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      Elise Stefanik Says She’s Confident a Republican Wave Is Coming to the House

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      Representative Elise Stefanik, the No. 3 House Republican, also spoke about her PAC’s success in backing female candidates, 23 of whom are running in the fall.Today’s newsletter is a guest dispatch from Annie Karni, a congressional correspondent in Washington.Representative Elise Stefanik of New York, the No. 3 House Republican, predicted on Wednesday that her party would pick up as many as three dozen House seats in November, despite signs that the red wave many predicted months ago might not form after all.And, brushing aside concerns from many Republicans that the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade has saddled them with an unpopular position that is energizing Democrats all over the country, Stefanik told reporters defiantly at a news conference that “we will have a pro-life Republican majority in the next Congress.”Stefanik, who was first elected in 2014 to her upstate New York seat as a relative moderate, became a star of the MAGA universe thanks to her role as President Donald J. Trump’s chief defender on the House Intelligence Committee during his first impeachment trial.She has translated her Trump-refracted fame into a fund-raising boon for female Republican candidates she is boosting in critical House races — a move that is also helping build a base in the G.O.P. House conference for a politician with big ambitions.“My own experience going through impeachment No. 1, where I played an outsized role on the House Intelligence Committee — we built up a national donor list,” Stefanik said Wednesday at a briefing at the Republican National Committee about the midterm elections. “We’ve been able to have that donor list support other women candidates across the country.”Stefanik, 38, founded her political action committee, Elevate PAC, or E-PAC, in 2018, when only 13 Republican women served in the House of Representatives. At the time, her goal was to elect more conservative women to Congress.In 2020, 11 of the 15 House seats that Republicans flipped were won by women that E-PAC had endorsed. Today, there are 34 Republican women in the House.During this campaign cycle, Stefanik’s organization has raised and donated more than $1 million directly to female Republican candidates, and 23 women endorsed by E-PAC are running in the general election. Since its creation, E-PAC has raised $4 million to date.Another part of Stefanik’s aim is to help with news coverage. “One thing that is very clear to me is Democrat women get outsized coverage in the media,” Stefanik said. “They get magazine covers.” Those she helps, she said, “deserve glossy magazines as well.”The outcome of those races will help determine Stefanik’s clout as a queenmaker in the current, Trump-controlled version of the Republican Party. Her activities are also a key part of the G.O.P.’s overall midterm strategy to expand beyond the core political base of right-wing and conservative voters with a more diverse slate.The push to elevate female candidates comes as the Republican Party struggles to overcome political gains Democrats have made on the issue of abortion since the overturning of Roe v. Wade.In an election year when political tensions are running high over gender and social issues, liberal groups are willing to give Stefanik only so much credit for helping to elect women.“There are challenges that all women face in running for office,” said Christina Reynolds, a spokeswoman for Emily’s List, a group that backs Democratic female candidates who support abortion rights. “I understand why there’s a need for this on both sides of the aisle.”But she added, “To support women’s rights, to support our freedoms, we think it’s critical that we elect Democratic, pro-choice women.”Stefanik shrugged off questions about how the issue of abortion will affect the midterms. Her party has struggled to unite behind a strategy on a fraught social issue that is reshaping campaigns across the country and, in some cases, forcing Republicans to backpedal on hard-line positions they took to win their primaries.“On the issue of abortion, Democrats are working overtime to force the American people to rethink what their top priorities are,” Stefanik said. “In every poll, inflation is the No. 1 issue. In my district, Second Amendment issues are second. Our candidates know how to communicate on this issue.”Stefanik also emphasized that many of the candidates she is backing are mothers. “I think that’s a very compelling message to voters,” she said, noting that one congressional candidate in Ohio, Madison Gesiotto Gilbert, gave birth just days ago.E-PAC’s slate of candidates includes seven who are Hispanic, four who are veterans and one who is Black. Stefanik said it was the most diverse group of candidates her PAC had supported to date.Stefanik said she had no ideological litmus test for candidates to gain her organization’s financial backing and endorsement.This cycle, she has backed candidates who falsely claim that Trump won the 2020 election, like Karoline Leavitt in New Hampshire’s First Congressional District and Yesli Vega in Virginia’s Seventh District.Vega has come under attack for questioning on tape whether a woman was less likely to become pregnant after a rape.Stefanik also supported Representative Mayra Flores, who won a special election in Texas’s 34th District after saying, falsely, that the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol was stoked by members of Antifa and used a hashtag associated with the QAnon conspiracy theory in tweets that were later deleted.At the same time, Stefanik is backing Barbara Kirkmeyer, a state senator running in Colorado’s competitive Eighth District, who said President Biden legitimately won the 2020 election.Stefanik simply interviews candidates who are able to raise $250,000 in their first quarter, she said, and decides which of them have what it takes, based on her gut feeling and experience.“I interview and talk with everyone,” she said. “I put candidates through their paces. I ask how they would answer certain questions from the media.”After meeting hundreds of candidates across the country over the years, she said, “I’m able to tell pretty quickly, No. 1, if they have the fire in the belly, and also if they’re speaking from the heart on behalf of their district. I don’t do any ideological litmus test. These are all strong, conservative Republicans.”Karoline Leavitt with Senator Ted Cruz before her primary. “When you start your campaign as an outsider, you’re looking for that early support and help,” Leavitt said of Stefanik’s political action committee.Brian Snyder/ReutersIn some cases, Stefanik’s endorsements have put her at odds with leadership. She endorsed Leavitt, a 25-year-old hard-right Republican who served as an assistant in Trump’s White House press office before winning the G.O.P. nomination for a House seat in New Hampshire. Representative Kevin McCarthy, the House minority leader, was backing Leavitt’s rival, Matt Mowers, in the primary.“When you start your campaign as an outsider, you’re looking for that early support and help,” Leavitt said on Wednesday, joining Stefanik briefly as an example of an E-PAC success story. She said that Stefanik, whom she once worked for, was “someone that I leaned on, not only for financial support through E-PAC but also for advice and support.”Republicans are expected to win back control of the House next year, although in recent weeks, the political winds that once favored them have shifted toward Democrats.Still, for Democrats to retain a majority, they will have to hold virtually all their tossup districts in addition to flipping some tossup seats Republicans currently hold.Stefanik said she remains bullish about a red wave.“I remember on election night in 2020 when people said Nancy Pelosi would pick up 15 seats,” she said, referring to the House speaker. “Well, Republicans picked up 15 seats.”She added: “Eighty percent of their dollars are on defense. Do I think we have the opportunity to earn that historic majority of 35 seats? I do. I’ve always thought that this cycle.”What to readToday’s big story: Letitia James, the attorney general of New York, filed a lawsuit accusing the Trump Organization, former President Trump and three of his children of what she called “staggering fraud.” Jonah E. Bromwich, William K. Rashbaum and Ben Protess wrote the main article examining the 220-page claim, and I have a short piece on the politics at play.The House voted mostly along party lines to overhaul the 135-year-old Electoral Count Act, the law that Trump tried to exploit to overturn his defeat, Carl Hulse reports.At the United Nations, President Biden called on countries to unify in the face of Russian aggression in Ukraine. Moscow’s goal, he said, is “extinguishing Ukraine’s right to exist as a state.” Follow our live coverage of the U.N. General Assembly here.The Federal Reserve tightened interest rates by a further three-quarters of a percentage point fewer than seven weeks before the November elections, an effort to stem inflation that remains stubbornly high. Chairman Jerome Powell said the U.S. economy was fundamentally healthy, however. The Times’s economic team covered all the angles here.Thank you for reading On Politics, and for being a subscriber to The New York Times. — BlakeRead past editions of the newsletter here.If you’re enjoying what you’re reading, please consider recommending it to others. They can sign up here. Browse all of our subscriber-only newsletters here.Have feedback? Ideas for coverage? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com. More

