When Mike Lawler, a Republican congressman from New York, conceded his race on Tuesday to his Democratic challenger, Cait Conley, he said it was important to be “gracious in defeat.”
If Mr. Lawler was trying to model decorum, some of his Republican colleagues in the state seemed to have missed the message.
In the days following the brutal, 19-point loss sustained by the Nassau County executive, Bruce Blakeman, to the Democratic incumbent, Gov. Kathy Hochul, the state Republican Party has descended into a vicious, backbiting brawl.
An incoming Republican congressman called for the state party chair to be fired. The Republican he’s replacing, Representative Elise Stefanik, criticized Mr. Blakeman for running a “low-energy” campaign — the same insult Mr. Trump lobbed at Jeb Bush, the former governor of Florida, during the 2016 Republican presidential primary.
Marc Molinaro, a former Republican congressman and incoming state assemblyman, suggested a different sort of cleaning: The state party, he wrote on X, “needs an enema.”
Circular firing squads are a common post-defeat phenomenon among politicians, but Tuesday’s loss for the Republicans, both nationwide and locally, was particularly crushing.
Not only did Ms. Hochul outperform the polls to trounce Mr. Blakeman, but Democrats flipped a pivotal congressional seat held by Mr. Lawler in the Hudson Valley. They also retook significant territory in southern Brooklyn; flipped the town supervisor’s seat in Hempstead, the base of the Nassau County Republican Party, for only the second time in more than a century; and even took power in Pelham Manor, a small village in Westchester County, for the first time in decades.
If the results were ugly for Republicans, so was their post-election fracas.
Mr. Blakeman responded to Ms. Stefanik’s slight with a wholesale attack on her character.
“Elise Stefanik is a selfish, do nothing politician that didn’t lift a finger to help Republican candidates in New York this year,” he said on social media.
In an interview with The New York Times on Friday, he also disputed the contention that he had run a low-energy campaign.
“I took two days off in 11 months,” he said. “I think that’s pretty remarkable.”
And he kept up the anti-Stefanik drumbeat.
“She has no right to criticize anybody, because as a so-called leader of the party in this state, she did nothing,” he said.
Ms. Stefanik declined to comment further beyond her posts on social media, where she pointedly acknowledged that feelings were “raw in the aftermath of Tuesday’s result,” an experience she said she was not herself familiar with, since she had “never lost any of my seven elections.”
“I know that this is a tough loss in NY and I imagine it takes time to process,” she wrote on X. “I’m going to give some Upstate grace whether deserved or not.”
The performance by Democrats was, of course, buoyed by a surge that returned both the House and Senate to Democratic control and routed Republicans in Texas, South Carolina and Maine. Mr. Blakeman pointed to those losses in his interview with The Times.
“This was nationwide,” he said. “It was in every state.”
But some Republicans argued that there was plenty of blame to go around locally, too.
Inna Vernikov, a Republican New York City councilwoman, accused Mr. Blakeman of misleading potential donors by suggesting the race was closer than it was, likening it to a “grift.”
“When a campaign runs and publishes polling that is not an accurate reflection of what credible external polls show, while everyone knows the political reality is different, but then uses those polls to attract donors to gain financially on the race without a shot of winning, that is a grift,” Ms. Vernikov said in an interview.
Mr. Blakeman dismissed Ms. Vernikov.
“I don’t think about her,” he said in an interview on Friday. “She’s inconsequential in politics in this state.”
The disputes had some New York conservatives lamenting the standing of the state Republican Party.
“Infighting within the party betrays the faith of us regular schmucks who actually believe in candidates and try to help them,” wrote Bob Lonsberry, a conservative talk radio host in upstate New York.
Ken Girardin, a former Republican operative, suggested that the state party should have done a deep dive into why Lee Zeldin, its former standard-bearer, narrowly lost the governorship to Ms. Hochul in 2022.
“A lot of Republicans want to take the patient into surgery before they’ve looked at the X-ray,” Mr. Girardin said, noting the party’s lack of introspection into why Mr. Zeldin underperformed in the party’s purported stronghold of upstate New York, including Onondaga, Saratoga and Monroe Counties.
Mr. Girardin also lamented the lack of Republican Party infrastructure, an issue that also bedeviled the Democratic Party in 2022, and that Ms. Hochul has spent the ensuing years trying to fix.
“The state party has three things: access to R.N.C. data, U.S.P.S. mailing privileges, which allow the State Committee to mail at a cheaper rate, and Nelson Rockefeller’s brownstone on State Street,” Mr. Girardin said. “Beyond that, it’s not like the State Committee has a core of volunteers the way that county parties do.”
Anthony Constantino, one of the few Republicans in New York to win a heavily contested race on Tuesday, did not disagree, and on Wednesday urged the party to fire its leader, Ed Cox. (Mr. Constantino did not have his party’s backing during the primary in June.)
“In NYS, the Republican Party is mostly a Con Job that helps Democrats win,” Mr. Constantino wrote on social media. “Even Bruce Blakeman was in on the con. He just wandered around like a headless chicken going from stupid dinner, to stupid dinner and charming the ‘party’ while ignoring the people. I am with the people and insist we rebuild the Party. Fire Ed Cox!”
Asked if he agreed with the notion that Mr. Cox should go, Mr. Blakeman was circumspect.
“I think it’s very healthy to have that discussion,” he said. “I think in a lot of cases new blood can be very helpful.”
Mr. Cox did not respond to a request for comment.
The post Republicans’ Losses in New York Were Bad. Then Came Their Freakout. appeared first on New York Times.
