The Republican Party in New York, fresh off one of its best elections in two decades, is somehow entangled in turmoil.

With its chairman, Representative Nick Langworthy, set to resign this month, the party has been immersed in a fraught battle over who will replace him — baring familiar fault lines between upstate and downstate, old guard and new blood, and on how closely to align its identity with ex-President Donald J. Trump.

Hopeful candidates have come and gone, sometimes in a matter of days, unable to marshal enough support because of old feuds and new scrutiny over credentials — fueled in part by fears of anointing another Representative George Santos, a New York Republican and serial liar whose election and subsequent exposure fractured and embarrassed the party.

The search for a new party chair was so stymied that in February, Long Island Republicans successfully pushed the vote back a month in want of better candidates.

Then, on Wednesday, the race for the chairmanship took an unexpected turn when news leaked that a past chair, Edward F. Cox, was planning a last-minute campaign.

Mr. Cox, a Harvard-educated lawyer who is the son-in-law of Richard M. Nixon, was seen to have a well of support in New York City and its suburbs. But news of his candidacy was not universally embraced, leaving Republicans in New York with a passel of possible options, a flurry of phone calls to make to whip up support, and no clear sense of when consensus might be found.

“People have been getting in and out like people change their socks,” said Assemblyman Chris Tague, who is also running for party chair.

Mr. Tague, a former dairy farmer who heads the party in Schoharie County, a rural outpost west of Albany, added he was “a little shocked” by Mr. Cox’s decision.

“I have a lot of respect for him,” Mr. Tague said. “But really, it’s time to move on.”

That sentiment was echoed by other candidates, including Susan McNeil, the Republican Party chair in Fulton County, northwest of Albany, who said that she didn’t “want to go backward” with Mr. Cox.

She added that she believed that some of the downstate backers of Mr. Cox, a Manhattanite, were “back-stabbing” upstaters like herself and Mr. Tague. (Mr. Langworthy, the current chair, is from western New York.)

“Some of them are trying to say downstate knows how to run something that upstate doesn’t,” she said. “Stop it.”

All of it reflected a party eager to maintain momentum after a year in which New York Republicans flipped key congressional seats, helping their party seize a narrow majority in the House, and ran closer than expected in several high-profile races including for governor. That said, Democrats still won all four statewide races, a streak that dates to 2002.

Indeed, without a statewide Republican leader in elected office, it will be up to the new party chair to lead candidate recruitment and fund-raising to fend off Democratic challengers during a presidential election year in 2024, with Democrats already signaling they plan to spend at least $45 million trying to flip seats back to their control in New York.

Mr. Cox, who has deep ties to the city’s Republican donor class, is offering himself up as a tested hand who could smooth over the party’s strained finances and serve as a bridge to a new generation of leaders.

He quickly picked up the endorsement of another downstate candidate, Lawrence Garvey, who said Mr. Cox’s experience running the party for a decade made him the best choice.

“He can do it because he’s done it,” said Mr. Garvey, who is the party chair in Rockland County, north of New York City.

Mr. Cox has remained active in New York Republican politics since he stepped down as chairman, after serving in that role from 2009 to 2019.

He, along with former Representative John Faso, helped orchestrate a successful legal challenge last spring that struck down new congressional districts that had been gerrymandered by Democrats. The two men then teamed up again last fall to form a super PAC, Save Our State Inc., that spent at least $7 million to try to elect Lee Zeldin, the Republican nominee for governor.

The latter initiative has been the subject of a state Board of Elections investigation into whether the Zeldin campaign violated state law by coordinating with it and another super PAC supporting his candidacy.

Mr. Langworthy, who was elected to represent the 23rd Congressional District in November, had no comment on the race to succeed him, citing the quick-changing dynamics of the campaign. He is still serving as chairman in a term that technically lasts until September, though he has made it clear that he wants to step down and concentrate on Congress.

Another prominent figure who has been publicly mum about the race is Representative Elise Stefanik, the Trump-aligned congresswoman from Northern New York who is the third highest-ranking Republican in the House. Ms. Stefanik declined to comment, but she has spoken to several of the candidates in recent days.

In some ways, the race for party chair is being seen as a referendum on whether the state’s Republicans — perpetually and profoundly outnumbered by Democrats — should follow Ms. Stefanik’s views or try to woo more moderate voters. Mr. Cox, for his part, is broadly seen as more interested in economic and public safety issues than polarizing culture-war attacks.

Gavin Wax, the president of the New York Young Republicans Club and a supporter of Mr. Trump’s 2024 campaign for president, said that the New York party had shifted “culturally and politically” in recent years, reflecting more conservative views like his own.

But he said the party still had some vestiges of Nelson A. Rockefeller’s era of moderate Republicanism, which he called “a relic of the past.”

“There are some people in certain donor circles in the state, largely around Cox and similar figures, that still have this idea that the party needs to still return to the Rockefeller age of New York politics for it to be successful,” Mr. Wax said. “And we had 10 years of that.”

On Friday, Mr. Wax said he was actively trying to foil Mr. Cox, calling senior advisers to Mr. Trump to try to rally opposition, including briefing them on the state party’s bylaws and sharing lists of state committee members.

On Friday morning, Mr. Cox had little official comment on his efforts at a comeback, saying merely that he had been “talking to Republican leaders around the state.”

“And I have nothing more to say at this point,” he said.

The comings and goings in the race have been head-spinning at times, including talk of a run by Colin Schmitt, a former state assemblyman and congressional candidate from the Hudson Valley, who decided instead to run for a local office.

As another possible front-runner, Michael Henry, emerged, foes began assailing his candidacy with claims about his résumé, party loyalty and campaign finances.

Though Mr. Henry, the party’s 2022 nominee for attorney general, rebutted many of the claims, opponents circulated memos that appeared designed to spook Republicans still paranoid from their experience with Mr. Santos.

“There are just too many questions about his background and campaign finances,” read one such email. “We cannot take a chance on putting another Santos in the highest party office in the state.”

Candice Giove, who managed Mr. Henry’s attorney general campaign, called the allegations “insane” and unfounded. “I’ve never seen something so dirty and despicable in my life,” she said.

Others have tested the waters. Andrew Giuliani, a former Trump White House aide and the son of Rudolph W. Giuliani, began making calls to key Republicans in recent days about pursuing the position.

Mr. Giuliani impressed some Republicans last year when he ran in the party primary against Mr. Zeldin. But he conceded the process of picking a new leader was “murky,” and he would only move forward if encouraged to do so. “There are power structures at play,” he said in an interview this week.

Not to be outdone, Democrats in New York have spent months quarreling over the leadership and direction of their own party. Progressives have called for Jay Jacobs, the chairman, to resign, blaming him for weak Democratic turnout last November.

For now, most political eyes in the state are on the Republicans, who will gather in Albany on March 13 to formally choose a new leader.

Adding to the intrigue is the history between Mr. Cox and Mr. Langworthy, who effectively deposed Mr. Cox after the party suffered steep losses — including control of the State Senate — in 2018.

At the time, Mr. Langworthy’s ascent was assisted by Mr. Trump, who had previously disparaged Mr. Cox as a someone “doesn’t know how to win.”

“He’s never won anything,” Mr. Trump said in 2014.

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