WASHINGTON — GOP Rep. Elise Stefanik has landed an “all-star” team of New York-bred strategists — including those who helped defeat Gov. Kathy Hochul in past races — and even Dem backers as she prepares to take on the governor, sources say.
The upstate Republican is set to announce her widely anticipated bid for governor as soon as next week — and has already hired such campaign heavyweights as Erie County natives Stefan Mychajliw and Chris Grant.
Mychajliw started as a journalist covering Hochul, and Grant was the chief strategist and media consultant behind GOP Rep. Chris Collins’ successful run against the gov for the House in 2012, the year Democratic President Barack Obama was re-elected.
“It will be my pleasure to help fire the worst governor in America to save New York,” said Mychajliew, who was later elected as a Republican comptroller in Erie County in the 2010s, to The Post.
Hochul previously served there as county clerk before being elected to one term in the House from 2011 to 2013.
A source said Stefanik was very deliberate in her choice of Mychajliw and Grant.
“As she was putting together a team, it was important to her that they have a deep understanding of New York, specifically the regional aspects,” the source said, adding that both of the incoming staffers are well-equipped to “run up the score” on Hochul on her home turf in Western New York.
Tony Fabrizio — who was President Trump’s top pollster for his 2024 campaign and is from Long Island and a longtime political consigliere to Suffolk County Republican Chairman Jesse Garcia — will head up polling, giving the Stefanik campaign an even firmer footing in regions that have shifted right in recent years, insiders said.
Former New York Republican gubernatorial candidate Lee Zeldin defeated Hochul in Long Island’s Suffolk and Nassau counties in 2022 but lost to her in Erie County.
Adding to Stefanik’s effort is the fact that “a number of Democrats and prominent former Hochul supporters have been both urging Elise to run and pledging to support her campaign as well,” a second source said.
Stefanik plans to announce her gubernatorial bid after the New York City mayoral election Nov. 4.
Other Stefanik aides who have signed on to her campaign include Alex DeGrasse, who has worked for the Republican congresswoman for a decade and helped maintain a grassroots donor list of more than 400,000 contributors, Patrick Hester, who has also been with the upstate pol for a decade and another Trump 2024 campaign official, Tim Saler.
DeGrasse will serve as the 2026 gubernatorial campaign’s chief of staff and CFO; Mychajliw will head up rapid response; Grant will be an adviser. Hester will also join in advising, and Saler will oversee micro-targeting, Axios first reported.
The second source called the assembly of staffers an “all-star team” and said it will be focusing on messages that attack Hochul’s record on crime and affordability and her recent endorsement of socialist New York City mayoral frontrunner Zohran Mamdani, among others.
The staffing blitz comes as Stefanik is touting a more than $13 million campaign war chest across several fundraising committees — including nearly $11 million in her principal campaign committee, Elise for Congress, which could easily be transferred for a statewide run in New York.
In addition to Stefanik’s upstate roots and her team’s expertise with media strategy in the Capital District, the congresswoman launched a political action committee in June that is helping foster connections in 62 counties statewide, according to the first source.
If the congresswoman beats Hochul next year, she would become the first Republican governor in the Empire State since George Pataki defeated Democratic incumbent Gov. Mario Cuomo in 1996, driven by disenchantment with three terms of “too liberal” policies in Albany.
Pataki left office in December 2006, leading to what has become two decades of Democratic control of the governor’s mansion.
The Dem reign kept up even after a sexual-harassment scandal forced Cuomo’s son, Andrew Cuomo, to resign as governor in August 2021, with Hochul ascending to fill the vacancy.
“I know Kathy Hochul well, personally and politically,” said Mychajliw, a former TV anchor and investigative reporter for WKBW and WGRZ who has more recently been attacking the Democrat in op-eds for the Long Shore Press.
“She’s a hypocritical fraud who was never really litigated as the accidental governor who got swapped in at the last minute.
“I saw firsthand as Erie County comptroller what a disaster she left the Erie County Clerk’s Office, which took quite some time to clean up,” he said.
“Her check-cashing scandal is a precursor to how badly she turned New York state into a massive dumpster fire.”
Hochul had left the clerk’s office mid-term to run in the special election for New York’s 26th Congressional District in 2011, leaving behind roughly $3 million in unprocessed checks relating to real-estate transactions, though her successor didn’t place blame her directly for the backlog.
New York State Democratic Party spokesman Addison Dick shot back, “Sellout Stefanik is more than welcome to focus on how she has jacked up prices with her tariff tax hikes and enabled Trump’s attempts to cut funding for the police in New York.
“New Yorkers know that Stefanik is running on her failed record in Washington and Trump’s destructive agenda that makes our state less safe and less affordable.”
But some prominent Democrats and Hochul’s opponents are “urging” Stefanik to formally announce her campaign — and say they will be backing her bid “financially” and “vocally,” the second source familiar with the situation said.
That effort was given a boost last week when the right-of-center Manhattan Institute put out a poll of registered New York voters showing Stefanik besting Hochul, 43% to 42%, with 7% still undecided and 9% preferring neither candidate.
The survey found that Stefanik would beat Hochul 54% to 37% on Long Island, dominate in upstate rural regions by more than 40 percentage points and narrowly win among upstate urban voters, 46% to 45%.
But Hochul beat Stefanik in the Hudson Valley region, 45% to 36%, in the hypothetical match-up, according to the survey of 600 likely voters taken last week.
The New York Republican is expected to keep needling Hochul on her Mamdani endorsement, as she has been a combatting antisemitism in Congress and plans to publish an “insider’s account” of her oversight work in April 2026, The Post previously exclusively reported.
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