Three sitting congressmen and the newly chosen Manhattan GOP chairwoman are on a short list of potential Republican challengers to Sen. Charles Schumer next year, The Post has learned.
Two of the congressmen, both from upstate, are pro-choice and pro-gay-marriage, making them exceptions in a socially conservative New York party but also making them “promising’’ as statewide contenders, said a knowledgeable Republican activist.
The third congressman, Rep. Peter King of Nassau County, is conservative on social issues but is also a high-profile critic of some of the GOP’s most prominent national conservative activists, including Sen. Ted Cruz, an announced presidential candidate.
While King, 71, has toyed with the possibility of mounting a presidential campaign himself, he’s demonstrated little popularity with the national GOP base and is widely seen as unlikely to do so.
“I really think King might be interested in going after Schumer,’’ the GOP activist contended.
Adele Malpass, wife of former New York Senate hopeful and Reagan and George H.W. Bush official David Malpass, took over the long-struggling Manhattan, or New York County, GOP Committee in December, and is touted as having a promising future.
She’s also a social liberal with considerable financial resources, but she told The Post that she’s not interested in running next year.
“No, no, no, under no circumstances,’’ said Malpass, insisting she’s concentrating her energies on the difficult task of rebuilding the near-non-existent city GOP.
The two socially liberal congressmen are Chris Gibson, of Kinderhook, who recently announced that he’ll leave Congress after next year, and Richard Hanna of Utica, who only narrowly won a primary last year against tea party-backed Assemblywoman Claudia Tenney.
Gibson, a retired Army colonel and combat veteran with a Ph.D. in government from Cornell, has declared he’s interested in running for governor in 2018. But Malpass and other GOP activists would like to see him challenge Schumer.
“I think he’d be a very strong statewide candidate. He’s very conservative on everything but on social issues,’’ said Malpass.
Hanna, 64, who is known to fear another challenge from Tenney, “could go out on a high note if he takes on Schumer,’’ said a prominent GOP strategist.
While GOP insiders concede that defeating the long-tenured Schumer, who is now in line to succeed the retiring Harry Reid and become the next Senate Democratic leader, would be difficult, they point to polls showing President Obama with a negative rating among New York Jewish voters and the strong upstate showing last fall of Republican gubernatorial hopeful Rob Astorino as offering hope to a Schumer challenger.
“If everything went right for us, if Obama continues to fight with [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu, if the Iran deal falls apart or is seen as dangerously irresponsible, if the economy continues to slow and Schumer, as the Democratic leader, has to defend all of that, who knows what could happen?’’ said the GOP strategist.
Last week’s missed state budget deadline — the first since Gov. Andrew Cuomo took office in 2011 — was a major embarrassment for the governor and, according to some of his fellow Democrats, intentionally so.
“It was a way of sticking it to the governor over his education reforms, which have just infuriated the teachers unions, and they were happy to do it,’’ said a senior Democrat with a laugh.
Assembly Democrats, like most of their Senate counterparts, are unhappy about many parts of the new budget, most significantly Cuomo’s education-policy changes, which curtail tenure rules and establish a controversial teacher-evaluation system.