Republicans Should Have No Problem Winning This Special Election to Replace Elise Stefanik
Not long after he was elected president once more, Donald Trump announced he was nominating Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY), who also serves as the Republican conference chairwoman, as the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. She’s not the only Republican in the House to be chosen for the second Trump administration, with now former Rep. Mike Waltz (R-FL) retiring on January 20 to serve as national security advisor. While Republicans are in the majority, it’s a particularly narrow one, and it could be a little tight before replacements for Stefanik, Waltz, and also former Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL), who resigned last November, are picked. That being said, it should be particularly easy for Stefanik to be succeeded by a fellow Republican, and that could very well be with help from Democrats.
On Tuesday, Democrats selected Blake Gendebien to run for the seat in New York’s 21st Congressional District, despite how, as a headline for the Times Union pointed out, they don’t even have the timeline yet of that special election. Although she is expected to be handily confirmed for the ambassadorship with stated bipartisan support from those like Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA), Stefanik still serves in the House.
Gendebien’s Congressional website describes himself as a “dairy farmer,” and North Country Public Radio (NCPR) also uses the “farmer” label in their reporting. According to Fox News, “the 15 Democratic chairmen of NY-21 announced their unanimous support for Gendebien, championing him as ‘an authentic voice that will fight for sensible solutions.'” He’s also celebrated as “an outsider to the political arena,” and one who “embodies the voice and grit that distinguishes this district.”
There’s more to it, though. Gendebien, who serves as vice chairman of the Agri-Mark Dairy Cooperative covering New York and New England, may be an “outsider to the political arena,” but he hasn’t shied away from making political remarks, and disparaging ones at that. As that same Fox News report mentioned:
The Democratic candidate who will run to replace outgoing Republican Rep. Elise Stefanik in upstate New York can be heard in a resurfaced interview condemning U.S. Border Patrol for apprehending illegal immigrants and disparaging off-duty corrections officers and local American laborers he hired to work on his dairy farm.
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New York GOP Chair Ed Cox referenced the dairy farmer’s past comments made in a more than hour-long interview with a local newspaper reporter on March 13, 2013.
According to the recorded audio reviewed by Fox News Digital, Gendebien voiced frustrations about the labor market in upstate New York. Among his comments, he claimed local correction officers “don’t have much self-worth,” and described North County workers as not having “practical independence and ability to think,” in contrast to his foreign farm laborers.
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In the 2013 interview, Gendebien is heard explaining why he much preferred “Hispanic labor,” generalizing local residents as having drinking problems and being involved in child custody disputes.
“If it weren’t for the Hispanic labor, I wouldn’t be doing this,” Gendebien said while describing the process for milking cows. “So there’s three Hispanic employees. They would need to be replaced by probably six local people. And it’s hard to find one person that does not have domestic abuse problems, alcohol problems, wage garnishments.”
“So when you hire these local guys, all of a sudden you’re bombarded with social program stuff like what do you call it? I don’t even – I’m not in that world, so I don’t know,” he went on. “So the court will call you. Is Brian showing up to work? What is Brian making? He has a child with this girl. He has a child with this girl. He has a court date. He needs to appear on this day. So you’ve got all of these plans and these guys have to leave for court all the time because they’re in custody battles and, what’s it called, child support battles. And they want you to lie and tell that you don’t make this money. And it’s just awful. And they show up late. They show up. They drink too much. There is just no labor force out there.”
Regarding other farm help, Gendebien said he hired a corrections officer.
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“You probably know that they don’t have much self-worth in their jobs as corrections officers, so they’ll work extra time and get maybe three, four weeks’ vacation. And in that vacation they will do things, plumbing or electrician work or something, just so that they feel some self-worth,” Gendebien told the reporter. “So we gave him all hunting rights. You can hunt all 800 acres and he does the work for basically materials. But he also gets some self-worth. He gets the hunting rights, and we get a guy that we trust to do a lot of work and a good deal. He did my house, he did the barn. He did a lot of things.”
At one point, Gendebien complained that a Border Patrol agent took one of his workers, an illegal immigrant, into custody.
