Newsday: “Rep. Lee Zeldin, the front-runner to be the Republican nominee for New York governor, acknowledged in a Newsday interview last week that Joe Biden won the presidency and said he won’t call the election ‘illegitimate,’ even though he sought to overturn it. Zeldin edged away from former President Donald Trump in the interview in the Capitol Wednesday just hours after he voted to oust Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) from the House Republican leadership for her repeated denunciations of Trump’s election claims. Political consultants in both parties warn that Zeldin’s staunch support for Trump and his outspoken defense of him during the Mueller investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, two impeachment trials and the bid to overturn the presidential election potentially loom as a liability in the 2022 general election.”

“And despite a testy exchange in March with two Politico reporters in which he said ‘yes’ when asked if Democrat Biden won the election, some consultants said they were still not sure exactly where he stands on that question. Asked by Newsday if the 2020 election was fair, Zeldin gave a nuanced answer. ‘So, you had tens of millions of people that came out and voted for each of the candidates. Their votes were counted. They’re counted once, and you ended up with an outcome,’ Zeldin said. ‘And that’s how President Trump, uh… President Biden became the president, was by winning the November 2020 election.’ Asked who is right – Cheney who defended the election’s legitimacy and called Trump a ‘liar’ for denying it, or Trump who has undermined the election’s legitimacy by calling it a ‘fraud,’ – Zeldin said, ‘I believe that there are opinions that both have expressed that I would not subscribe to.’ Pressed further on whether he thought the election was legitimate, Zeldin focused on the damaging impact of calling an election illegitimate. He defended his own support for Trump’s efforts to undercut Biden’s election. ‘Anybody who wants to describe the 2020 election as being perfect, and free of error – I actually have never seen any federal election ever that actually meets those standards,’ said Zeldin, who pointed to ballots being thrown out in his own election as an example.”