Republican Rep. Elise Stefanik’s long-awaited announcement she is running for governor of New York was quickly derailed by reports her campaign website launched with spelling errors and Latin-style filler text common on amateur web pages.
“Nice website!” Addison Dick, rapid response director for the New York State Democratic Party, wrote on X, sharing an image of a campaign page featuring the text “Lorem Ipsum Dolor Sit Amet.”
“@EliseStefanik’s botched launch continues.”
He also shared screenshots of spelling issues and bizarre phrases that made the apparent early version of the site look more like a work in progress than a primetime campaign operation.
“It’s not just Latin – @EliseStefanik’s botched website also features classic ‘American values’ like: ‘Family first trust’ ‘Will alternative’ ‘Legacy planningegal issues’” Dick wrote.
“This is completely false, Far Left Democrats went into a way back machine to review private drafts and production of the site,” the Stefanik campaign told The Independent in an email.
The Independent was unable to access the initial public version of the website with the alleged errors, and a current version appears to be fully edited.
Fellow Democrats and political observers joined in the criticism.
“Really messed up campaign website for Team Stefanik,” wrote New York political journalist Alex Gault. “She’s been teasing this run for months!”
Not to be outdone, Stefanik’s rival in the governor’s race, the incumbent Democrat Kathy Hochul, also pounced, sharing a link to a “website that’s not broken” leading to a video calling Stefanik a “sellout” for her close association with Trump and his policies like tariffs and insurance funding cuts that have impacted the state.
All in all, it was a rough day online for Stefanik’s campaign, with others joining the pile-on and resurfacing the New Yorker’s endorsement of the disgraced, now-former congressman George Santos, while Semafor political reporter David Weigel praised the Hochul campaign’s messaging as similar to the recent “landslide” Democratic win in the New Jersey governor’s race.
“The sort of messaging just got [Mikie] Sherrill to a landslide in a less blue state,” Weigel wrote. “And there’s far more b-roll of Stefanik praising Trump. It’s not just ‘orange man bad,’ which doesn’t work, it’s ‘she’s focused on the orange man not you and she won’t stand up to him.’”
Stefanik, a longtime Trump ally, is known for her scathing questioning in Congress, including a highly viewed series of hearings where the Republican flummoxed university presidents under scrutiny for campus antisemitism during protests against the Israel-Hamas war.
The Trump administration previously nominated Stefanik to be the United Nations ambassador, only to withdraw the nod in March over fears losing the GOP rep to the post would imperil the slim Republican majority in Congress.