Elise Stefanik Gets Famous... For All The Wrong Reasons

Not a good image for the North Country this cycle

North Country conservative Elise Stefanik (R-NY) is well-known among DC insiders-- but virtually unknown outside-the-Beltway. Or she was until last week, when she consistently beclowned herself on national TV during the impeachment hearings. Stefanik represents a huge, sparsely-populated district in the northeast corner of New York, bordered by Quebec, Ontario and Vermont. Plattsburgh and Watertown, each with less than 30,000 inhabitants, are the two biggest towns. There are a dozen counties in this swing district that went for Obama twice and then slammed Clinton with a massive 14 point loss against Trump in 2016. How would Bernie have done there? Well here's how he did in the primary:

• Saratoga- Bernie- 55.8%, Hillary- 44.2%
• St Lawrence- Bernie- 58.9%, Hillary- 41.1%
• Jefferson- Bernie- 50.9%, Hillary- 49.1%
• Clinton- Bernie- 73.5%, Hillary- 26.5%
• Warren- Bernie- 61.7%, Hillary- 38.3%
• Washington- Bernie- 64.1%, Hillary- 35.9%
• Fulton- Bernie- 61.1%, Hillary- 38.9%
• Essex- Bernie- 73.2%, Hillary- 26.8%
• Franklin- Bernie- 70.9%, Hillary- 29.1%
• Lewis- Bernie- 59.1%, Hillary- 40.9%
• Herkimer- Bernie- 56.0%, Hillary- 44.0%
• Hamilton- Bernie- 63.1%, Hillary- 36.9%

Last year, in an anti-red wave year, Stefanik beat Democrat Tedra Cobb 131,981 (56.1%) to 99,791 (42.4%) and won all but Clinton and Essex counties, both basically tied. As in many Bernie districts, the Democratic establishment pushed a Clinton-type candidate instead of a Bernie-progressive-- and lost. Cobb is running again and she just got her biggest break of the cycle. If her moderate, yes-but-better-than-a-Republican campaign was getting nowhere, Stefanik's clunky and uber-partisan defense of Trump benefitted no one but Cobb. Cobb's campaign raised over half a million dollars last week, her biggest fundraising week ever, and her social media following vaulted to over 200,000 people, now able to reach more people than Stefanik can on Twitter. Meanwhile, Stefanik's carefully-crafted, if misleading, image as a "moderate" lays smashed, irreparably, on the floor of the hearing room and in the minds of millions of Americans who saw her in action, kissing Trump's ass.

As much as Republican Party hacks-- from Nunes to Trump's Goebbels-like press secretary-- tried to push the idea that the hearings are boring and that no one was watching, people were very much watching and the hearings were all over TV, radio, newspapers and social media. CNN reported that the hearings were ratings bonanzas for Fox News and MSNBC. According to Nielsen, Fox averaged 2.9 million viewers at any given time between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. and MSNBC averaged 2.7 million viewers at the same time. How big a deal is that? "On a typical day, Fox News has about 1.5 million viewers during the daytime hours, and MSNBC has closer to 1 million... The ratings contradict claims from some of the president's allies, including one of his sons, Eric Trump, who said on Fox News that 'no one was watching it. No one cares.' Clearly lots of people cared enough to tune in. They also wanted to see the spin later in the day-- Fox's Sean Hannity had one of his highest-rated shows of the year, with 4.4 million total viewers."

It's impossible to estimate how many people watched or heard the hearings across all platforms, since television, radio and streaming video are all measured in different ways.

Some people consumed the hearing in one sitting, but the more common experience is much more scattered-- hearing snippets on the air and seeing clips on social media and headlines on phones.

The ABC, CBS (CBS) and NBC broadcast networks pre-empted regular programming for Wednesday's hearings as well. ABC and CBS averaged 2 million viewers each, and NBC had nearly 1.67 million.

But a much greater total number of people saw some portion of the hearings over the course of six hours. The granular Nielsen data shows fluctuations throughout the proceedings.