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      In New Hampshire, a MAGA Rivalry Is Splitting House Republicans

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      WASHINGTON — He calls her “fake MAGA Karoline” from “the swamp.” She calls him a “Fauci foot soldier” and a “pharma bro.”A congressional primary in New Hampshire between two young, conservative former Trump staff members has divided MAGA Republicans and the party’s leaders in the House, devolving into a bitter, expensive battle over who carries the mantle of Trumpism.The race, in a highly competitive district currently held by a Democrat, will be decided on Tuesday. Its outcome could determine whether Republicans have a chance at flipping the seat in the midterm elections in November as part of their drive to reclaim the House majority. The contest has also highlighted a power struggle in the party ranks that will shape what that majority might look like if Republicans take control.Matt Mowers, 33, who worked on Donald J. Trump’s 2016 campaign, served him at the State Department and was endorsed by the former president in an unsuccessful bid for the same congressional seat in 2020. Mr. Mowers entered the race last year as the presumed front-runner against Representative Chris Pappas of New Hampshire, who is one of the most vulnerable Democrats in the country in this election cycle.Mr. Mowers is viewed as a strong candidate with high name recognition in the state’s First Congressional District; he drew favorable coverage from right-wing news outlets like Breitbart and a well of endorsements from powerful conservative figures. They include Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the minority leader; Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana, the No. 2 House Republican; Representative Jim Banks of Indiana; as well as Corey Lewandowski and David Bossie, the former Trump campaign managers.But despite all that, Mr. Mowers is facing a strident and surprisingly fierce challenge on his right from Karoline Leavitt, 25, a former assistant in Mr. Trump’s White House press office. She is backed by a host of hard-right Republicans in Congress, including Senator Ted Cruz of Texas and Representatives Lauren Boebert of Colorado, Jim Jordan of Ohio and Elise Stefanik of New York, the No. 3 House Republican.The race has turned less on any ideological divide between the candidates, who have few discernible differences on policy, than on style and tone. Where Mr. Mowers opts for nuanced, carefully worded statements, Ms. Leavitt almost always reaches for the most extreme and provocative ones.Her success at turning the primary into a neck-and-neck competition has underscored how in the current Republican Party, fealty to Mr. Trump is not always enough on its own to sway voters. What increasingly matters is a willingness to mimic his tactics, by adopting inflammatory language and making the most incendiary statements possible.“Maybe in part because Leavitt came out of the White House press operation, it’s like a second language to her,” Dante J. Scala, a political science professor at the University of New Hampshire, said of her ability to channel the style and rhetoric of the MAGA movement. “Her campaign has been the whole package, and that’s put Mowers to the wall.”Gail Huff Brown and Matt Mowers during a debate in Henniker, N.H., on Thursday. They are among the candidates running against Ms. Leavitt in the Republican primary.Mary Schwalm/Associated PressTake, for instance, Mr. Trump’s lie that the 2020 election was stolen. When pressed about whether he agrees, Mr. Mowers has said he harbors concerns about voting “irregularities around the country.”That was too wishy-washy for Ms. Leavitt, who repeats Mr. Trump’s falsehoods unequivocally.“We need candidates who are willing to speak truth about the election, who are willing to push back,” she said during an interview at the Conservative Political Action Conference in February, where she also bragged that Facebook had removed an interview she had done with the former Trump adviser Stephen K. Bannon in which she asserted that the election had been stolen. “If you’re not willing to say what happened in 2020, then, gosh, you don’t deserve to be elected.”Ms. Leavitt later accused Mr. Mowers of siding “with Joe Biden and the Democrats by refusing to stand for election integrity and support audits.” She has also said she would support Mr. Jordan for speaker rather than Mr. McCarthy, though she later said she would back Mr. McCarthy.The State of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsWith the primaries winding down, both parties are starting to shift their focus to the general election on Nov. 8.Abrams’s Struggles: Stacey Abrams has been trailing her Republican rival, Gov. Brian Kemp, alarming those who celebrated her as the master strategist behind Georgia’s Democratic shift.Battleground Pennsylvania: Few states feature as many high-stakes, competitive races as Pennsylvania, which has emerged as the nation’s center of political gravity.The Dobbs Decision’s Effect: Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, the number of women signing up to vote has surged in some states and the once-clear signs of a Republican advantage are hard to see.How a G.O.P. Haul Vanished: Last year, the campaign arm of Senate Republicans was smashing fund-raising records. Now, most of the money is gone.At a recent debate, when asked whether he would support impeaching President Biden, Mr. Mowers said he would want to have hearings to look into the issue. Ms. Leavitt said without qualification that she would support any impeachment charge against the president.Each candidate has been savaging the other as a creature of Washington. Mr. Mowers’s campaign operates a “fake MAGA Karoline” website, which accuses her of having “never held a real job outside the swamp,” attending private school in Massachusetts and being registered to vote from the “penthouse” apartment where she lived in Washington before moving back to New Hampshire to run for office.On a site operated by Ms. Leavitt’s campaign, titled “backdoor Matt,” the campaign refers to Mr. Mowers as a “Fauci foot soldier” for his role working in the administration for Dr. Deborah Birx, the former White House coronavirus coordinator. It also refers to him as a “big pharma bro” who worked as a lobbyist for a pharmaceutical company.“Matt Mowers is the swamp,” the website proclaims, noting that he voted in two states — New Hampshire and New Jersey — in the 2016 Republican presidential primary.Mr. Mowers, a former Trump campaign aide, at a rally in 2020 in New Hampshire.Alyssa Schukar for The New York TimesThe race has grown so close and so heated that it is drowning out New Hampshire’s competitive Senate race, with ads from both campaigns blanketing the 5 p.m. news.A recent poll conducted by the University of New Hampshire Survey Center showed Mr. Mowers leading Ms. Leavitt by a razor-thin margin: 26 percent to 24 percent, barely more than the 2.2 percent margin of error, though 26 percent of likely voters said they remained undecided. A third Trump-aligned candidate, Gail Huff Brown — whose husband, the former Massachusetts senator Scott Brown, served as Mr. Trump’s ambassador to New Zealand — was trailing with 16 percent. Two other lesser-known candidates have gained little traction in the race.Money has also poured into the contest, with several outside groups spending millions of dollars trying to defeat Ms. Leavitt, who some Republicans fear could be a weaker opponent against Mr. Pappas..css-1v2n82w{max-width:600px;width:calc(100% – 40px);margin-top:20px;margin-bottom:25px;height:auto;margin-left:auto;margin-right:auto;font-family:nyt-franklin;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1v2n82w{margin-left:20px;margin-right:20px;}}@media only screen and (min-width:1024px){.css-1v2n82w{width:600px;}}.css-161d8zr{width:40px;margin-bottom:18px;text-align:left;margin-left:0;color:var(–color-content-primary,#121212);border:1px solid var(–color-content-primary,#121212);}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-161d8zr{width:30px;margin-bottom:15px;}}.css-tjtq43{line-height:25px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-tjtq43{line-height:24px;}}.css-x1k33h{font-family:nyt-cheltenham;font-size:19px;font-weight:700;line-height:25px;}.css-ok2gjs{font-size:17px;font-weight:300;line-height:25px;}.css-ok2gjs a{font-weight:500;color:var(–color-content-secondary,#363636);}.css-1c013uz{margin-top:18px;margin-bottom:22px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz{font-size:14px;margin-top:15px;margin-bottom:20px;}}.css-1c013uz a{color:var(–color-signal-editorial,#326891);-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;font-weight:500;font-size:16px;}@media only screen and (max-width:480px){.css-1c013uz a{font-size:13px;}}.css-1c013uz a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}How Times reporters cover politics. We rely on our journalists to be independent observers. So while Times staff members may vote, they are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. This includes participating in marches or rallies in support of a movement or giving money to, or raising money for, any political candidate or election cause.Learn more about our process.“Mowers probably has a slight advantage in running against Pappas, because he’s already done it,” said Thomas D. Rath, a former New Hampshire attorney general and longtime Republican strategist. “But she’s engaging because of her youth, her energy and her fierce competitiveness. The momentum is with her.”Even top House Republicans are torn over the race, signaling lingering divisions in the party that could shape how it defines itself no matter who wins. For Mr. McCarthy, who is campaigning to be speaker, a victory by Mr. Mowers would add a reliable ally to his ranks. Ms. Leavitt would be a wild card more in the mold of Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and other hard-right lawmakers who have sometimes proved a thorn in Mr. McCarthy’s side.A senior Republican strategist close to Mr. McCarthy said Mr. Mowers was one of several candidates who ran in 2020 whom the leader was supporting this election cycle, in part because he believed their name recognition and established networks of donors would position them for victories in the general election.Ms. Leavitt, who was an assistant in the Trump White House, repeats the former president’s falsehoods unequivocally.Brian Snyder/ReutersBut Ms. Stefanik, who has styled herself in Mr. Trump’s image and has ambitions to rise in the party, is backing Ms. Leavitt, who previously worked as her communications director. She calls Ms. Leavitt “a rising star in the Republican Party who will carry the torch of conservative values for generations to come.”The Congressional Leadership Fund, a super PAC aligned with Mr. McCarthy, has spent more than $1.3 million supporting Mr. Mowers. Another super PAC that supports moderate Republicans, Defending Main Street, has spent over $1.2 million and is running an ad that describes Ms. Leavitt as a “woke Gen-Z’er” and plays a Snapchat video she once posted where she uses crude language to refer to her viewers.E-Pac, Ms. Stefanik’s outside group that supports conservative female candidates, has maxed out to Ms. Leavitt’s campaign, and Ms. Stefanik has served as an informal adviser to her former aide.Ms. Leavitt has leaned into the attacks to paint herself as a victim. “I am officially the top target of DC’s money machine,” she posted on Twitter this week. “The Establishment knows I am the greatest threat to their handpick puppet Matt Mowers.”Ms. Leavitt’s backers view the money elevating her opponent and the increasingly negative attacks against her as signs of fear from Mr. Mowers and Mr. McCarthy, who they say is trying to put together a compliant conference and views Ms. Leavitt as a maverick who would be difficult to control.In order to sell himself as the Trumpier candidate, Mr. Mowers has advertised his 2020 endorsement from the former president on his campaign mailers, even though Mr. Trump has not made an endorsement in the current contest. (A top Trump aide said he was “still thinking about the race.”)Despite the heated attacks and the stylistic differences, operatives with both campaigns admit there is little that distinguishes the candidates on policy. In their ads introducing themselves to voters, Ms. Leavitt and Mr. Mowers both come across as deeply angry about the state of the country under Mr. Biden’s leadership and pitch themselves as fighters who want to secure the border and stand in the way of Mr. Biden’s agenda. Both oppose abortion rights at the federal level, saying the issue should be left to states.Their rivalry has given Democrats renewed hope of holding the seat. Collin Gately, a spokesman for Mr. Pappas, said the contest had given New Hampshire voters “a front-row seat to the MAGA show” that has prompted both candidates to “run to the right.”“Their eventual nominee is getting weaker by minute while we’re building a bipartisan coalition to win in November,” Mr. Gately said. More

