An age-old belief among politicians is that Friday afternoon is the best time to release bad news.

The underlying assumption is that few people are paying attention. But that’s not true with the case at hand, with GOP star Elise Stefanik dropping a bombshell so important that there was no way to miss it — or the potential aftershocks.

Chief among those is that Gov. Hochul could have an easier path to re-election. And that means the Empire State’s lurch to the loony left could become more pronounced if Hochul feels free to embrace more of the agenda of socialist Gotham mayor Zohran Mamdani.

Stefanik, in the direct style that has become her trademark, put her explosive news this way: “While spending precious time with my family this Christmas season, I have made the decision to suspend my campaign for Governor and will not seek re-election to Congress.”

After I picked myself up from the floor, my first thought, was, wait, can’t we discuss this?

The next sentence in her statement only made me hungry for a fuller explanation. Although Stefanik claimed she would have easily won a primary, presumably against Nassau County executive Bruce Blakeman, whom President Trump endorsed Saturday, she added that “it is not an effective use of our time or your generous resources to spend the first half of next year in an unnecessary and protracted Republican primary, especially in a challenging state like New York.”

There’s some truth to that, but not the whole truth. A victory over Blakeman, a prodigious fund-raiser with a strong base on Long Island, was far from certain.

Nonetheless, she is correct that the winner of their slugfest would have been wounded and challenged by the need to unite the party and raise........

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