CNN, for example, averaged 1.85 million viewers during the entire hearing, peaking at 11 a.m. when more than 2.1 million were tuned in.

The cumulative average audience for the big six channels listed above was 13 million-- about on par with the day former special counsel Robert Mueller testified in July.

Wednesday's hearing was also carried live on PBS; by some local Fox stations; by C-SPAN; and by other television networks.

And the hearing was streamed almost everywhere, on a wide variety of social networks and news websites.

CNN Digital reported strong but not off-the-charts interest in live streams of the testimony.

There's no Nielsen-like way to measure cumulative viewership on the web.

But the overnight ratings indicate that the impeachment hearing reached both political junkies and a wider group of daytime TV viewers.

The vast majority of Americans, however, didn't watch the entire event live-- they soaked it up through social media and heard about it later.

Nielsen estimated 13,787,000 viewers live (while most people are at work or school), however among elderly people, many of whom are retired and at home, there were 10,644,000 viewers live. News clips dominated the nightly news shows and all other forms of media. Elise Stefanik is famous, not as the moderate she has spent years trying to pass herself off as, but as a radical imbecile Trumpist trying to disrupt the hearings to protect a criminal plot to solicit foreign interference in the 2020 election. Stefanik congratulated AOC when she was first elected, saying she was glad to give up the spot as youngest woman in Congress to her and predicting that AOC would inspire other young women. AOC has, while Stefanik has continued to sink into a morass of hyper-partisan Trumpism, adding both another chin and political enemies among moderates and independents.

Washington Post columnist Aaron Blake called Stefanik's shameful game-playing a gender-centric stunt. "During the hearing's first break, Rep. Lee Zeldin (R-NY) declared that Democrats were trying to get Yovanovitch to 'cry for the cameras.' But arguably the most significant moment on that front was one that was manufactured by Republicans-- and rather transparently so. After returning from the first break, ranking Republican Nunes tried to yield time for questioning to Stefanik. But Schiff said Nunes couldn't do that-- that he could only yield to his counsel or ask questions himself. The Republican professed to be perplexed. 'You're gagging the young lady from New York?' Nunes said incredulously. The optics would seem to be pretty bad for Schiff; he was silencing the committee's only female Republican, for apparently no reason except spite. Except that's hardly the case. The rules as voted on by the broader House last month were clear: The chairman, Schiff, and the ranking member, Nunes, each got 45-minute periods to either ask questions or yield to a staff member. (The resolution says: 'Only the chair and ranking minority member, or a Permanent Select Committee employee if yielded to by the chair or ranking minority member, may question witnesses during such periods of questioning.') Afterward, each member would get five minutes, during which they can yield to other members. Stefanik still tried to use the moment for political hay, tweeting, 'Once again, Adam B. Schiff flat out REFUSES to let duly elected Members of Congress ask questions to the witness, simply because we are Republicans.' That is just not true-- Schiff was acting firmly within the rules-- and Nunes and Stefanik have to know that. It's pretty apparent this was a stunt."

Republicans Only Have 13 Women In The House

Guess which party is havin' a meetin'

After the North Carolina Republican Party got caught trying to steal the NC-09 House seat last November, the election of far right Trumpist sociopath, Mark Harris was invalidated and a special election called for September 10. Citizens of a district going from Charlotte to Fayetteville will have had no representation in Congress for nearly a year. The Democrat in the race is, politically, a worthless Blue Dog, Dan McCready and his GOP opponent, Dan Bishop, is even worse-- a right-wing psychopath who made a name for himself as author of the legislation to deny transgender children bathrooms.

