New York State Sen. Dan Stec, a Republican and Navy veteran, is running for Congress.

Stec has tossed his hat in the ring to succeed Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., who will vacate her seat in the House of Representatives to become the next U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. A special election for New York’s 21st Congressional District will take place once Stefanik officially leaves Congress.

“At the end of the day, it’s about representing the district, and for the last 12 years in Albany, I know what it means to represent the district and if I can do that in Albany I am certain I can do that in Washington,” Stec told WWNY in an interview on Dec. 24. 

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The North Country native, whose state senate district lies within Stefanik’s congressional district, argued he is the best candidate to win the seat for Republicans because he has the highest name recognition there. 

“My argument is that I am the most electable. If we are concerned about holding this seat and the Republican majority in the House of Representatives, you want to put your most likely-to-win candidate forward and no one can compare the numbers like I do with how much of the district I already represent,” Stec told the outlet.

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Representative Elise Stefanik, a Republican from New York, during a House Education and the Workforce Committee hearing in Washington, DC, US, on Tuesday, Dec. 5, 2023. President-elect Trump tapped Stefanik to be the next U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.  (Haiyun Jiang/Bloomberg)

He pointed to his record in the New York legislature and the 104,000 votes he won in the previous election for state senate, which is nearly half of the total Stefanik won in her bid for re-election, in support of his argument that he’s best positioned to defeat the Democratic candidate in the special election.

“I am proud of my track record, my resume, and my principles. I don’t have any votes that I am embarrassed that I would have to explain like maybe someone from the other side of the aisle I have worked with would have to explain,” Stec said.

WHO COULD RUN TO REPLACE STEFANIK IN THE HOUSE?

Sticker Mule CEO Anthony Constantino is also running for the GOP nomination to succeed Stefanik.  (Paul Antonelli)

Stefanik won a sixth term to represent the district which encompasses North County, New York, but President-elect Donald Trump chose her in November to fill the U.N. ambassadorship in his new cabinet. 

In the campaign to be the Republican nominee to succeed Stefanik, Stec joins Sticker Mule CEO Anthony Constantino, a political outsider whose claim to fame is a 100 ft. “Vote for Trump” sign he installed in upstate New York. Constantino is self-funding his campaign and has pledged $2.6 million to the effort. 

Other Republicans mentioned as possible candidates include state Assemblymen Robert Smullen and Christopher Tague; and Rensselaer County Executive Steven McLaughlin, according to WWNY. Possible Democratic candidates include Assemblyman Billy Jones, whose state district falls just east of St. Lawrence County, as well as past unsuccessful challengers to Stefanik such as Matt Castelli and Paula Collins.

There will not be a traditional Republican primary for the special election. Instead, both the GOP and Democratic nominees will be chosen by party chairs in the district. 

WASHINGTON —  The rivalry between California and Florida reached a high mark in November 2023 when Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, faced off against Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, on Fox News over which state held a better model for the country.

Thirteen months later, DeSantis has left the national stage after an aborted presidential run. But his state is winning the political war.

The nation under President-elect Donald Trump will look far more like Trump’s adopted home state of Florida, after he defeated Vice President Kamala Harris by painting her as an out-of-touch California liberal.

Trump is stocking his Cabinet with Floridians. And his plans to reverse California’s policies on the environment, crime, homelessness and education are facing far less pushback than they did during his first term, thanks to the state’s diminishing clout in Congress and a system of checks on Trump’s power that has eroded.

“These are all folks born and raised in our state and are going to show America our type of leadership,” said Brian Ballard, a powerful Florida lobbyist and Republican fundraiser whose firm previously employed Trump’s incoming chief of staff, Susie Wiles, and still employs his nominee for attorney general, Pam Bondi, Florida’s former attorney general. (Ballard’s expanded footprint now includes offices in Washington and West Los Angeles, opened two years ago, another sign of his state’s incursion.)

Other high-level Floridians likely to be in Trump’s inner circle include Sen. Marco Rubio, Trump’s pick for secretary of State, and Rep. Mike Waltz, his choice as national security advisor.

Two prominent people in Trump’s orbit with California ties, advisors Elon Musk and Stephen Miller, are sharp critics of the state’s business and immigration policies, which they have pledged to help Trump reverse.

Their unified efforts are expected to unleash a continuation of fights that began eight years ago during Trump’s first term, when he sought to halt California’s policies providing sanctuary for immigrants who came to the country illegally, slash its authority to set environmental policies such as automobile fuel standards, alter water policy to benefit farmers and suspend aid after wildfires.

He was thwarted in many of those efforts by regulators, advisors who found ways to change his mind, courts and former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the San Francisco Democrat who proved his most formidable adversary.

Democratic attorneys general filed a record 155 lawsuits against the first Trump administration, winning 83% of cases, according to a tally by Paul Nolette, a political science professor at Marquette University. California was involved in more than 100 such lawsuits.

But Trump has picked staffers for his second term who are less likely to push back against his wishes. The Supreme Court has grown more deferential to Trump, who appointed three of its nine members. And Pelosi is no longer leading her party, while Republicans won control of both the House and Senate in last month’s election.

