Democrats had not listed Stefanik’s 21st Congressional District in New York among their 59 highest-priority target seats.
Stefanik won by a “mere” 35 points in 2016, or “only” about 91,000 votes.