There are only 13 Republican women in the House, a shockingly low number likely to bear some of the responsibility for the output of such a horrifying GOP agenda, even more extreme than normal. Women have been encouraged to run in open-seat primaries and against Democrats, weakly by the NRCC and strongly by Elise Stefanik' and her pro-women leadership initiative E-PAC. [Spoiler: last cycle, Stefanik raised money by screaming about electing women-- for example, $10,000 each from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, UPS, Goldman Sachs, the Laborers Union, Ernst & Young-- but in the end she contributed to 54 right-wing men and just 20 women. She's a phony; keep reading.] When it came time to sign up for the NC-09 race, 4 women qualified as candidates. The votes of all 4 combined didn't add up to the transgender bathroom bill guy.

• Transgender Bathroom Bill Guy- 14,178 (47.7%)
• Leigh Thomas Brown- 2,624 (8.8%)
• Stevie Rivenbark- 892 (3.0%)
• Fern Shubert- 433 (1.5%)
• Kathie Day- 190 (0.6%)

Two other crazy right-wing lunatics, Stony Rushing (5,820 votes) and Matthew Ridenhour (5,065 votes) also finished significantly ahead of Brown. The biggest outlay of outside money ($1.3 million) was spent on behalf of Brown by the National Association of Realtors-- with this ad-- but to no avail. The ad was too positive and uplifting, not what Republican primary voters expect to hear in North Carolina. They were more interested in Dan Bishop's negative ugly messaging against AOC and socialism and his image as someone for trans-fats and against transgender students. This is the ad the Club for Growth, which was backing Stony Rushing, ran to smear Brown:





Did the NRCC or Stefanik rush to her defense? Not a chance. On Sunday Laura Barrón-López and Mealnie Zanona, reporting for Politico wrote that "Before Leigh Brown ran for a vacant House seat in North Carolina earlier this year, she got plenty of encouragement from Republicans in Washington eager to grow the ranks of GOP women in Congress. Then Brown jumped into a crowded Republican primary-- and the people who had given her hope were nowhere to be found. Among those who disappeared, she said, was Rep. Elise Stefanik, who launched an initiative this year to elect more Republican women."

“That's a little frustrating to have initial conversations and then follow up and be ghosted,” Brown said in an interview with Politico. “I put my real estate business on hold. I've dinged my own reputation in order to put myself forward as a public servant, and then you find out exactly how lonely it is to run for office.”

Stefanik acknowledged Brown’s account during a brief exchange in the Capitol last week but declined to elaborate.

The Republican Party has ramped up its efforts to recruit female candidates for the 2020 election, following the brutal midterm that decimated the ranks of GOP women. But Brown’s experience highlights an enduring challenge for the party: translating widespread concern about the dearth of women in the House Republican Conference into significant campaign support and, ultimately, victories by female candidates.

GOP consultants and candidates acknowledge their recruitment and resources lag far behind Democrats. And no centralized group exists to provide hiring advice, social media guidance, press training, or messaging tactics to candidates. Democrats, on the other hand, have the behemoth EMILY’s List network, as well as groups focused on recruiting immigrants, women of color, female veterans and more.

“The support structure needs to be more than the idea that you can get some PAC dollars from random PACs out there,” Brown said. “I didn't know how to hire. I'm an outsider to this.”

Republicans are not blind to the problem. A growing number of outside GOP groups are dedicated to boosting female candidates since the House GOP’s official campaign arm doesn’t play in primaries. “Winning for Women” launched a new super PAC in response to the devastating losses Republicans suffered in 2018.

And after watching her party swear in a 29-member class of House freshmen that included 28 men, Stefanik repurposed her leadership PAC, known as E-PAC, to focus on backing women in primaries. She told Politico at the time that “we are at a crisis level for GOP women.”

But neither Stefanik nor Winning for Women supported Brown, who faced nine other Republicans in the North Carolina race-- including three other women, each of whom finished with fewer than a thousand votes. The National Association of Realtors threw $1.3 million behind Brown as she presented a more moderate tone than her conservative opponents, and View PAC, a group focused on electing more GOP women since 1997, endorsed her.

Brown also spoke to Winning for Women before she filed and received strong encouragement. But once she announced her candidacy, she never heard from them again. Winning for Women’s super PAC said it has limited resources and stresses candidate viability.