California Democrats’ best defense appears to be Republican dysfunction, as demonstrated by the party’s struggles last week to pass a bill in the GOP-controlled House that would avoid a government shutdown.

Trump, meanwhile, has vowed to fight the state this time on a variety of fronts, including its homeless policies, its resistance to a border wall, its electric car mandate and his plans to begin mass deportations that would disproportionately affect California, a border state with the nation’s largest Latino population.

Newsom, who declined an interview request, has vowed to continue the fight against Trump’s policies but without what he called “a resistance brand” that defined his earlier clashes. Other Democrats have approached Trump’s second term with more conciliatory rhetoric as the party struggles to coalesce around strategy.

Former Sen. Barbara Boxer, a Democrat who helped define the party’s liberal wing for decades, argues that Trump will incite his own backlash by overreaching.

“Bring it on,” she said.

“People just decided they weren’t feeling happy about things,” she added. “They didn’t vote on the issues that are now going to hit them in the face,” she said, citing a list of policies from Trump’s allies that could lead to workers losing overtime and residents losing breathable air.

But even if Trump’s policies help Democrats politically, they may have a deep impact on Californians.

Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta, who began preparing potential lawsuits months before the election, said he expects to battle the incoming administration over immigration, climate, reproductive rights, gun safety, democracy-related issues and civil rights. He acknowledged the Supreme Court’s rightward turn but pointed out that most decisions are made by trial and circuit court judges.

“We can and will prevail, and we have prevailed in front of the U.S. Supreme Court,” he said.

Bonta, who is considering a run for governor in 2026, argued that voters were choosing Trump the man — narrowly — rather than a single state’s governing model.

“The Florida model? You mean Matt Gaetz or DeSantis or Pam Bondi?” he said, referring to the former House member who withdrew from consideration as attorney general over allegations of sexual misconduct with minors, along with the governor and current attorney general nominee. “I don’t think they’re a model for the future of our country. What else is the Florida model? ‘Don’t say gay’ — just absolutely exclusionary and discriminatory? A formal program sending immigrants across the country as political pawns?”

But Bonta and other Democrats concede the party just lost an election and that Trump, even as he lost California by 20 percentage points, gained about 10 percentage points over his 2016 and 2020 margins in the state.

Much of that growth came among the state’s Latino population, which makes up a large proportion of Democrats’ traditional working-class base.

“It’s all centered around affordability. California is the least affordable state when you factor in housing costs,” said Mike Madrid, an anti-Trump Republican pollster who conducted surveys of Latino voters after the election and has focused on their evolving views for decades. “The idea of California values is specific to cultural issues. It is essentially ignoring economic issues.”

Madrid pointed to policies like Newsom’s plan to phase out sales of new gas-powered vehicles by 2035 as an example of a policy that does not speak to working-class voters.

Most Latinos in the state have to live farther from their jobs, because of the high cost of housing, and pay more for gas, but they cannot afford a new EV or benefit from a Biden administration rebate. The majority of their income is spent on housing costs, which have grown in part because of costly building regulations.

New census estimates released Thursday show California gaining 232,570 residents between 2023 and 2024 after pandemic-era declines. But the state lost more residents (239,575) to other parts of the country than any other state, and saw an increase only because of immigrants from other countries, according to the estimates.

Florida’s population gain was among the largest: 467,347 residents, comprising both immigrants and domestic migrants.

California’s long-beleaguered Republicans are gloating as they promise to work with Trump to dismantle Democratic-led projects and environmental regulations.

Rep. Vince Fong, a Bakersfield Republican who won an election to succeed former Republican Speaker Kevin McCarthy earlier this year, said he will file legislation to halt funding on California’s high-speed rail project and work with Trump to build a border wall in the state, blaming a porous border for allowing fentanyl-smuggling from China.

In an interview, he praised Florida effusively as a better model for business, regulation, environmental policy and housing costs and welcomed the state’s influence at the national level.

“It’s ironic to me that Gov. Newsom and the Democrats in the state Legislature are now concerned about affordability,” he said. “You hear them talking about it, but it’s their policies.”

He accused Newsom of waging war with Florida and the Trump administration for his own personal gain.

“He is trying to elevate himself for his own political purposes and at the expense of Californians,” he said.

Newsom’s office said the state maintains the world’s fifth-largest economy and ranks first in new business starts and private sector jobs. Brandon Richards, a spokesman, said Newsom is traveling the state to expand economic opportunity.

But many of the nation’s biggest business titans are making their own pilgrimages — to visit Trump at his home in Florida.

Virginia’s top legislative Democrat sounded an alarm over President-elect Trump’s Department of Governmental Efficiency (DOGE) plan to tell a portion of the federal workforce “you’re fired” for efficiency’s sake.

The state Senate’s top Republican responded Thursday by saying the majority party is “asking the wrong question.”

Earlier this week, House Speaker Don Scott Jr. wrote a letter to the commonwealth’s unemployment agency warning of the fallout from such a plan and a potential uptick in unemployment claims.