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      Matt Castelli’s Long-Shot Race to Defeat Elise Stefanik

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      GLENS FALLS, N.Y. — Matt Castelli has spent much of his career in the shadows.Over nearly 15 years at the Central Intelligence Agency, he hunted down terrorists in one way or another. Half-Sicilian, with a glistening black beard, he has the look of a global Everyman — someone who you might imagine, in the immortal words of Indiana Jones, “speaks a dozen languages, knows every local custom” and can “blend in, disappear” in any society.Much of what Castelli did in government service he can’t talk about — so it’s hard to know exactly what his accomplishments are. Now, after stints with the National Security Council under the Obama and Trump administrations, Castelli is attempting a radical career shift.He’s running to unseat Representative Elise Stefanik, the No. 3 Republican in the House, who has made an abrupt transition of her own — a Harvard-educated darling of the G.O.P. establishment who is now a pro-Trump bomb-thrower.Castelli, 41, has not received much help from national Democrats, who have all but written off Stefanik’s upstate New York district as a lost cause. In 2020, she won re-election by nearly 18 percentage points, running nine points ahead of President Trump.But after trouncing his primary opponent, a more progressive Democrat, by more than 60 percentage points in Tuesday’s primary, Castelli argues that he has more of a chance to win the North Country, as the area is known, than party officials and pundits expect. (Stefanik ran uncontested.)“This is a moderate district,” Castelli said last week over beers at Fenimore’s Pub in Glens Falls. “And Stefanik is no longer a moderate.”Elise Stefanik and other Republicans defended Donald Trump after the F.B.I.’s search of Mar-a-Lago. Anna Rose Layden for The New York TimesA major component of Castelli’s strategy is leaning into that word: moderate. His campaign collected more than 6,600 signatures to put him on the ballot for the Moderate Party, taking advantage of New York election laws that allow candidates to run on multiple tickets. That total was more signatures than he collected to make the Democratic Party ballot and nearly twice as many as the rules required.He figures there could be thousands of independents and disaffected Republicans who might not stomach voting for a Democrat but would choose a Chevy-pickup-driving, American-flag-waving national security specialist who is not shy about rejecting the left-wing inclinations of, say, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of the Bronx.Motivated after Sept. 11 …Raised in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., by a Republican mother and Democratic father, Castelli played baseball in high school, then went to Siena College, a private Franciscan institution near Albany. He was inspired to get a master’s degree in national security studies at Georgetown University after Sept. 11, then joined the C.I.A., where, he says, he “straddled” the agency’s operational and analytical wings as a targeting specialist and, later, a leader of various teams.More Coverage of the 2022 Midterm ElectionsAug. 23 Primaries: The Democratic establishment in Florida and New York had a good night. Here are some key takeaways and a rundown of who won and who lost.The Evidence Against a Red Wave: Since the fall of Roe v. Wade, it’s increasingly hard to see the once-clear signs of a Republican advantage. A strong Democratic showing in a special election in New York’s Hudson Valley is the latest example.Bruising Fights in N.Y.: A string of ugly primaries played out across the state, as Democrats and Republicans fought over rival personalities and the ideological direction of their parties.Challenging DeSantis: Florida Democrats chose Representative Charlie Crist, a former Republican, to take on Gov. Ron DeSantis, setting up a contest between a centrist and a hard-right G.O.P. incumbent.After spending five months in Barack Obama’s National Security Council, he spent a year as a director for counterterrorism in Donald Trump’s tumultuous National Security Council, serving under Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn, then Gen. H.R. McMaster. Castelli then returned to the C.I.A. for about two years in a liaison role while attending business school at Northwestern University on the side, before leaving for the private sector.During his time in two administrations, Castelli also had a front-row seat to the rise of groups like the Islamic State, which gave him a direct appreciation for the blowback America faced in the Islamic world after the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. After seven C.I.A. officers were killed by a suicide bomber in 2009 at an American base in Khost, Afghanistan, Castelli took a more “operational role,” he said, declining to go into details.… and again after Jan. 6But it was the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, Castelli says, that motivated him to leave his job at a health care company to run for public office. Last year, he moved upstate for the first time and now lives in Glens Falls, an old lumber-mill and paper-factory town near Lake George, and announced his run against Stefanik in September. That has fueled the accusation from Stefanik’s local political machine that Castelli is a carpetbagger — a transplant from Washington, D.C., or, worse, Poughkeepsie.In Castelli’s telling, however, his decision to run against Stefanik was inspired by her defense of Trump and embrace of his conspiracy theories about the 2020 election — even after the assault on the Capitol — offended his sense of patriotism.“It was an attack against our country,” he said. “For those of us who swore an oath to the Constitution, this was an effort to overturn all of that. And for me, it was galling.”Castelli estimates he has put at least 40,000 miles on his Chevy driving around the 21st District, which, at around a third of the state, is one of the country’s largest by geographic area. Plattsburgh is the district’s most populous city, but most of the area is rural — and Stefanik was known to run up 40-point margins over her previous Democratic opponents. More

