Tale of 2 Republicans: a winner and a loser
Faso, Stefanik view Trump’s effect in their districts differently
U.S. Reps. Elise Stefanik and John Faso have both styled themselves as independentminded Republicans, but they diverged Thursday on the extent to which President Donald Trump’s negatives affected their races and others — and what the message is for the GOP looking toward 2020.
“He was a decidedly negative factor in my race and races across the country where we lost the House,” said Faso. “I think it’s fair to say his prospects in 2020 are very uncertain.”
Stefanik is more circumspect. “Even though 2020 seems around the corner … it’s a long way off,” she said. Voters in her North Country district ex-
pressed varying degrees of upset with Trump, “but they say ‘I’m voting for you because I know you’re focused on issues that matter to the district and you’ll work with the president.”
Faso, 66, lost his bid for a second term to Democrat Antonio Delgado. He returns to Kinderhook to consider the next chapter of his life.
Stefanik, 34, easily defeated her Democratic opponent, Tedra Cobb, to win a third term representing the area north of Albany encompassing the Adirondacks and much of the U.s.-canada border. Her life will change too.
With Democrats flipping 39 Republican seats and one race still undecided, Republicans will shift to minority status.
Many viewed Stefanik as a rising star in the Republicancontrolled Congress, and she flourished in a close working relationship with retiring House Speaker Paul Ryan. Stefanik brushed aside any suggestion her role would be significantly diminished with Democrats in control.
“I’m very well positioned (because) I have very, very strong relationships across the aisle,” she said. Republicans “who didn’t develop those relationships” are more likely to have problems.
Although Faso faced strong opposition for his vote last year to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act — Obamacare — he said his loss this month was a simple factor of Trump generating Democratic voter enthusiasm and campaign-donation dollars.
Republicans may have netted two seats in the Senate, but the blue wave that delivered the House to the Democrats washed over the small towns, rolling hills and dairy farms of Faso’s 19th Congressional District.
Between the Trump-russia investigation of special counsel Robert Mueller, Trump’s tweets, misstatements and efforts to choke off illegal immigration, the New York real-estate mogul-turned-president was an outsized presence in an election in which his name was not on the ballot.
Two days after the election, he called out Faso by name among other defeated Republicans for not sufficiently backing his agenda.
“Those are some of the people that, you know, decided for their own reason not to embrace, whether it’s me or what we stand for,” Trump said Nov. 7 at the White House.
Faso on Thursday said Trump had made a “singularly an ungracious statement.”
He defended his position on health care, saying the Republicans’ American Health Care Act, which passed the House last year, was mischaracterized as destroying the achievements of Obamacare without an adequate replacement.
In fact, the Congressional Budget Office estimated 23 million would be uninsured under the Republican plan compared to keeping the Affordable Care Act in place.
Faso offered a detailed but complicated explanation of how the Republican bill would have shifted Obamacare subsidies around by “equalizing tax treatment” of employer-provided plans vs. non-employer individual market plans.
But “try to reduce it to 30 second ad and you see what the problem is,” he said.
Stefanik’s North Country district is more solidly Republican than Faso’s Hudson Valley district, so it was easier for her to ward off negative fallout from the repeal-and-replace vote.
With Democrats in control, Stefanik said she would support what she calls “fix and replace” — efforts to widen coverage and make it more affordable. But it is an open question whether Democrats in the House who support some form of expanding Medicare can agree with Republicans who still dominate the Senate and oppose what they term “government-run health care” — a term Stefanik embraces.
Stefanik was careful not to go negative on Trump, noting that “I’m in a Trump district.”
Three of her fellow female Republicans who were also first elected to the House in 2014 did not win. And another one, Martha Mcsally, lost her Senate bid in Arizona.
Stefanik headed recruitment for the National Republican Congressional Committee in 2018 and prides herself on recruiting 100 women. About half made it past the primary.
“It wasn’t a recruitment failure,” she said. “It was a failure to provide the early support necessary to get these non-traditional women candidates through the primaries.”
Her PAC is E-PAC (“E” for Elise). It will be “expanded and rebranded” to help women early on gain sufficient traction to increase their odds of winning future primaries, she said.
Trump’s record with women includes multiple charges of groping and forced kissing. So is he a deterrent to efforts to get women to vote Republican?
“It depends, district by district,” Stefanik said, again sidestepping condemning Trump’s behavior. “Obviously we have a challenge with suburban voters nationally. I’m pleased with wining all 12 counties in my district, suburban and rural.”
Republicans can win “in this tough environment by being independent, delivering results and showing a willingness to challenge your own party,” she said. “That’s good advice for Democrats too.”
Faso is not so sanguine. To him, Republicans are in danger of having their party dragged down by Trump.
Swing states he won in 2016 — Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan and others — could easily go for Democrats in 2020, he said.
Although the party in power in the White House typically loses seats during its first midterm election, the losses this year were alarming , Faso said.
“A lot of Republican leaders have their heads in the sand about those warning signs,” he said.