PONTE VEDRA BEACH, Fla. – On the second floor of a luxury golf resort near Jacksonville, House Republicans gathered for drinks last week as they embarked on a three-day retreat to work their way to winning the majority in this year’s midterm elections.
Ohio Representative Jim Jordan, dressed in a fleece vest, stood in a corner as Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene walked in and out of the front desk. But it was New York Representative Elise Stefanik, the No. 3 Republican and an architect of the party’s message, who ran the show and worked in the room with her 7-month-old son on her hip.
A year ago, the same House Republican retreat was fraught with drama when Wyoming Representative Liz Cheney, who then held the third executive position, publicly denounced former President Donald J. Trump’s election lies. That sparked backlash from other Republican leaders, who quickly moved to oust her and install Ms. Stefanik in her place.
This year, with Ms Stefanik as organizer of the event and MC, there was little difference of opinion. Inflation, immigration and President Biden’s failures played out, while Mr. Trump’s false claims about fraud in the 2020 election and his denial of responsibility for the January 6 attack on the Capitol did not deserve even mention — a sign of how thoroughly the party has gathered around the former president.
That Ms. Stefanik, 37, would host this particular party seemed appropriate. A once moderate Republican who worked in President George W. Bush’s White House and was a protégé of former Chairman Paul D. Ryan, she is the epitome of the rapid shift in the Republican Party. In just a few years, she’s gone from the conservative mainstream to an unlikely star in the MAGA universe and a die-hard Trump loyalist.
Her reinvention was vividly seen in an interview on the sidelines of the party retreat. Ms Stefanik echoed Mr Trump’s lies about the theft of the 2020 election and refused to recognize Mr Biden as the legitimately elected president.
“Joe Biden is in the White House now — the American people understand that — but they do have questions,” she said between lunch with former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and dinner with the author of a book called “Woke, inc.”
“In my district, I still get questions about it,” said Ms. Stefanik, adding, “I think there are constitutional questions about the unconstitutional reach of unelected individuals in states like Pennsylvania.”
And while her party leans toward extremism, Ms. Stefanik declined to condemn the Republicans who speak loudest to the brink. When asked about Ms. Greene, who recently spoke at a white nationalist event, and North Carolina Representative Madison Cawthorn, who has called Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky a “thug,” she said the two are merely expressing the views of voters in their districts.
“They represent their voters, and they are held accountable for the statements they make,” Ms Stefanik said, noting that the House Republican conference as a whole did not share their view.
It has been a rapid transformation. Ms. Stefanik, a Harvard graduate, was once seen by Democrats as a bright spot in the Republican Party, someone who delved into policy issues in the House Intelligence Committee, which she joined in 2017.
In private conversations, Ms Stefanik sometimes admitted to former colleagues and confidants that Mr Trump was a disaster for the party, though she said she saw no benefit in criticizing him publicly. She told her confidantes that the administration made “stupid” decisions that blamed Republicans in Congress — frustrated, for example, by Trump’s on-again, off-again support for sweeping immigration laws to grant legal status to unauthorized immigrants who were deported. brought in to the United States as children, often known as Dreamers.
(A senior adviser to Ms. Stefanik, Alex deGrasse, said she never made those comments about Mr. Trump and his administration.)
But today, Ms. Stefanik is a loud and brash Trump acolyte, even defending his praise for President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia. (“I think President Trump said Vladimir Putin underestimated Joe Biden’s weakness and unfortunately took advantage of it,” she said, pointing out that Mr. Putin was a war criminal.)
While some Republicans have tried to tread a careful tightrope, backing Mr. Trump’s policies and distancing himself from his false claims about the stolen election, Ms. Stefanik makes no such qualifications.
“I often speak to President Trump,” she said. “He is an incredibly important voice in terms of growing the party among the working class.” When asked whether Mr Trump’s influence on her party was on the wane, she flatly rejected the idea.
“No, it’s in the elevator,” she said. “Especially as voters regret voting for Joe Biden.”
Ms Stefanik, who previously said she would serve only one term in the leadership, is herself emerging within her party’s ranks. She could lead a powerful House committee or throw her hat in the ring in what is expected to be a competitive race for the whip. Part of her leadership success, aides said, is based on her efforts to elect more Republican women to Congress through her Political Action Committee, which also helped her build a network of support at her conference.
She has worked hard to win over opponents who question her conservative bona fides and is now widely popular among Republicans, including right-wing members who were once suspicious of her mainstream background. The biggest help in that effort has been the support of Mr. Trump, who doesn’t care about her more centrist past if she has shown him total allegiance.
