A House candidate in New York may be in Congress for just four months. And he's fine with it.

ITHACA, N.Y. — Joe Sempolinski’s path toward being likely one of the shortest-tenured members of Congress in New York history hasn’t exactly been straightforward.

The Steuben County Republican Committee chair began campaigning last year in an upstate district that stretched past Jamestown, 130 miles to the west. A new round of maps led him to start campaigning in a potential district that connected his home in the Southern Tier to Lewis County, 200 miles to the northeast in the Adirondacks.

Another redistricting plan resulted in Sempolinski dropping out and supporting Rep. Claudia Tenney when she announced plans to move out of the Utica area and run nearby.

Now he’s well-positioned to be elected to the U.S. House in his own right — but don't blink. If he wins, he will have the second-briefest stint in Congress of the nearly 1,500 New Yorkers who have ever served in the chamber.

Sempolinski is running in an Aug. 23 special election to fill, until year's end, the heavily Republican seat that was vacated in May by Republican Rep. Tom Reed, his former boss.

But Sempolinski isn't looking to be elected to a full two-year term in November under new district lines. So if he wins the special election as expected, come January he'll be back home in Canisteo rather than the halls of Washington.

“I’m running to serve for approximately four months. I would do it if it were for four minutes — because this is my home,” he said in a recent interview in Ithaca.

Sempolinski has spent most of the past decade working for Reed as district director, which required him to traverse the vast district stretches from the southwestern corner of New York to near Binghamton in the east and Seneca Falls and Geneva in the north.

“Nobody knows that district as well as I do,” he said.

How Sempolinski might end up in Congress

Reed announced last year that he would not seek another term after he was accused of sexual misconduct, and Sempolinski quickly jumped into the race to replace him.

But the future of the district as the state debated new congressional maps was far from certain. One of the biggest questions throughout the drawn-out process was whether the Southern Tier along the Pennsylvania border would continue to have a seat of its own or whether it would be chopped up and joined with urban areas further north.

Tenney’s seat was ultimately the one that was split the most. And when she made clear she was willing to move to run elsewhere, that meant every incumbent Republican representing upstate had a district of their own, and Sempolinski, 39, stepped aside.

Even he thought that was the end of his House aspirations.

Then Reed abruptly announced his resignation in May, creating a special election to finish off the final months of his term. Since neither Tenney nor neighboring GOP Rep. Chris Jacobs could run in a special election in one corner of the state while representing another area, talk among Republicans quickly turned to having a placeholder.

Enter Sempolinski.

“When you swipe your little card [in Washington] and you press the yes or no button, you speak for about three quarters of a million people, which is a really profound thing if you think about it," he said of his potential election. "So to do that once is meaningful. And three of those four months, the House is going to be in session, so there’s going to be a lot more than one vote cast.”

In the special election, Sempolinski will face Democratic candidate Max Della Pia, a former Air Force wing commander. Della Pia is also running for a full term in November, and he's hopeful that if he could pull off the special election upset against Sempolinski, it would propel his candidacy in the fall.

"It may be only four months or so, but from a political standpoint I think it's significant," Della Pia said. "If I won, I would be going into the general election as an incumbent."

The district, however, is perhaps the safest Republican one in New York; Reed received 58 percent of the vote in 2020.

While candidates expect turnout to be low in an atypically scheduled late-August primary, Republican participation in the special election will likely be stronger than elsewhere in New York.

Jacobs and Tenney swapped seats after the final district lines were released in May. Then, Jacobs came out in favor of gun control days after he announced his reelection. Backlash from Republicans led to him to drop out, and a fiery primary to face Della Pia between state GOP Chair Nick Langworthy and Buffalo developer Carl Paladino has now ensued. About 60 percent of the new district they are running in overlaps with the old Reed seat.

There are some Democratic primaries in parts of the district too, including in Ithaca, which is being moved to the congressional seat where Dutchess County Executive Marc Molinaro will be the GOP nominee in November. But they overlap with smaller portions of the seat that Sempolinski is seeking.

“[Thanks to] Carl and I really getting a lot of Republicans out to vote, that’ll be taken care of,” Langworthy said of Republican turnout in the special election.

A short timer

So what would Sempolinski do with a term that probably couldn’t start any earlier than Sept. 13, when the House next meets and will conclude Dec. 31?

He said he would be on some committees — though noted Republican leadership has made clear he’s got “the last draft pick” in choosing which ones — and would have the same opportunity to mark up bills as any other member.

He cited economic development as an issue he would like to focus on. And he would also like to work, if also elected, with Molinaro, who’s running in a separate special election against Ulster County Executive Pat Ryan in the eastern half of the state on the same day after Democratic Rep. Antonio Delgado resigned to serve as lieutenant governor.

“One similarity with myself and Mr. Molinaro, my sort of running mate in the other special election, is we’re both very concerned about things that impact developmentally disabled kids,” Sempolinski said. “I have a daughter with Down syndrome; he has a daughter that’s on the autism spectrum. I’ve mentioned that to Marc, let’s see if there’s something in that arena.”

There have been only a handful of New Yorkers in the state’s history to serve in Congress for less than a full term, but, ironically, two of them have done so in the area recently.

Democrat Eric Massa won an election in the seat that preceded Reed’s in 2008, but resigned after 14 months in office when he admitted to instigating tickle fights with his staffers. An Erie County clerk named Kathy Hochul — now governor — won a special election to represent a neighboring seat in 2011, but did not win a full term the following year.

The record for the briefest tenure in New York’s history seems to belong to John Ward Hunter, who finished off the final 89 days of a term for a Brooklyn seat in 1866 and 1867.

His stint in Congress was most notable for an incident when House Republicans criticized Democrats for being sympathetic to the former Confederate states. Hunter, a Democrat, called that a “base lie.”

He quickly acknowledged that such language was “totally uncalled for.” But the standards of the House at the time meant those words were “a violation of the dignity and decency of debate,” and Hunter would go down in history as the 10th member of Congress ever censured.

Hunter would later become the mayor of Brooklyn. He and poet Walt Whitman were among the founding members of the Society of Old Brooklynites, or “SOBs,” a still-extant group that has spent over a century opposing the former city’s decision to merge with Manhattan.

While Sempolinski would likely fall short of Hunter’s mark for brevity by a few weeks, he might claim a different milestone.

After all the “twists and turns” of the past year and Reed’s retirement, he “needed to get a job,” he said. That wound up being with one of his “good friends,” Assemblymember Joe Giglio (R-Cattaraugus).

“We were having lunch when it looked like I wasn’t running, and he said ‘why don’t you take a job with me,’” Sempolinski said. “So I was his chief of staff for about two months … I think I’m the first Assembly aide ever to leave to become a congressman.”

And the Assembly’s minority conference might also provide an employment option after his potential congressional tenure.

“[Giglio] said I could have my job back afterwards,” Sempolinksi said.