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      How Carl Paladino Is Dividing New York Republicans

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      For New York’s beleaguered Republican Party, all signs had been pointing for months toward 2022 being an exceptional year.As Democrats battle the traditional midterm slump, Republicans were blessed with unforeseen fortune, including a court victory that resulted in new congressional lines pitting veteran liberals against each other and putting new House districts in play. Add in Gov. Kathy Hochul’s middling poll numbers, and many New York conservatives were dreaming of a united G.O.P. winning its first statewide election since 2002.Then Carl Paladino walked in.Mr. Paladino, the party’s lightning rod former gubernatorial nominee, unexpectedly re-emerged in the past week as a candidate in the newly drawn 23rd Congressional District in Western New York, a development that has driven a sharp wedge between some Republicans, including those who feel Mr. Paladino’s history of racist and outrageous remarks disqualifies him and could endanger Republicans up and down the ballot.It is also fueling a potentially nasty proxy war between two of the party’s younger Trump-aligned leaders vying for dominance: Representative Elise Stefanik, the powerful North Country conservative who has endorsed Mr. Paladino, and Nick Langworthy, the state party chairman who formally declared his candidacy for the 23rd District on Friday, taking a veiled swipe at his onetime ally’s tendency toward incendiary statements.“We don’t just need people who like to make noise,” said Mr. Langworthy, in a campaign announcement video. “We need proven fighters who know how to win.”Far from rattled, Ms. Stefanik, the No. 3 House Republican, is standing by Mr. Paladino, whom she endorsed moments after the district’s current congressman, Representative Chris Jacobs, announced last week that he would not seek re-election in the face of furious backlash for his embrace of gun control measures after mass shootings in Buffalo — near his district — and in Uvalde, Texas.Representative Elise Stefanik, a member of House Republican leadership, has endorsed Mr. Paladino and is helping him qualify for the ballot.T.J. Kirkpatrick for The New York TimesMs. Stefanik’s team spent the week helping Mr. Paladino collect signatures to qualify for the ballot. And privately, she and her allies are fanning discontent for Mr. Langworthy among midlevel party leaders and lawmakers, a growing number of whom believe his congressional run could prove a costly distraction for the party if he does not resign as chairman.Needless to say, a rough-and-tumble primary battle on the banks of Lake Erie is not what Republicans had in mind ahead of critical midterm elections that were shaping up to be the most promising for the party in two decades.After the redistricting fiasco for Democrats, party leaders planned to compete seriously in as many as a dozen House districts across the state.And in a likely race for the governorship against Ms. Hochul, a Democrat who has seen her job performance ratings sag in the face of concerns about crime and the economy, Republicans are hoping for a serious shot at breaking a lengthy losing streak in a state in which registered Democrats outnumber Republicans by more than two to one.Four Republicans are facing off in the June 28 primary for governor, with Representative Lee M. Zeldin of Long Island receiving the party’s blessing. Andrew Giuliani, the son of the former New York City mayor; Rob Astorino, the former Westchester County executive; and Harry Wilson, a corporate turnout expert, are also all on the ballot and will meet for their first debate on Monday.“This is a distraction in a battle that nobody needs at all,” Thomas Doherty, a former top aide to Gov. George Pataki, the last Republican elected statewide in New York, said about Mr. Paladino and the debris spinning off his campaign.“You have the leading Republican in the House supporting a guy who has a ton of baggage against the Republican chairman,” Mr. Doherty added. “It just doesn’t make any sense.”Since Mr. Paladino entered the race last Friday, Media Matters, the left-leaning watchdog group, has already unearthed a Facebook post amplifying conspiracy theories about the mass shootings in Buffalo and Texas and a 2021 radio interview in which Mr. Paladino praised Adolf Hitler as “the kind of leader we need today.”Mr. Paladino, 75, who was soundly defeated in the governor’s race by Andrew M. Cuomo in 2010, has long been known for racist and homophobic comments. He partially apologized for the Hitler remarks on Thursday, calling them a “serious mistake” that he nonetheless claimed had been twisted by the news media.On Friday, Mr. Paladino’s campaign said it would not comment on Mr. Langworthy’s candidacy, but it said he planned to file more than 3,000 petition signatures to qualify for the ballot, more than his opponent.“I am so grateful for the outpouring of grass-roots support from thousands of Republicans across NY-23 in such a short amount of time,” Mr. Paladino said in a statement. “Onward to victory!”In her own statement, Ms. Stefanik said she was “focused on winning back the majority this November,” while serving her constituents and the House Republican Conference she leads in Washington.But some Republican state leaders were apoplectic about Mr. Paladino, including Keith H. Wofford, a Black corporate lawyer who was the party’s 2018 nominee for attorney general. He issued an unsparing statement on Friday saying that his personal experience left no room for doubt about who Mr. Paladino was.“There are many times where people have called one Republican or another a racist, and I have explained to those accusers why they were wrong,” Mr. Wofford said. “But Carl Paladino is a racist. Not ‘racially insensitive’; not ‘unsophisticated’; a straight-up, old-school racist.”He added: “If he wins the primary, I hope he loses in November.”Democrats have chosen Max Della Pia, an Air Force veteran and community activist, as their nominee in the district.Nick Langworthy, who chairs the New York State Republican Party, is running against Mr. Paladino in a House primary. “We don’t just need people who like to make noise,” he said in a video announcing his candidacy.Johnny Milano for The New York TimesMr. Langworthy’s decision to run — after he pushed Mr. Jacobs to step aside — has not been without controversy. A series of county party leaders have criticized him for trying to run for Congress and lead the state party simultaneously, raising concerns about conflicts of interest.“It has to be all hands on deck and our state chair can’t be hunkered down in the 23rd Congressional District running a primary while we are simultaneously trying to elect a governor,” said Lawrence A. Garvey, the party chairman in Rockland County.He called on Mr. Langworthy to resign.“The potential is very much there to squander what good options we have this year,” Mr. Garvey added, clarifying that he was not trying to boost Mr. Paladino either: “No person in their right mind could defend some of the things he has said.”That sentiment was echoed by Susan McNeil, the Republican Party chair in Fulton County, northwest of Albany, and Mike Rendino, her counterpart in the Bronx.“You can’t serve two masters,” said Ms. McNeil, who is close with Ms. Stefanik. “I’m not arrogant enough to think I could do both.”Mr. Rendino said Mr. Langworthy would make a fine congressman, but said “we need a state chair committed to raising the money necessary for ballot security and protecting the party in the upcoming statewide elections.”In an interview, Mr. Langworthy, 41, argued that he was advancing the party’s interests by taking on Mr. Paladino and said that he maintained the support of the “vast majority” of county G.O.P. chairs in the state.He also predicted he would have no trouble focusing on winning the governor’s race for Republicans in the general election after defeating Mr. Paladino in the primary.“There’s naysayers and people who have self-interest in any organization, and perhaps they are egged on by certain elected officials, but I won’t take the bait,” he said. “The most destructive thing that can happen is for us to have a leadership election.”Mr. Langworthy’s run for office comes after a career as a party operative, including a stint in Mr. Pataki’s office and time spent working for two Republican House members. In 2010, he became the chairman of the Erie County G.O.P., a position he used to boost Mr. Paladino’s raw and rambunctious campaign for governor.Both he and Mr. Paladino urged Donald J. Trump to run for governor against Mr. Cuomo in 2013, ultimately failing to convince him. Both stumped for Mr. Trump in his 2016 presidential run.In 2019, Mr. Langworthy helped oust the party’s longtime chairman, Edward F. Cox, with the then-president’s support and took the job himself, promising a new face for the party.The 23rd District, which was redrawn by a court-appointed mapmaker last month, should be safely Republican. It runs from the Buffalo suburbs to the Southern Tier, on the New York-Pennsylvania border, and includes some of the state’s most conservative counties.Still, after suffering a brutal spring — with their carefully crafted redistricting plan shredded by the courts and their lieutenant governor indicted on bribery charges — Democrats seemed delighted on Friday to sit back and let the Republicans share the glare of scrutiny.“I would not call the past few months perfect for my team, and it worried me as a Democrat,” said Christine C. Quinn, a state party leader.But she called the G.O.P. strife an ongoing “train wreck.”“Republicans seem committed to messing this thing up so badly,” she added. More

