Republican Michael Lawler maintained a slender lead over one of the most powerful Democrats in Congress, Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney, in a race that went to the wire early Wednesday morning.

Just 3,000 votes of the more than 278,000 cast separated the two men, who spent the summer and fall campaigning to represent the 17th Congressional District, which covers much of Westchester and the lower Hudson Valley.

“We are not yet ready to declare victory, but with a few more votes counted, we are poised to make history,” Lawler told supporters, acknowledging the closeness of the race, at his election night party in Rockland County.

“We’ll have to wait a little bit longer for the voters of this district to serve Sean Patrick Maloney the best dish of Chef Boyardee, and I can promise you, it will be served cold,” Lawler chided early Wednesday morning.

A defining moment was when Maloney told constituents to just eat Chef Boyardee to deal with soaring inflation.

It was not immediately clear how many absentee ballots were still on the way back to officials at the local boards of elections. Any ballot postmarked by Election Day is valid in New York State, though it typically takes the Post Office a few days to deliver them to officials.

Records show there were potentially 11,000 absentee ballots still out in Westchester County alone, as of Friday.

His GOP challenger also benefited from $6 million in Republican attacks bludgeoning Maloney. One of the ads involved Maloney being asked whether he’d support the state’s bail reform push during a 2018 debate while was running for state attorney general.

“Absolutely, and I’d make it a top priority,” he replied.

The House GOP’s Congressional Leadership Fund poured millions of dollars into Lawler’s bid to take down Maloney, who as chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee was responsible to help elect other Democrats. His ouster from office was a symbolic scalp for Republicans.

Damaging stories about Maloney’s eyebrow-raising hires for his legislative and campaign work did not help his cause.

He used more than $7,000 in taxpayer and donor funds to employ his husband’s personal trainer — leading to calls for an ethics probe.

Over the summer, Maloney also came under fire by ethics experts — including a former Democratic Federal Elections Commission chairwoman — for using congressional and campaign funds to hire Harold Leath as his “body man” and pay for his move from Florida in 2014, The Post first reported.

Leath — who was registered to vote in New York using the address of Maloney and husband Randy Florke’s home — appeared in online photos with the couple’s kids, at events that included their 2014 wedding and swimming in what appeared to be the pool on their estate.

Maloney, a five-term incumbent, also was upended by the Democratic Party’s debacle over redistricting. The courts tossed out the Democrats’ redistricting plan for the House — called the Hochulmander because it was approved by Gov. Kathy Hochul — saying it was illegal partisan gerrymandering.

The new districts that were drawn by a court-ordered special master carved up Maloney’s 18th Congressional District. Maloney then instead ran in the redrawn 17th Congressional District, which included a majority of voters he hadn’t represented before but still included his residence.

The new district includes Lawler’s base in Rockland County.

The current congressman for the 17th Congressional District, Mondaire Jones, decided to run for a House seat encompassing lower Manhattan and brownstone Brooklyn in the 10th district instead of running against Maloney in the redrawn 17th. He lost to Dan Goldman in the primary.