“We should all be concerned about what these changes mean for the employees raising their families in Virginia, paying taxes in Virginia and calling Virginia home,” Scott wrote to Virginia Employment Commissioner Demetrios Melis in a letter reported by the Richmond Times-Dispatch.

TOP DOGE SENATOR DEMANDS LAME-DUCK BIDEN AGENCIES HALT COSTLY TELEWORK, CITING VOTER MANDATE

“Taking President-elect Trump at his word that he will immediately move to downsize the workforce and relocate agencies, we can safely assume that a large portion of our workforce that resides in the commonwealth will be negatively affected,” added Scott, D-Portsmouth.

Scott reportedly said he believes Northern Virginia and the Hampton Roads area he represents would be hardest-hit.

“I have concerns that, in the coming months, not only will our nation experience a mass increase in unemployment due to the proposed changes to our government. But, more importantly, those changes will have a detrimental effect on Virginians, our commonwealth’s unemployment rate and our economy overall,” he told the Times-Dispatch.

However, Senate Minority Leader Ryan McDougle, R-New Kent, said the concept of DOGE addresses a greater concern for Virginians and U.S. taxpayers when it comes to fiscally responsible governance.

“That’s the wrong question,” McDougle said in an interview Thursday.

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“The question should be whether we are taking dollars that Virginians are earning and paying to the federal government and whether they are being spent wisely.

“If the federal government is paying people to do jobs they shouldn’t be doing, then that’s spending taxpayer dollars unwisely.”

Trump’s DOGE co-leader, Vivek Ramaswamy, previously told Fox Business, “We expect mass reductions … [and] certain agencies to be deleted outright.” 

Ramaswamy’s counterpart, Elon Musk, has expressed similar sentiments, including a tweet stating, “Delete CFPB,” a reference to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Additionally, Sen. Joni Ernst, the Iowa Republican seen as the top DOGE lawmaker in the upper chamber, is spearheading a bill to relocate about one-third of federal workers outside the District of Columbia-Maryland-Virginia area. The legislation proposed by Ernst has a lengthy acronym, the DRAIN THE SWAMP Act.

Virginia Sen. Ryan McDougle, R-Hanover/New Kent (Virginia Senate)

Ernst also demanded answers from Biden agency heads about work-from-home policies their staffs enjoy.

In his remarks Thursday, McDougle added that if Democrats were so concerned about the subject, they should have balked at plans to funnel Virginia taxpayer funds to the Washington-area Metro system to “subsidize” the lack of ridership from telework policies criticized by Ernst.

“I didn’t feel our Democratic friends were as concerned with the millions of dollars going to fund Metro amid [federal workers not being required to] go into the office and having to subsidize them,” McDougle said.

Virginia’s 2024 budget included about $144 million in Metro funding. Metro CEO Randy Clarke said in June the transit agency found an additional $50 million in efficiencies for its nearly $5 billion budget, according to multiple reports.

Earlier this month, a top Democrat on the state House Labor Committee, said she was “very disappointed” with a response from representatives for Gov. Glenn Youngkin when she voiced concerns about potential federal workforce cuts.

State Delegate Candi Mundon King, D-Dumfries, noted in November that thousands of federal workers live in the state and in her district and called DOGE’s plan “disastrous” after the Virginia Republican Party touted the “streamlin[ing of] government bureaucracy” as “good for all Americans, including Virginians.”

Mundon King’s district sits in the Washington exurb of Prince William County, which, for many years, was led by high-profile conservative Corey Stewart but has recently swung heavily Democratic.

Virginia welcome sign (Joe Sohm/Visions of America/Universal Images Group/Getty)

“No wonder Northern Virginia has lost faith in Virginia Republicans,” Mundon King said.

Youngkin, a successful business executive before entering politics, previously said anyone who leaves the private sector to work in government will immediately recognize it needs drastic adjustments.

“Whether it’s me coming into state government in Virginia or President Trump coming back into the federal government, [we] know it is inefficient. It does not work with the same efficiency you would expect out of a business,” he told The Daily Progress of Charlottesville.

Government efficiency plans “may result in some job losses for the federal government. … The great thing about the Commonwealth of Virginia is we have nearly 300,000 jobs that are unfilled,” he added.

Melis similarly told Scott Virginia is “well prepared” to adapt to changes in employment figures and reassured Mundon King earlier this month that some of the concerns voiced were premature, according to The Roanoke Times.

Youngkin earlier this month invited workers in Trump’s incoming administration to choose Virginia as their place of residence over Maryland or the District of Columbia, citing, in part, lower taxes and better-ranked schools.

In a statement to Fox News Digital, Youngkin spokesman Christian Martinez said Virginia’s economy was “stagnant” and the unemployment system “in shambles” when the Republican took office after eight years of Democratic governorship.

“Commonsense policies to lower the cost of living and bring real business-like efficiency to government have helped fix both,” Martinez said.

“The governor appreciates Speaker Scott’s recent commitments to support further tax relief, which, along with a roaring economy and over 300,000 open jobs, means Virginia is in a great position as the president works to shrink the bloated federal government.”