...[A] number of Washington Republicans, including Stefanik and Winning for Women, have coalesced around a different female candidate in another special North Carolina race this year: Joan Perry.

Perry’s success in an upcoming July 9 runoff will be the first real test of Republicans’ new efforts to propel female candidates through primaries. But Perry begins the race at a disadvantage: She finished with 15 percent of the vote in the April primary, behind the first-place candidate, Greg Murphy, who earned 23 percent.

If Perry fails, it will highlight the limits of Republicans’ cash-only strategy-- and amplify the party’s woman problem heading into 2020. [It will also highlight how bad GOP recruiting is when the best woman they could find is so obviously unsuited for Congress and who couldn't come up with a better ad than this pathetic attempt to run against AOC and Bernie. Has anyone asked her how she feels about the total abortion bans in Alabama, Georgia and Missouri?]





“Donors are taking it seriously. Outside groups are taking this seriously. The party is taking it seriously,” said Olivia Perez-Cubas, a spokeswoman for the Winning for Women Action Fund. “It would be awesome if the first election after the midterms, Republican voters chose a woman. It would send a strong message.”

Indeed, Republican leaders have made replenishing their ranks of female lawmakers a top priority in 2020. The issue could take on even greater urgency if Rep. Liz Cheney, the No. 3 Republican in the House, decides to run for an open Senate seat in Wyoming.

The party’s leader, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (CA), has already contributed to New York state Assemblywoman Nicole Malliotakis, who is running to unseat freshman Democratic Rep. Max Rose-- even though the rest of the GOP field has yet to take shape.

[Note: Michael "Mikey Suits" Grimm is expected to run, win the primary and lose the general.]

...[A]ccording to recent data collected by The Associated Press, just 38 of 172 declared Republican House challengers for the 2020 elections were women, or around 1 in 5. That compares with 84 of 222 declared House Democratic challengers, nearly 2 in 5.

Part of the problem, critics say, is that there is little concert between the groups set up to help Republican women. And they limit where they get involved to vacant, open Republican-leaning seats or swing districts currently held by Democrats-- while deliberately shying away from backing challengers to male incumbents.

...The key to getting Republicans to commit to a cohesive effort to boost women candidates isn’t just convincing them that it’s good for the party’s image, but that women will make better candidates in general elections against Democrats, VIEW PAC’s Conway said.

"People need to put their thumbs on the scale during the primary to make the nominee be the person most likely to be able to win in November,” Conway said. “And the Republicans have not done enough of that.”

"The key to getting Republicans to commit to a cohesive effort to boost women candidates isn’t just convincing them that it’s good for the party’s image, but that women will make better candidates in general elections against Democrats." Yes, but that will never happen inside a party that seems to think that a way one women is a good strategy to turn out their base voters. Maybe not passing abortion bans with no exceptions for rape or incest in every state that Republicans control would be good messaging too?

Republican Ladies, There's A Fella Who Says It's OK For More Of You In Congress-- But Only The Types He Approves

Nice shoes! Can she dance?

New York's North Country Republican Elise Stefanik did well in November. Her R+4 district, the biggest in the state, which stretches from just not of the Albany/Schenectady/Sarasota Springs are along the Vermont border and Lake Champlain to Quebec, along the St. Lawrence, past Waterown and into Lake Ontario. In 2016, the district went for Trump 53.9% to 40.0%, after voting for Obama twice. In November, Stefanik beat progressive Democrat Tedra Cobb 131,981 (56.1%) to 99,791 (42.4%). She won 10 of the 12 counties, spending $2,810,249 to Cobb's $1,538,958. Neither the DCCC nor Pelosi's House Majority Fund gave Cobb a dime.

