The reason Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) is cooling her heels in the House instead of heading to the United Nations to give them hell at Turtle Bay is that Republicans have gotten a case of the nerves.

Depending on what happens in a few elections being held Tuesday, their condition is about to get a lot worse or a lot better.

Stefanik is a kind of House of Representatives version of Vice President Vance. She started out as an old-fashioned Republican national security hawk, working in former President George W. Bush’s White House after Harvard, then the Romney-Ryan campaign in 2012. When a loss blocked that path forward, she went home to Albany and looked for another way.

The House district just north of where she grew up had been redrawn after the 2010 census to include everything from above Albany all the way to the Canadian border, basically the right side of the “Y” shape of the Empire State. Former Rep. Bill Owens, a moderate Democrat, had flipped the old district in a special election in 2009, but quit after the new district took shape for the 2014 midterms.

That opened the way for Stefanik, then just 30 years old, to become the youngest woman ever elected to Congress. She was the dark horse in the primary, but tapped the deep pockets of the Bush political universe to win. Then, as her party changed, she changed right along with it. In the span of less than eight years, she went from Bush-Cheney wunderkind to the woman who knocked off Dick Cheney’s daughter, Liz, to become the No. 4 member of the Republican House leadership.

Her

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