Stefanik says data shows her new book outsold every nonfiction book in America, accuses NYT of bias

Rep. Elise Stefanik says her new book outsold every other nonfiction hardcover in the country — and is accusing The New York Times of deliberately undercounting its sales to deny her a No. 1 ranking.

“Poisoned Ivies sold the most copies of any non-fiction hardcover book in America (above #1 and nearly double #2),” the New York Republican wrote Thursday on Truth Social. “But they ranked Poisoned Ivies at #3 knowing that there were purchases from various Jewish groups of readers.”

Ms. Stefanik said the New York Times made the decision because of the subject matter and viewpoint of her book. “Because of the topic and viewpoint of the book, the NYT refuses to acknowledge the crisis of antisemitism,” she wrote, adding that “their paper has helped fuel this moral rot.”

Published April 14 by Threshold Editions, an imprint of Simon & Schuster, “Poisoned Ivies: The Inside Account of the Academic and Moral Rot at America’s Elite Universities” draws on Ms. Stefanik’s role in the December 2023 congressional hearing in which she questioned the presidents of Harvard, MIT and the University of Pennsylvania over whether calls for genocide of Jews violated their campus codes of conduct. The equivocal answers from Harvard President Claudine Gay and University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill contributed to both women eventually resigning.

In BookScan metrics provided to The Washigton Times from Ms. Stefanik’s team, “Poisoned Ivies” sold 20,186 copies, while the other books that the NYT placed above hers, “Famesick” and “Strangers,” sold 19,270 and 11,802 units in total, respectively.

The most recently published New York Times hardcover nonfiction list — reflecting sales for the week ending April 11, three days before the book’s release — does not include “Poisoned Ivies.” The list covering its first week of sales has not yet been released publicly.

The New York Times uses a dagger symbol (†) to flag books it believes benefited from bulk or institutional purchases rather than individual retail sales.

The dispute echoes a long-running tension between the New York Times bestseller list and conservative authors. A 2024 study by The Economist found that books from conservative publishers ranked an average of 2.3 spots lower on the NYT list compared to titles with similar sales figures on other tracking services. The Times has maintained that the political views of authors play no role in its calculations and did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Ms. Stefanik, who is leaving Congress at the end of her term this year after President Trump withdrew her nomination as United Nations ambassador and declined to back her bid for the New York governorship, said she expected the outcome.

“As I predicted, even when my first book ’Poisoned Ivies’ shattered records,” she wrote, “the inaccurate NYT ’Best Sellers’ would never acknowledge the fact that it was the #1 best-selling non-fiction book in America.”