Elise Stefanik Realizes Everyone Hates Her, Drops Out Of Governor's Race, Congress, Life

Stefanik out!

She wore her finest off-color pearls for this!

Friends, Wonkettes, countrymen, lend us your shovels. For we come to bury Elise Stefanik, not to praise her.

Late Friday afternoon, Stefanik announced on X that she is dropping out of the race for the Republican gubernatorial nomination in New York. Not only that, she will also not run for re-election to the US House seat she has held for 11 years. For the moment, she is leaving elected office — and presumably any sort of spotlight — for the foreseeable future.

What did America do to earn such a blessing? Maybe nothing! Maybe after this last year, we’ve simply earned it.

Ain’t that a kick? A year ago, Stefanik was riding high. Donald Trump had just been elected, and her years of grotesque obsequiousness to him were going to earn her a spot as his Ambassador to the United Nations. Finally! No more wallowing in some backwater upstate district. Bright lights, big city, multi-million-dollar penthouse, here she comes!

And oh, how she had kissed Trump’s ass. Stefanik had been a moderate centrist for her first two terms in Congress. Then, having reconciled her ambition with the fact that she had no apparent actual beliefs but would instead glom onto the nearest power center like a particularly eager remora, she gave herself a MAGA makeover. She became the sort of shithead wingnut who promoted the Great Replacement Theory, teamed up with Marjorie Taylor Greene to overturn Trump’s impeachment (which is not a thing you can actually do), blamed Nancy Pelosi for January 6, called Zohran Mamdani a “raging antisemitic communist,” and on and on and on.

There was no ridiculous bullshit from Trump that Elise Stefanik would not squawk into the nearest microphone. Election conspiracy theories, complaints about the Biden administration’s “weaponization” of the Department of Justice to investigate Trump just because he committed a metric assload of crimes ... you name it, she parroted it.

Consider this passage from a New York Times profile in 2022:

[Paul] Ryan has told associates he now considers her the biggest disappointment of his political career. One by one, many of her oldest and closest friends have stopped speaking to Ms. Stefanik, leaving a trail of embittered final texts and emails. Over dinners and group chats, they sometimes talk about what happened to the talented woman they once loved and respected. [...] What had they missed?

What did they miss? Oh, not much, just Stefanik’s lack of principles or a moral core, and a sociopathic lust for power. Other than that, you guys had her all the way.

Also, Paul Ryan ran for vice president and lost. How big of a piece of shit do you have to be to rank higher than that on his list of career disappointments?

So having sold whatever soul she may have ever possessed, having lost all her friends, Stefanik was ready to cash in with that sweet, high-powered Cabinet post.

Sadly, it was not to be. Months after nominating her, and before the full Senate could vote on it, Trump pulled her nomination to the UN and replaced her with Mike Waltz. Who, it should be noted, had just crashed out after about five minutes as National Security Advisor. The humiliation, being pushed aside for a guy who couldn’t competently organize a Signal chat.

Elise Stefanik’s Road To Nowhere

Elise Stefanik Cancels The Drapes

Trump ostensibly made the move because with a razor-thin majority in the House, he and Mike Johnson needed every Republican they could get. Stefanik had already fired her staff, packed up her office, and been replaced as House Conference Chair, where she had been the fourth-most powerful Republican in the caucus. As a consolation, Johnson made up a new title and position for her — Chairwoman of House Republican Leadership — where she appears to have had no real responsibilities at all.

In November, Stefanik announced she would run for the Republican nomination for next year’s gubernatorial election in her home state. A month later, she dropped out with a long, long post on X:

[W]hile we would have overwhelmingly won this primary, it is not an effective use of our time or your generous resources to spend the first half of next year in an unnecessary and protracted Republican primary[.]

A recent Siena College poll had Stefanik crushing the rest of the field, so a protracted primary didn’t look likely. But the same poll also had her losing to incumbent Democrat Kathy Hochul by 19 points. Also, her favorability ranking is so deep in the toilet, she’d need a plunger and a drain snake to rescue it:

Stefanik’s favorability rating stands at 22% favorable and 33% unfavorable, though 44% of voters said they don’t know enough about her to have an opinion.

Stefanik was looking at 11 months of this:

And that was in her own district, which she won last year with 62 percent of the vote.

Maybe Stefanik really does want to be home more for her son, who is four. Though in our experience, people with that level of ambition are usually fine with letting a nanny do the work. And she’s too much of an asshole to give the benefit of the doubt. More likely, she’s reading the writing on the wall that indicates a huge Democratic wave next year. That, along with the ongoing MAGA infighting, is driving a large number of congressional Republicans into retirement.

So long, Elise Stefanik! We will remember you for the reasons we remember so many of your contemporaries: because you suck.

[Adirondack Almanack]

Help keep Wonkette alive long enough to outlive the political careers of other charlatans besides Elise Stefanik.