To an outside observer, New York Republicans have had a rough go of it as of late. In October, President Trump, the billionaire businessman, reality show stalwart, leader of the free world, in essence, the quintessential New Yorker, announced he was changing his residence to Florida. If that weren’t deflating enough to GOPers along the Hudson, early November brought the announcement that Rep. Peter King, the longest serving Republican in the state’s congressional delegation, was heading for retirement. For many, 1988, the last time the Empire State went red in a presidential election seemed a memory too far removed to ever have been real. New York, throughout the five boroughs and up and down the Thruway, seemed, from the outside, to have fallen into one repetitive, deep blue, Democrat routine.
Yet now, new hope has risen in the shadow of Democrat dominance. Young Republicans are storming back in New York, and in a big way. Decades of Democrat neglect, at the hands of Mayors Koch and Dinkins, and Governor Mario Cuomo, enabled the rise of Republicans like Rudy Giuliani and George Pataki to right the ship in the 1990s. Now, quite similarly, the current Democrats’ hard lurch to the even more extreme left has enabled a new generation of Republican powerhouses to come storming back.
Elise Stefanik, the 35-year-old Harvard graduate, has spent the last five years representing her Albany district in Congress, all the while forging a solid reputation as a bipartisan pugilist, fighting to get the job done for her state, district, and country. Whether it’s sponsoring bipartisan bills for veterans’ cemeteries, or chairing the Tuesday Group championing moderate, common sense causes, Congresswoman Stefanik has made her mark in Washington, and heralded a Republican resurgence in New York. While doing so, she earned the rank of 19th most bipartisan member of the 115th Congress by the Lugar Center.
Another Empire State Republican making his mark in D.C. is Long Island’s Lee Zeldin. The 39-year-old Iraq war veteran, attorney, and “country first” conservative has exploded on the national scene as of late, raining on the Democrats’ fantastical impeachment parade. While ranking as the 49th most bipartisan member of Congress, Zeldin consistently peppered the feckless hearings with over 500 questions, statements, and interjections, effectively becoming the wrecking ball to Adam Schiff’s farce, or, more appropriately, the bull in Hunter Biden’s China shop.
Only teenagers in 1998 when Jerry Nadler proudly declared Bill Clinton’s impeachment a “partisan coup d’état”, Reps. Stefanik and Zeldin have now emerged as two of the most powerful Congressional forces counterbalancing the Nadler-Schiff partisan witch hunt. And it says something, not to be overlooked, that where Stefanik and Zeldin rank 19th and 49th respectively in bipartisanship, Schiff and Nadler rank 247th and 316th respectively. If Speaker Pelosi truthfully and “prayerfully” wants any impeachment to be overwhelmingly bipartisan, perhaps she should jettison the figureheads of division in favor of her more measured and bipartisan colleagues from New York.
Democrats have held near universal power in New York for too long. As they sprint with careless abandon to the left, forgetting the people and state they have been elected to serve in favor of whatever may be their latest left-wing cause du jour, they have left an opening for a Republican resurgence in the Empire State. Reps. Stefanik and Zeldin are leading the charge in Congress. As Mayor de Blasio and the new iteration of Governor Cuomo steer New York in cyclical harmony with the 1970s and '80s, an opportunity has arisen for a new generation of Republicans to return the flagship state and city of America back to where it belongs. The New York Football Giants may be entering a “rebuilding” phase, but the New York Republican Giants are back and ready to play.
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