Stefanik is a well-liked mainstream conservative. Her Trump affinity score was 89.6%. Right around the average for the 9 New York state Republicans. (Aside from Stefanik, there are only 5 left, Faso, Donovan and Tenney having been swept away in the anti-red wave.) Serving on the Armed Services, Education and Labor, and Intelligence Committees, she was an ally of Ryan's and never gave leadership a hard time-- until after the election, when she served notice on GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy that she would no longer work with or pay dues to the NRCC and would be using her own leadership PAC to recruit women to run in primaries (against Republican men). "I am going to keep pointing out to my colleagues," she explained to the media, "that we are at a crisis level for GOP women. This election should be a wake-up call to Republicans that we need to do better... We need to be elevating women’s voices, not suppressing them."

This kind of thing doesn't go over with in the GOP. Identity politics is a no-no for white patriarchs and the new NRCC head, reactionary Tom Emmer (R-MN), blew his top, and menacingly told an on-the-record interviewer that she was "making a mistake" to help female candidates in primaries. Stefanik tweeted that she was informing him, not "asking for permission." Other GOP women-- including even some on the most extreme fringes, like Tennessee sociopath Diane Black-- backed Stefanik... and Emmer was forced to back down and apologize.

But Republicans are still smarting from the little lady stepping out of line and talking too loud. Over the weekend, one right-wing goof-ball, Neil Dwyer, wrote an OpEd for oligarch Philip Anschutz's crackpot misogynysitic website, the Washington Examiner, We need more GOP women, but not in the mold of Rep. Elise Stefanik. He tried-- but failed-- to make the point that Republicans lost so many seats in November was because they didn't have enough extremists and it was "moderates" who dragged the party down. He used long-time far right psychopath Barbara Comstock, who lost her suburban DC district in a landslide to a relatively conservative Democrat, Jennifer Wexton, as an example. "One moderate who did win re-election and has asserted herself in the face of her party's defeat," he fumed, "is Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY). She has conducted many interviews describing the level of women in the Republican caucus as at a 'crisis level.' Stefanik has also announced she will be using her political action committee, 'E-PAC.' for congressional recruiting, aiming for more Republican women to get through primaries and win races. There's nothing wrong with recruiting more female Republican candidates for Congress," he condescended. "But is Stefanik the mold we want to see the party's candidates being shaped from?" No, he wants the women to be just like neo-fascist Arizona lunatic Debbie Lesko or like even further right Marsha Blackburn.

Stefanik has voted for a farm bill without the original work requirements, for amnesty, against spending cuts, against tax cuts, and for taxpayer-funded sex change procedures in the military. She voted for $81 billion in emergency aid for natural disasters (two months after a $36.5 billion bill for aid was also passed). Meanwhile Republican women such as then-Reps. Martha McSally, Marsha Blackburn, and Kristi Noem all voted "nay." While Stefanik voted against the major tax reform law passed in 2017, her upstate New York Republican colleagues like Reps. John Katko, Chris Collins, and Tom Reed all voted for it. Katko's 24th District even trends at a D+4 rating on the Cook PVI, yet he won re-election by more than 6 percentage points.

...Republicans who want to limit Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi's second term as speaker to two years need to find women who serve as a counterpoint to the Women's March, women who can speak directly to the mothers in these suburban districts and appeal to their family values, which include treasuring life, security (which includes immigration), and prosperity. Recruiting women for the sake of optics will get the party nowhere."

This past cycle, Stefanik's leadership PAC raised $250,167 and contributed $105,000 directly to 68 House candidates, 49 of them men and 20 of them women. Among the Republicans she gave to were very extreme right candidates like Steve Knight (CA), Mimi Walters (CA), Rod Blum (IA), Barbara Comstock (VA), Dino Rossi (WA), Randy Hultgren (IL), David Young (IA) and Marty Nothstein (PA), all of whom were defeated Nov. 6 by Democratic women.

Dwyer should go out on tour-- perhaps with that other long-time GOP woman-hater, Ed Rollins, who referred to Ocasio as "the little girl" a couple of days ago omg Fox. Maybe they can start with an interview with Teen Vogue. I'm sure editor Lucy Diavolo would be delighted to take them on.