ALBANY, New York — Empire State Democrats are salivating over the possibility of Rep. Elise Stefanik leading the Republican ticket in deep blue New York next year.
Stefanik, a zealous ally of President Donald Trump, launched her long-expected gubernatorial campaign Friday — handing Democrats a chance to tie every Republican in the state to Trump’s brand of politics. It’s already making some Republicans quietly nervous that down-ballot candidates in crucial House races will suffer.
Trump is easy fodder for Democrats in a state where Republicans have a vast enrollment disadvantage and a GOP candidate hasn’t won statewide since 2002. Democrats expect to have plenty of material next year — his trade war, threats to send federal troops to New York City and deep cuts to popular aid programs among them — to weaponize in campaign ads.
“It’s about a guy who is hurting people. And thankfully the American people and New Yorkers — despite the BS spin Trump and Stefanik put on this — are saying, ‘We feel this,’” Democratic Rep. Pat Ryan said in an interview Friday. “The harm is only going to get worse. That will certainly motivate folks.”
A Stefanik nomination would test whether a Trump-supporting Republican can win in a state that’s soundly rejected the president in three elections and where he remains deeply unpopular. New York is home to several swing House seats that may determine control of the narrowly divided chamber next year — making a strong top of the ticket essential for GOP candidates in tight races.
Those stakes, which will determine the future of Trump’s final two years in office and the country’s direction, are leading some Republicans to privately panic that a Trump acolyte’s nomination will dash their chances of retaining power in Washington.
“Nominating Elise would be like putting Trump at the top of the ticket next year and hoping everyone survives,” said one Republican operative who was granted anonymity to speak candidly about the dynamic.
Elected to the House a decade ago in a deep red district, the 41-year-old Stefanik is the longest-serving New York Republican in Washington and has long been considered a rising star within the party. Known for having sharp elbows, she’s emerged as a prominent — and fervent — Trump supporter in an otherwise Democratic-dominated state.
Her potential nomination stands to negate Democratic queasiness surrounding Gov. Kathy Hochul, an incumbent with middling popularity whose weak showing three years ago was cited by Rep. Nancy Pelosi as the reason Democrats lost control of the House. Hochul’s campaign on Friday called Stefanik “a Trump cheerleader.” The governor faces a Democratic primary against her hand-picked lieutenant governor, Antonio Delgado.
Stefanik said a Trump-focused strategy will only work to energize the state’s Trump voters — noting the president received over 400,000 more votes in New York in 2024 than the governor did in 2022.
“As much as Kathy Hochul wishes otherwise, New Yorkers know that his election is about Kathy Hochul and her failed policies making New York the most unaffordable state in the nation,” Stefanik spokesman Alex DeGrasse said. “Hochul’s campaign is turning out low propensity Trump voters for Elise. Thank You Kathy!”
Republicans are counting on the bellwether Long Island suburbs to continue trending their way as they fight to flip two House seats and retain Rep. Mike Lawler’s Hudson Valley seat.
Stefanik has already signaled she will leverage Zohran Mamdani and his victory in the New York City mayoral race this week. Her announcement video released Friday morning featured images of Mamdani standing next to Hochul and one of him wearing a bandit-like mask while a narrator calls him “a defund the police, tax-hiking, antisemitic communist.” Polls have shown Mamdani, who holds anti-Israel views, is unpopular in the politically crucial suburbs.
Trump — or any reference to the president — is not featured in the video.
Stefanik’s Republican allies scoff at the idea that Democrats will conversely attempt to cast Trump in a similar light — as a GOP albatross.
“Between Kathy Hochul’s sagging approval and Zohran Mamdani’s radical socialist agenda, New York Democrats are stuck campaigning under poison-pill leadership,” said National Republican Congressional Committee spokesperson Maureen O’Toole. “Republicans will keep focusing on common sense results that work for their communities.”