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      Censuring Reps. Cheney and Kinzinger Sets Off Republican Food Fight

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      Punishing Representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger was a blunder, many in the party say.Republicans had Democrats right where they wanted them: on the ropes.Then on Friday, the Republican National Committee voted to censure Representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, the two House Republicans on the congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.The text of the resolution made no distinction between peaceful protesters and those who stormed the Capitol, referring to that day’s events simply as “legitimate political discourse.” The R.N.C. also backed a primary challenge against Cheney, whose high-profile criticism of Donald Trump has made her a top target on the right.It was one of those polarizing moments that forced other Republicans to react, with some — notably, a bunch of sitting U.S. senators — denouncing the national committee’s move as “wrong” and “absurd.”In the view of many Republicans, censuring two of their own was much like that old saw attributed to Charles Maurice de Tallyrand-Périgord, the 19th-century French diplomat: Worse than a crime, it was also a mistake.As President Biden grapples with soaring inflation, a pandemic that isn’t yet over and general public malaise over the two, why change the subject?“Certainly it wasn’t the right thing to do, and certainly it wasn’t the politically smart thing to do,” said Josh Venable, a former deputy finance director for the R.N.C. “It doesn’t take David Axelrod or Karl Rove to figure that out.”Mitch McConnell, the Senate’s top Republican and a man who chooses his words carefully, rejected the R.N.C.’s decision on Tuesday.“We saw what happened,” he said. “It was a violent insurrection for the purpose of trying to prevent the peaceful transfer of power after a legitimately certified election from one administration to the next. That’s what it was.”‘When we became the news’This is the kind of intramural food fight that the press loves — and political operatives despise when their own party is on the proverbial menu.“When I was at the R.N.C. in 2010, our worst days were when we became the news,” said Doug Heye, a Republican communications consultant. “G.O.P. senators and members know this, and it’s why you’re seeing them speak out.”But while Cheney has Republican friends in the Senate, she has few, if any, in the House. Allies of Kevin McCarthy, the minority leader, see her as a political opportunist who has made their lives more difficult — a thoughtless colleague who failed to appreciate his attempts after the 2020 election to shield her from the wrath of her colleagues on the right.Fielding a question on the controversy on Tuesday, Representative Elise Stefanik, who replaced Cheney as the third-ranking House Republican last year, offered a curt response. “My reaction is the R.N.C. has every right to take any action,” she said, “and the position I have is that you’re ultimately held accountable to voters in your district.”Translation: Cheney deserves to lose her seat, and if the Republican Party wants to aid in the process, so be it.The Trump questionThere’s a lot going on here worth unpacking.One obvious motive behind censuring Cheney and Kinzinger was to place them outside the bounds of respectable Republican Party company. Their presence on the Jan. 6 committee is a constant source of irritation for the party, giving Democrats bipartisan cover for an investigation that Republicans have sought to cast as a partisan vendetta.But the larger point of tension is the same existential question that the Republican Party has been wrestling with since 2015, when a certain New York real estate mogul glided down that golden escalator: What to do about Donald Trump? And whose view of the party should prevail — his, or those of establishment leaders like McConnell?Alyssa Farah Griffin, who served as former communications director in Trump’s White House before quitting over his stolen election claims, said the R.N.C.’s censure of Cheney and Kinzinger would “damage the Republican Party more broadly and going into 2024.”She’s among around 150 Republicans who signed a statement this week condemning the move as a betrayal of the party’s “founding principles” and a signal that it “no longer welcomes people of conscience.”‘An opportunity lost’Then there are Republicans who express a more parochial concern — a party consumed with internal strife will have a harder time defeating Democrats in the upcoming midterms.“Americans are scared of the future because of inflation, because of crime, and what do we talk about? A stolen election,” said Dick Wadhams, a Republican strategist in Colorado.As Matt Continetti, the former editor of the Free Beacon, a conservative website, put it, “Any minute Republicans spend re-litigating 2020 or downplaying the events of Jan. 6, 2021, is an opportunity lost.”Chris Stirewalt, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, said the censure could be a sign that Republicans are getting too confident about the prospects of a “red wave” election in the fall.“Democrats are certainly still in line for a serious thumping this year, but it is now possible to see how — if the economy and virus keep moving in the right direction — divisions of this kind of ugliness could screw up Republicans’ chances at a big win,” he said.What to read tonightNate Cohn analyzes recent polling that found that “the desire to return to normalcy has approached or even overtaken alarm about” Covid-19 itself.Prosecutors released a “revealing glimpse of their strategy” for the first trial stemming from the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, Alan Feuer reports. Their evidence includes surveillance videos and text messages.The Secret Service escorted Doug Emhoff, the second gentleman, out of Dunbar High School in Washington, D.C., because of a bomb threat. The school was also evacuated.LISTENING POSTA protest in Brooklyn on Monday showed solidarity with Canadian truckers.Justin Lane/EPA, via ShutterstockTruckin’Fox News was of one mind on Monday evening: America needs a movement of disaffected truckers just like the one in Canada.Tucker Carlson used his monologue to celebrate the Canadian truckers, whose protests against vaccine mandates have paralyzed Ottawa and threatened the flow of trade with the United States. Tech companies, Carlson complained, are censoring their online organizing efforts while mainstream media outlets are supposedly ignoring the story.“Instead, everyone in New York and D.C. and Los Angeles is cheering on the national security state and its alliance with Silicon Valley as they come together to crush a human rights movement,” he said.Laura Ingraham used the truckers mainly to criticize CNN for its coverage of what she lauded as “Canada’s expanding freedom convoy.”“The regime media knows exactly what’s happening in Canada and it scares the heck out of them,” Ingraham said. “Just think: Honking, really loud honking, may keep Joe from his 12 hours of sleep a night.”It’s hard to say how many people are ready to take up the cause.One of the main groups calling for a truckers’ protest in Washington, which calls itself “The People’s Convoy,” has nearly 50,000 followers on Facebook and another 40,000 on Telegram. Another group, “Convoy to D.C. 2022,” had more than 130,000 members before Facebook shut it down for violating the site’s policies on vaccine misinformation. Several truckers’ groups have announced plans to drive to Washington to protest vaccine mandates on March 1.Canadian researchers have linked the truckers to conspiracy theorists and anti-government extremists, and have noted how much of the support for their sit-in has come from the United States.Jared Holt, a researcher who studies extremist movements, said the online activity appeared to be aimed at “manufacturing sentiment” that wasn’t fully organic. It reminded him of the recent demonstration by anti-vaccine advocates on the National Mall, which drew a modest crowd in late January.“They’re hoping they can animate the imagination of similarly minded people here,” Holt said.Is there anything you think we’re missing? Anything you want to see more of? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com. More

