April 17, 2024
By Tyler McNeil
21st CONGRESSIONAL DISTRICT — U.S. Rep. Elise Stefanik has been named on an elite list.
The controversial high-ranking Republican congresswoman and Saratoga resident has been listed as one of TIME magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world.
“Elise Stefanik is the highest-ranking woman in the House GOP and, since shedding her more moderate persona to fully embrace Donald Trump, is increasingly seen as a standard bearer for the party,” wrote TIME national correspondent Charlotte Alter.
The list comes out on newsstands Friday.
Stefanik shares space with politicians, including California Gov. Gavin Newsom, Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia Mohammed Bin Salman and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott. The list isn’t an endorsement, inasmuch as a measure of stature.
Among highlights, Alter underscored Stefanik’s effort to question Joe Biden’s win in the 2020 presidential election, her vocal fight against anti-semitism on Ivy League college campuses and her place in the 2024 veepstakes, in which she stands as a rumored running mate for presumptive GOP nominee former President Donald Trump.
The 39-year-old congresswoman, who is up for election this year against potential contender Paula Collins, was elected in 2014. She began to align more closely with the former president after the 2016 election. Alter wrote that Stefanik had shed her “more moderate persona.”
In 2021, the Albany Academy graduate ousted conservative Trump critic Liz Cheney from her role as minority conference chair. The former Wyoming congresswoman drew the ire of her party for co-chairing a U.S. House select committee investigating a failed insurrection of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