Mr. Trump, said people close to him, would be more than happy to see Ms. Stefanik make history as the Republicans’ first female speaker, though he has no plans to run for the post and it is unlikely that he will last. in the manner of Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the minority leader, if Republicans manage to win back the majority of the House. But his constant praise for Ms. Stefanik serves as a reminder that she passed a loyalty test with Mr. Trump that Mr. McCarthy failed.
Mr. Trump speaks to Ms. Stefanik several times a week, describing her as “one of my killers,” thanks to her key role as his chief defender on the House Intelligence Committee during its first impeachment trial.
Her opportunism is criticized by her opponents, but celebrated by some on the hard right, who think she has revealed herself as someone who will go to any lengths to take off.
At a recent fundraising drive in Palm Beach, Mr. Trump even floated her name as a potential presidential candidate in 2028.
“I’m not even going to get involved in that,” she said when asked about her future in the House leadership. “I support Kevin McCarthy as a speaker. I don’t measure the curtains. It is a long time between now and the November elections.”
(To downplay any semblance of rivalry, Ms. Stefanik’s aides noted that Mr. McCarthy not only attended her wedding in 2017, but also campaigned for her at a motorcycle bar in upstate New York during her first race.)
Her political metamorphosis has come with heady rewards for an ambitious politician: a prime-time speaking engagement at the 2020 Republican National Convention and an airplane-driven rise in her party’s ranks.
“Congress has gotten tougher and rougher,” said Oklahoma Republican Representative Tom Cole. ‘She didn’t start that. She’s proven she knows how to mix it up, and that’s one of the qualities we look for in a conference.”
But Ms. Stefanik’s political calculation astonished the networks she had built throughout her life. She lost many of her Harvard college friends and was asked to set aside her role on the senior advisory committee of the university’s Institute of Politics over her false claims of voter fraud in the 2020 election.
Her former mentor Mr. Ryan declined to comment on her for this article, although assistants to both said they were still in regular contact.
Many friends and former colleagues think she took a cynical, short-term political gamble in her full turn to Trumpism. Some tried to warn her at various points along the way, but got a gritty response.
Melissa DeRosa, a childhood friend of Mrs. Stefanik, and secretary to former New York Governor Andrew M. Cuomo, said she got in touch in 2019 after seeing Ms. Stefanik during the impeachment hearings.
“I’m really concerned that you’re doing these things that damage your credibility in the long run,” she recalls texting Ms Stefanik.
Mrs. DeRosa said the response was polite but curt. “She wrote back and basically said, ‘You should always feel like you can tell me what you think. I appreciate your input.’” It was the end of the conversation.
Other former friends and mentors said they found her shape-shifting depressing. Bill Kristol, a prominent Never Trump conservative, said he once considered her a rising star in the party.
“I introduced her to backers and contributed to her campaign in 2014,” Kristol said, noting that at a meeting in her office in 2018, she privately agreed with him that Mr. Trump was an obligation. “She seemed like a responsible elected official. Error.”
To explain her own transformation, Ms. Stefanik points to the sway to the right of her former swing district, which voted for Barack Obama and was represented by a Democrat before turning the chair in 2014 and making the district Trump land.
“I believe my track record and my time in Congress is a reflection of my constituents,” she said.
Privately, she has told people she was “radicalized by Adam Schiff,” the Democratic Intelligence Committee chairman who led the first impeachment trial against Trump.
Other members of the panel say that as Ms Stefanik became more partisan about the allegation, her attendance at committee events and briefings dropped to nearly zero.
At home, in a neighborhood that has become redder in the process of reclassification, Ms. Stefanik has only become safer politically. “If you live in an area like this, it’s kind of a quiet neighborhood,” said Jeff Graham, a conservative radio host and former mayor of Watertown. “Seeing your congressman on the news makes you feel good.”
Still, there are awkward moments.
Last fall, while Ms. Stefanik was with her husband and her newborn son in an apple orchard in Saratoga County, a woman growing up in the North Country region approached her and told her outright how she thought the Congresswoman had compromised her values for power. .
Ms Stefanik was furious, telling voters that she was considered one of the most bipartisan congresswomen in the country, a record she was proud of. (A report from the Lugar Center, seeking to reinforce the bipartisanship, ranked her as one of the most bipartisan members of the previous Congress, according to the index.)
In an interview, Ms Stefanik said she remembered the incident but refused to believe the woman was from her district.
“No voter,” she said firmly. “No voters.”