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      For Republicans, ‘Crisis’ Is the Message as the Outrage Machine Ramps Up

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      With next year’s midterm elections seen as a referendum on Democratic rule, Republicans are seeking to create a sense of instability and overreach, diverting focus from their own divisions.WASHINGTON — House Republican leaders would like everyone to know that the nation is in crisis.There is an economic crisis, they say, with rising prices and overly generous unemployment benefits; a national security crisis; a border security crisis, with its attendant homeland security crisis, humanitarian crisis, and public health crisis; and a separate energy crisis.Pressed Tuesday on whether the nation is really so beleaguered, the No. 2 Republican in the House, Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana, thought of still more crises: anti-Semitism in the Democratic ranks, “yet another crisis,” he asserted, and a labor shortage crisis.“Unfortunately they’re all real,” he said capping a 25-minute news conference in which the word “crisis” was used once a minute, “and they’re all being caused by President Biden’s actions.”As Americans groggily emerge from their pandemic-driven isolation, they could be forgiven for not seeing the situation as quite so dire. They might also be a little confused about which of the many outrages truly needs their focus: the border, perhaps, but what about Dr. Anthony S. Fauci and the Wuhan lab leak theory, the teaching of critical race theory in the nation’s schools, the fact that some schools are not fully reopened, Representative Ilhan Omar, or all those transgender athletes competing in high school sports?But for divided House Republicans, outrage may be the tie that binds — at least their leaders hope so.“Look, our main crisis is we’re not the majority — that’s our top crisis,” said Representative Tom Cole, Republican of Oklahoma.House Republicans, still overwhelmingly in the thrall of Donald J. Trump, have learned over the last four years that grievance, loudly expressed, carries political weight, especially with their core voters. Mr. Trump certainly did not teach members of his party how to express anger over perceived injustices; many of them had been doing it for years. But the House Republican leadership has shifted to Trumpian expressions of outrage since the days of former Speaker Paul D. Ryan, a self-described “policy guy” with a happy-warrior image, and the backslapping bonhomie of his predecessor John A. Boehner.There is a method to all the remonstrance. Representative Elise Stefanik of New York, who took over as the message maestro of the Republican conference after the banishment of Representative Liz Cheney, hatched the crisis strategy as one of her first ventures, Mr. Cole said, distributing talking points this month on the perils facing the country.He thought the list had five crises; Representative Cathy McMorris Rodgers, Republican of Washington, remembered four.The idea is that with Democrats in control of the White House, House and Senate, next year’s midterm elections will be a referendum on one-party control, not on Republican governing plans, said Mr. Cole, a former chairman of the House Republicans’ campaign arm. The Republicans, at least this early in the political cycle, need to seed a sense of instability, overreach and fear, he said.The strategy is also predicated on the adage that the best defense is a good offense. By focusing on an array of real or imagined disasters, Republicans avoid addressing the crisis in democracy created by Mr. Trump with his efforts to nullify the election, which he continues to stoke. On Tuesday night, 21 House Republicans voted against awarding congressional gold medals to the Capitol Police and other law enforcement officers who protected them when a mob of the former president’s supporters stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6.David Winston, who has long worked with congressional Republicans on polling and messaging, said every new president faces an early challenge, and how he responds helps cement his image with curious voters. Republicans tried to make that early challenge the surge of migrants — including unaccompanied children — at the border.But there is a risk of throwing up too much chaff, he said. And eventually, Republican leaders are going to have to find a theme, like former Speaker John Boehner’s groan-worthy “Where are the jobs?” mantra. Its repetition might have annoyed reporters, but it was effective with voters.A group of migrants who recently crossed the border from Mexico into Yuma, Ariz., waiting to be taken to a processing center. Republican leaders have focused on a “crisis” at the border as well as several other issues.Ariana Drehsler for The New York TimesRepublicans have long been better than Democrats at imparting a sense of crisis. They made Solyndra a household name, with heated news conferences, accusatory hearings and angry statements, when the solar company went bankrupt and left the Obama administration — and the taxpayers — the bill for a $535 million federal loan guarantee that was part of Barack Obama’s economic rescue plan. This week, an electric pickup truck plant in Lordstown, Ohio, midwifed by Mr. Trump, lost its top executives, its prototype burst into flames and it is on the brink of collapse — with hardly a Democratic peep.The deadly terrorist assault on Benghazi became a two-year ordeal for Hillary Clinton, thanks to the Republican outrage machine, while a botched military raid ordered by Mr. Trump in Niger, which left four Americans dead, has largely been forgotten — even after Mr. Trump fumbled the name of one of the dead and told a grieving widow her husband “knew what he signed up for.”Brad Woodhouse, a veteran Democratic operative, said some in the party had wanted to “Benghazi” the Niger raid, but, “It’s just not who most of the Dem Party and Dem Party leadership is.”“I guess you can say we don’t gin up phony crises, but I don’t think that’s a bad thing,” he added. “At some point, the public turns back to what they think is reasonable leadership.”Democrats have not been able to get the same traction even on the Capitol riot, which aimed to stop the official awarding of a presidential election to its victor, in part because Republican antics and accusations have disrupted hearings on the assault.Part of the Republican advantage is just a sheer will to muscle through, regardless of Democratic incredulity. One of this week’s outrages is Mr. Biden’s supposed weakness before President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, a “crisis” that seeks to send four years of Mr. Trump’s deference to the Russian leader down the memory hole.Veteran House Republicans say they have a traditional message to impart.“I think the biggest contrast right now with the Biden-Pelosi agenda is their goal to control from Washington so much of your daily life, from your paycheck to your health care decisions to everything else,” said Representative Kevin Brady, Republican of Texas. “We stand for the opposite. We want to create more freedom for individuals with lower taxes, a stronger economy and a safer nation.”But that message has been lost amid a constantly shifting menu of crises and outrages. At the state level, Republican legislators have obscured very real efforts to curtail voting access by spotlighting cultural issues like blocking transgender athletes from high school competitions or stopping the teaching to children of “critical race theory,” a graduate school framework that explores how racism is infused in American institutions.But a drumbeat of cries for Vice President Kamala Harris to visit a southwestern border in crisis gave way to accusations that the nation’s gasoline supply was nearing collapse, which then subsided amid demands for the firing of the government’s leading virologist, Dr. Fauci, and an investigation of the theory that the coronavirus was engineered in a laboratory in Wuhan, China, then released on the world.Last week, the target of Republican outrage was Ms. Omar, after a tweet she posted that appeared to equate the actions of Israel and the United States with the human rights abuses of Hamas and the Taliban. Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the minority leader, called the tweet anti-Semitic — though it did not mention Jews or Judaism — and threatened to try to remove Ms. Omar from the Foreign Affairs Committee, an action they have yet to take.Republicans are also pressing their case that the push by some progressive Democrats to “defund the police” has led directly to a very real surge in crime facing the nation’s cities.It can get difficult to keep up with all the catastrophizing. On Tuesday, minutes after Representative Michael McCaul, the lead Republican on the Foreign Affairs Committee, warned of Moscow’s aggressive cyber attacks and a looming Russian stranglehold over Europe’s power supply, Mr. Scalise said, “I don’t know if Vice President Harris understands the crisis is not in Europe, it’s at America’s southern border, and she and President Biden created it.”There are plans to put together some Republican policy proposals. Mr. McCarthy has assembled seven task forces: jobs and the economy; Big Tech censorship; the “Future of American Freedoms”; energy, climate and conservation; American security; “healthy future”; and China. Representative Cathy McMorris Rodgers of Washington, who leads the big tech task force, said the panels will take a year to come up with legislative and policy responses to take into the midterm elections.“The goal is to be ready on Day 1,” should the Republicans take back the majority, she said.For now, even Republicans who have been critical of their leaders say they have time to formulate an agenda beyond the outrage machine they are eagerly feeding. Representative Chip Roy, Republican of Texas, noted that Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America really didn’t emerge until September 1994, two months before Republicans’ resounding midterm sweep.“There’s night-and-day difference between Republicans and Democrats, say, on border security, where we’re fairly united that we need to secure the border, and I don’t think they care,” he said. “We’re watching small businesses unable to hire people because they’re paying people more not to work. We’re pretty united on those key differences. Thematically bringing all that together and how you message that the American people, I think that’s something you work on.”As for the Democrats, most simply don’t think the crisis talk is working, beyond spinning out clicks for right-wing media outlets and Facebook algorithms that thrive on outrage over such things as the decision by Dr. Seuss’s estate to cease publishing works that include egregious racial and ethnic stereotypes or the switch by Hasbro to a non-gendered brand name for its iconic plastic toy, now known as Potato Head.“President Biden, for all this angst, including Dr. Seuss and Mr. Potato Head, has a plus-eight approval rating overall, a plus-four on the economy and a plus-28 approval on the pandemic,” Mr. Woodhouse said.As House Republican leaders were leaving the stage on Tuesday, Ms. Stefanik wanted to reiterate for one last time the state of a nation on the brink.“Thank you so much for embracing our effective messaging,” she told a small clutch of reporters, sitting in socially distanced seating. “America is in crisis.” More

