A Rising Republican’s Bet on a Losing President

For the past three presidential elections, New York’s Twenty-First Congressional District—a humongous swath of rural, mountainous territory known as the North Country that’s closer to Canada than to the Big Apple—has voted along with the nation: Its constituents backed Barack Obama twice before flipping to Donald Trump in 2016.

“This district is really a bellwether district,” its Republican representative, Elise Stefanik, told me matter of factly a few weeks before the election. Cruising to a fourth term in the House, she had no reason to believe this time would be different.

But as the country turned left this year, Stefanik’s constituents, like their counterparts in many other rural areas, lurched further right. While a slim majority of Americans nationwide cast their ballots for Joe Biden, the overwhelming majority of voters in New York’s Twenty-First—nearly 60 percent, at last count—went for Trump. And an even higher percentage in the North Country backed Stefanik, who by her third term in the House had locked down her constituency so tightly that the national Democratic Party barely contested her reelection this year.

Stefanik’s sway over her district is no small feat: Nearly as big as Vermont and New Hampshire combined, the Twenty-First is one of the largest districts east of the Mississippi River. The district’s southern