Few New York Republicans have been as closely associated with Trump as Stefanik, a former aide to Paul Ryan’s vice presidential bid and a MAGA convert.
She ardently defended the Republican president during his first impeachment, earning kudos from a base initially skeptical of her Trump bona fides. Stefanik has voted 100 percent of the time with Trump in the House — including his sweeping domestic policy legislation that will significantly reduce federal funding to New York. She was poised to join his cabinet earlier this year as his United Nations ambassador, only to have the nomination yanked. And Stefanik has proudly declared herself “ultra MAGA” — a reflection of her own rural House seat that stretches from the Albany area to the Canadian border.
The rest of the state, however, is far less hospitable to the president — especially in vote-rich New York City, where he is highly unpopular.
Trump has threatened to slash federal aid to New York City and has not ruled in sending National Guard troops to patrol the streets — a vow that stands to be realized now that Mamdani will be sworn in as the Big Apple’s next mayor on Jan. 1. Spending cuts induced by the federal government shutdown are wreaking havoc on emergency food aid for needy people. Trump’s trade war with Canada has hampered farmers and tourism as well — including those in Stefanik’s sprawling upstate House district.
“Elise Stefanik wraps her arms around Donald Trump and squeezes as tightly as she can, and I don’t understand how an intelligent person sees that and thinks she can win statewide in New York,” said Morgan Hook, a Democratic operative and former aide to ex-Gov. David Paterson. “It’s not going to take a whole lot. There’s no argument that Elise Stefanik wants to be as cozy as possible because she says it herself.”
Her launch comes just days after New York’s local elections. Preliminary results indicate the state’s shift toward Democrats might have been even broader than in 2017 — when local results presaged the 2018 “Blue Wave” election in which Democrats rode anti-Trump fervor to record results.
The leftward shift was especially visible in purple upstate counties where several of the state’s congressional battlegrounds are located — and where a Republican gubernatorial hopeful needs to run up the score. Democrats won a majority in the Dutchess County Legislature for the second time since 1977. They made significant gains in races for the Orange County Legislature and Columbia County sheriff’s office, and won big in eight of the ten largest upstate towns.
In Onondaga County — home to Democratic Rep. John Mannion’s battleground seat — Democrats won control of the county legislature for the first time since President Gerald Ford’s time in the White House. The party attempted to flip eight Republican-controlled town executive offices and succeeded in seven of them.
“Everywhere on the ballot in Onondaga County, in red towns, purple towns, or blue towns, Democrats won and in many cases were put in charge of political subdivisions they’ve never been in charge of before,” Democratic election commissioner Dustin Czarny said. “There’s no comparison in my 30 years of working in politics here in Onondaga.”
Czarny said it was easier to energize Democrats off Trump this election cycle compared to eight years ago because of shifts within the Republican Party.
“In the first Trump years, the local Republicans would say, ‘Oh, I’m not really for all that stuff.’ Now, nationwide, the party has embraced it.”
Republicans also expect any GOP candidate would be tied to the president.
Democrats have tried to make Trump and his agenda the main issue in each of the past two gubernatorial elections. Former Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s 2018 campaign regularly characterized Republican Marc Molinaro as a “Trump mini-me,” and Cuomo put up one of the highest margins in state history while running in a wave year.
The attacks seemed to stick less when Trump was out of the White House in 2022: “There are people who are obsessed over this theory that the top three issues of New Yorkers are orange man bad, orange man bad, orange man bad,” Republican nominee Lee Zeldin said that year.
Some Democrats cautioned that framing the election around Trump without offering a countervailing message is a mistake and pointed to Kamala Harris’s failed White House bid last year as a prime example. State Sen. Gustavo Rivera said Mamdani’s victory offers a blueprint.
“The lesson for the Democratic Party is this is the type of campaign we need to do across the country,” Rivera said. “It’s about the affordability crisis and how we fight against it. The message isn’t just that Trump is terrible, but if the message is a positive one, then it will be far more potent.”