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      Elise Stefanik and the Young Republicans Who Sold Out Their Generation

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      Once upon a time, a shiny new trio of young conservatives — Ryan Costello, Carlos Curbelo and Elise Stefanik — wanted to help build a modern, millennial Republican Party. The 30-somethings, all sworn into Congress in 2015, understood that millennials often agreed on many of the nation’s core problems, and believed it was up to them to offer conservative solutions. They were out to create a new G.O.P. for the 21st century.“Whether it’s environmental policy or immigration policy, the younger generations are more open to the America of tomorrow,” Mr. Curbelo told me in 2018, when I interviewed him for a book about millennial political leaders. “We certainly have a lot of work to do on all those issues. The good news is that we have a lot of younger Republicans in Congress, and they all get it.”It was clear, even then, that millennial voters across the political spectrum cared more about issues like racial diversity, L.G.B.T.Q. rights and college affordability than their parents did. Polls showed that young Republicans were more moderate on some issues than older ones, particularly on questions of immigration and climate change.So Mr. Curbelo and Ms. Stefanik teamed up to fight for immigration reform, particularly for protections for young immigrants. They refused to join the right wing’s fight against marriage equality, likely recognizing that most young people embraced L.G.B.T.Q. rights. And Ms. Stefanik introduced a 2017 resolution, along with Mr. Costello and Mr. Curbelo, calling for American innovation to fight climate change — one of the strongest climate change statements to come out of the Republican Party in years. (Some octogenarian Republicans remained skeptical of climate science; just two years earlier, Senator Jim Inhofe brought a snowball onto the Senate floor to prove that global warming was a hoax.)But their visions of the “America of tomorrow” hadn’t foreseen Donald Trump.By 2018, Mr. Trump’s antics had helped lead Mr. Costello to opt for early retirement. That fall Mr. Curbelo, a sharp critic of the president, lost his re-election bid. Mia Love, the only Black Republican woman in Congress, was also defeated in the Democratic wave that year. Another young House Republican, Justin Amash, left the party in the face of Trumpism and dropped his bid for re-election in 2020. And Will Hurd, a young moderate and one of the few Black Republicans in the House in recent years, also decided not to run again.Ms. Stefanik is one of the few of this set who survived, but only by transforming into a MAGA warrior. By 2020, she was co-chairing Mr. Trump’s campaign and embracing his conspiracy theories about a stolen election. Her pivot paid off: This month, she was elected to the No. 3 position in the House Republican Party. She is now the highest-ranking woman and most powerful millennial in the House G.O.P.But a comparison of her past goals and present ambitions makes clear that Ms. Stefanik has morphed from optimist to operator, choosing short-term power over the long-term health of her party.When I interviewed Ms. Stefanik in 2018 and 2019, she seemed to understand that the Republican Party was in trouble with young people. “The G.O.P. needs to prioritize reaching out to younger voters,” she told me. “Millennials bring a sense of bipartisanship and really rolling up our sleeves and getting things done.” Now she has tied her political career to the man who has perhaps done more than any other Republican to drive young voters away from her party, resulting in surging youth turnout for Democrats in the 2018 and 2020 elections.Ms. Stefanik’s rise — and her colleagues’ fall — is not just a parable of Trumpism. It’s a broader omen for a party struggling to reach a 21st-century electorate. She ascended by embracing a movement that is all about relitigating the past rather than welcoming the future. Now she and other new Trump loyalists in Congress are caught between their party and their generations, stuck between their immediate ambitions and the long-term trends. The G.O.P. has embraced a political form of youth sacrifice, immolating their hopes for young supporters in order to appease an ancient, vengeful power.Of course, the road to political obsolescence is littered with the bones of political analysts like me who predicted that demographics would be destiny. But Mr. Trump didn’t just devastate the G.O.P.’s fledgling class of up-and-coming talent. He also rattled the already precarious loyalty of young Republican voters; from December 2015 to March 2017, nearly half of Republicans under 30 left the party, according to Pew. Many returned, but by 2017, nearly a quarter of young conservatives had defected.Millennials and Gen Zers were already skeptical of the G.O.P., but Mr. Trump alienated them even further. His campaign of white grievance held little appeal for the two most racially diverse generations in U.S. history. Youth voter turnout was higher in 2020 than it was in 2016, with 60 percent of young voters picking Joe Biden. His youth vote margin was sufficient to put him over the top in key states like Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Georgia, according to an analysis by Tufts University, and young voters of color were particularly energized.Contrary to conventional wisdom that young people are always liberal and older people are always conservative, most voters form their political attitudes when they’re young and tend to stay roughly consistent as they age. And anti-Trumpism may now be one of the most durable political values of Americans under 50. By the end of Mr. Trump’s presidency, after the Jan. 6 insurrection, almost three-quarters of Americans under 50 said they strongly disapproved of him. Even young Republicans were cooling off: According to a new CBS poll, Republicans under 30 were more than twice as likely as those older than 44 to believe that Mr. Biden was the legitimate winner of the 2020 election and roughly twice as likely to believe the party shouldn’t follow Mr. Trump’s lead on race issues.“Younger conservatives aren’t focused on the election being stolen or the cultural sound bites,” said Benji Backer, the president of the American Conservation Coalition, a conservative climate action group. He told me that Ms. Stefanik had “distanced herself from the youth conservation movement,” after years of being one of the most climate-conscious Republicans in Congress. Now, he said, “peddling misinformation about the election and Jan. 6 has made it harder for young people to look up to her as a future voice in the party.”The new G.O.P. of 2015 has been replaced by a newer G.O.P.: a cohort of young Republican leaders who seem far more concerned with owning the libs on social media than with proposing conservative solutions to issues that matter to young people.This cohort includes millennials like Representative Matt Gaetz and Representative Lauren Boebert as well as Representative Madison Cawthorn, a Gen Z-er, all Trump loyalists who voted to overturn the electoral vote result. Mr. Gaetz introduced a bill to terminate the Environmental Protection Agency, Ms. Boebert introduced a bill to designate antifa as a “domestic terrorist organization,” and Mr. Cawthorn has so embraced the Trumpian ethos of rhetoric as leadership that he once said he “built my staff around comms rather than legislation.”It’s clear that this version of the Republican Party is firmly the party of old people: Mr. Gaetz and Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene kicked off their America First tour with a Trumpian rally at the Villages, Florida’s famous retirement community.Once, the young leaders of the G.O.P. were trying to present next-generation solutions to next-generation problems. Now they’ve traded their claim on the future for an obsession with the past.Charlotte Alter is a senior correspondent at Time and the author of “The Ones We’ve Been Waiting For: How a New Generation of Leaders Will Transform America.”The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More