“So Border Patrol is up and down this road,” Gendebien relayed to the reporter, according to the audio archived by the Library of Congress. “As far as I know, these guys are illegal. I have all their paperwork, and I’m not obligated to check. Not obligated to E-Verify. So I get the same paperwork from them as I get from anyone else. And we move along. But Border Patrol will profile by skin color, crossing the road and they’ll stop. And then they will interrogate and scream at the person.”
After Border Patrol confronted one farmworker and took him into custody, Gendebien said he called up the high school’s soccer coach, a 30-year Border Patrol agent, who told him that new Border Patrol agents sent to upstate New York from places like Arizona want to make more apprehensions, causing some friction within leadership at their command.
Gendebien said the man told him, “I don’t pick up farmworkers, but we get young men and women from Arizona that are gung-ho, and all they want to do is pick people up. And he said when they bring someone in, we have to support them. We can’t say no because then they’ll want our jobs. They want our senior jobs. So they’ll quickly say, ‘You are, you know, you’re not supporting me with this illegal person.'”
One Christmas Eve, Gendebien said, he bailed out an illegal immigrant for $10,000 so that he had help on the farm over the holiday.
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Fox News Digital reached out to Gendebien’s campaign, but they did not immediately respond.
There’s lots to unpack there. It’s not a good look to be disparaging Border Patrol in general, but especially when it comes to perpetuating stereotypes about Hispanic laborers. Further, the people he’s lambasting in contrast to the laborers he prefers likely wouldn’t take too well to such insults, especially if Gendebien wants to represent them in Congress. How are remarks like the ones he made in that interview those that come from someone who “embodies the voice and grit that distinguishes this district?”
New York Republicans are “thrilled” about Gendebien’s run. New York GOP Chairman Ed Cox issued a statement on Tuesday indicating as much, which was also referenced by Fox News:
“Republicans are thrilled by the selection of Democrats of radical Far Left Blake Gendebien, who not only supported Joe Biden’s open border policies, but also bailed out illegals from ICE. Gendebien viciously claimed that local correctional officers ‘don’t have much self-worth’ and disparaged local North Country children as not having ‘practical independence and an ability to think.’
“Far Left Democrat Blake Gendebien even castigated hardworking North Country workers as ‘awful‘ people who ‘drank too much.’
“This radical Far Left Democrat is a longtime major donor and groupie of leftist, gun-grabbing, Taxin’ Tedra Cobb, a supporter of Kathy Hochul, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, and a public supporter of Biden’s inflation policies, which devastated NY21 families.
“Democrats didn’t do their homework when they selected Blake Gendebien and his catastrophic statements. Republicans will easily hold this seat in the upcoming special election, because the North Country is unquestionably Trump Country.”
Cox’s statement also references Gendebien’s individual contributions, according to Federal Election Commission (FEC) records. There’s been countless $50.00 donations to ActBlue, the Democratic fundraising platform which has been the subject of scandal and controversy when it comes to the platform admitting to accepting foreign gift cards donations.
There’s also a post from August 2022 when the woefully misnamed Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) was passed by Congress with no Republican support, shortly before then President Joe Biden signed the bill into law. Biden himself, a couple of months after he was forced out of the 2024 presidential race by fellow Democrats, finally admitted that the bill with a a $369 billion price tag was really a climate alarmism bill.
“With the passage of this historic bill, Americans will see their energy costs go down while we tackle the urgent threats we face every day from the climate crisis” – @SenStabenow https://t.co/ypXMu9JsU4
— Senate Ag, Nutrition, & Forestry Committee Dems (@SenateAgDems) August 7, 2022
Did Democrats really have a chance at winning Stefanik’s seat to begin with? Not exactly. She won reelection last November with 62 percent of the vote, with her Democratic challenger winning 38 percent. Still, that the party has chosen someone considered so radical and out of touch cannot be a good luck for them, especially with the 2026 midterms not all that far from now.
As hopeful as 2026 and 2028 look for the Republican Party, especially with the Democrats looking at a 57-31 percent unfavorable rating with Americans, Republicans cannot afford to get cocky. We all know how the 2022 midterms turned out, with the red wave never really materializing. If Democrats continue to fail this badly, though, with such a lack of self-awareness, it’s okay to be hopeful, especially if Republicans themselves do the work and take nothing for granted.
