She just made history.
On Tuesday, 30-year-old Republican Elise Stefanik, from New York’s 21st District, became the youngest woman ever elected to Congress — and the first Republican in 21 years to hold that seat.
“I was really the underdog,” Stefanik told The Post. “If you rewind to one-and-a-half years ago — I’d go to events and nobody would know who I was.”
Now, she’s a national political phenom, shellacking rival Democrat Aaron Woolf (Stefanik won 53.4 percent of the vote, with Woolf at 32 percent and the Green Party’s Matthew J. Funiciello at 11 percent).
“I’ve been a Republican from the get-go,” Stefanik says. “I grew up in a small-business family and saw my parents risk everything.”
Stefanik was raised in Albany, the older of two siblings; her brother, Matt, is 24. Their parents, Melanie and Ken, are the founders and owners of Premium Plywood Products.
“Neither of my parents were interested or active in politics,” Stefanik said. “They were very focused on running our family business; I saw them risk everything.”
She won a partial scholarship to the Albany Academy for Girls. Stefanik ran for secretary of student council in sixth grade — her platform included a new snack machine — and as a teenager, she volunteered for Rick Lazio’s Senate race against Hillary Clinton.
But Stefanik says it wasn’t until she attended Harvard — also on partial scholarship — that she really became electrified by politics. There, she met and studied with former Kennedy speechwriter Ted Sorensen. “At college, there was a lot of pressure to go into the worlds of consulting or finance,” Stefanik says.
As graduation approached, “I’d been interviewing at think tanks.”
Through a fellow alum, she heard about a few positions open at the White House and had a chance meeting with another upstate native. “On a whim, he interviewed me to be an assistant in the West Wing,” Stefanik says. “I think he recognized I had upstate grit and determination.”
Within a year, she was working for the deputy chief-of-staff in George W. Bush’s administration.
“As you might expect, She’s much more mature professionally than one might expect,” says Brent McIntosh, a former colleague. “I didn’t realize how young she was until she was running for Congress.”
Stefanik says her No. 1 priority is jobs and the economy. “Upstate New York has lost over 1 million people in the past 10 years, and the 21st District is aging very rapidly,” she says. “We need to make sure we have a limited government to make sure young people stay upstate, start small businesses and raise their families.”
She hopes to serve on the Armed Services Committee — the upstate economy, she points out, is heavily reliant on Fort Drum — and the Budgetary Committee.
‘The debt and the economy are longterm generational issues,” Stefanik says.
She also aims to bring more people like herself into the party and positions of leadership. “We need more young women’s perspectives in the halls of Congress,” she says. “I’m a pretty determined person.”