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      Elise Stefanik Is Playing a Dangerous Game With Her Career

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      The rapid rise of Representative Elise Stefanik of New York to the post of chief pro-Trump messenger in the ongoing battle for the soul of the G.O.P. has sparked a flurry of media reports about how a supposed onetime moderate Republican metamorphosed into a full-fledged fire-breathing far-right conservative.But for those who have been following Ms. Stefanik’s career since she emerged on the political scene in the 2014 battle for an open congressional seat in New York’s North Country, her embrace of Trumpism and elevation on Friday to the No. 3 role in the House G.O.P. don’t come as any big surprise.The reality is that Ms. Stefanik has always been a shape-shifter, driven more by the political zeitgeist than any strongly rooted ideology.Her single-minded drive to succeed has long been well known, starting from her first congressional run, at the age of 30, when she successfully sought to be the youngest woman elected to the House at the time. Her ambition, a trait for which her male colleagues are frequently praised, sparked routine — and frankly sexist — comparisons to Reese Witherspoon’s cutthroat student politician character Tracy Flick in the 1999 film “Election.”Ms. Stefanik has a well-established track record of recognizing opportunities and seizing them, molding herself and her message to fit the moment. When her Democratic predecessor Representative Bill Owens abruptly announced in January 2014 he would not seek re-election, she was already six months into her campaign — positioning herself as a fresh-faced newcomer who would usher a new generation of Republican leaders, especially women, into office.Ms. Stefanik ran as a self-described “independent voice,” even though she was strongly backed by the national G.O.P. — from the House speaker at the time, John Boehner, on down. She espoused conservative positions on a host of litmus test social and fiscal issues: opposing most abortions, the complexity of the tax code, gun control and the Affordable Care Act.She also ran on an anti-establishment platform — declaring that she understood “firsthand that Washington is broken” (sound familiar?) — despite the fact that she was steeped in the establishment. She previously served in George W. Bush’s White House and was a campaign adviser for the former vice-presidential candidate and House Speaker Paul Ryan.Ms. Stefanik’s path to victory in 2014 was made easier by the fact that her Democratic opponent was unusually weak — Aaron Woolf, a documentary filmmaker who was a first-time candidate, like Ms. Stefanik, and a transplant to the district. Ms. Stefanik routinely touts her significant margins of victory in that race and each of her re-election bids, but the reality is that the national Democrats have never truly made ousting her a top priority.Damon Winter/The New York TimesMs. Stefanik criticized Donald Trump on personal and policy fronts in 2016 and in the first years of his administration, but she read the political tea leaves — not only the rightward shift of her district but also the full tilt of the House G.O.P. to a pro-Trump caucus.As she chose the Trump side in the national G.O.P.’s internal power struggle, a similar intraparty battle has been taking place in her home state at a time of political flux. Multiple scandals and investigations plaguing Gov. Andrew Cuomo present the Republican Party with its best chance to regain the Executive Mansion since the last standard-bearer to hold it, George Pataki, departed at the end of 2006.As recently as late April, Ms. Stefanik was reportedly considering a challenge to Mr. Cuomo in 2022, with a senior staff member releasing a statement touting her status as the “most prolific New York Republican fundraiser ever in state history” and insisting she would “immediately be the strongest Republican candidate in both a primary and general gubernatorial election.”Yet Republicans are coalescing around a pro-Trump challenger to Mr. Cuomo, Representative Lee Zeldin of Long Island. And a 2022 race for governor is looking tough for any Republican, given how New York is leaning steadily leftward and democratic socialist candidates are expanding the left’s electoral power by attracting new progressive voters.With Republican registrations dwindling across the state, Ms. Stefanik’s political options back home are increasingly limited. Against that backdrop, a short-term gamble that propels her up the D.C. food chain is a classic Trumpian power grab — one requiring that she cast off the moderate mantle she was perceived to wear.New York has a long history of shape-shifting elected officials who willingly and even eagerly changed their positions — and in some cases, their party affiliations — based on how the political winds were blowing.Mr. Pataki, for example, was elected on an anti-tax, pro-death penalty platform, defeating Democratic incumbent Mario Cuomo, a national liberal icon, in 1994. Over his 12 years in office, Mr. Pataki shifted steadily leftward, embracing everything from gun control to environmental protection to assure his re-election by the increasingly Democratic-dominated electorate.Another prime example: Kirsten Gillibrand. She was once a Blue Dog Democrat infamous for touting how she kept two guns under her bed. But when former Gov. David Paterson tapped her, at the time an upstate congresswoman, to fill the U.S. Senate seat vacated by Hillary Clinton, Ms. Gillibrand quickly changed her tune. Critics accused her of flip-flopping, much the way a different set of critics is currently targeting Ms. Stefanik.Ms. Gillibrand at the time said her evolution signaled political courage and a willingness to “fight for what’s right.” Ms. Stefanik, by contrast, has thrown her lot in with a former president who was impeached not once but twice and consistently sought to undermine — if not outright overthrow — the very democratic foundation of this nation. It is no doubt a dangerous game for the up-and-coming congresswoman, and one that could well cut short her once promising political career in a re-election bid in New York. But given her history, was this choice surprising? Not in the least.Liz Benjamin is a former reporter who covered New York politics and government for two decades. She’s now the managing director for Albany at Marathon Strategies, a communications and strategic consulting firm.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram. More