At their executive committee meeting the Queens County Republican Party unanimously endorsed former Congressmember Rick Lazio for governor.
Lazio is the only officially announced GOP gubernatorial candidate. Erie County Executive Chris Collins is mulling a run but has yet to declare. Collins has come under fire of late for comments comparing Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, an Orthodox Jew, to Hitler and the anti-Christ, and for reportedly asking a female guest at an event for a lap dance.
In 2000, Lazio ran unsuccessfully for United States Senate against Hillary Clinton, garnering 45 percent of the vote. Lazio was a late entry into the race, entering in May of that year when Rudy Giuliani bowed out amidst his diagnosis of prostate cancer and his divorce.
At the GOP’s meeting on Wednesday, January 13, chair Phil Ragusa likened Lazio’s race in 2000 to entering a marathon when everyone else was already on mile 10. This time, Lazio went about building a campaign infrastructure well in advance.
Lazio posed for pictures with GOP committee members and enthusiastically touted the Queens GOP’s Assembly candidates present as sharing his platform of returning fiscal discipline to Albany. He emphasized that New York needs a fundamental overhaul, sweeping change to create jobs and lower taxes.
Queens support is crucial to Lazio’s hopes of winning the Republican nomination for governor. Per the election law, the state GOP will officially designate a nominee at the party convention in May. Due to the size of Queens County, Republican State Committee members from the county have a sizeable impact on the vote.
Votes at the GOP nominating convention are weighted according to the number of votes cast for governor in the last election. Accordingly, Queens has the sixth highest weight out of New York’s 62 counties, behind Nassau, Suffolk, Erie, Westchester and Monroe.
Nevertheless, a runner-up candidate receiving at least 25 percent of the weighted vote at the party’s convention can still make written demand of the state Board of Elections to appear on the ballot, forcing a primary.
Like with the 2006 gubernatorial race, expect the GOP to coalesce behind Lazio as it did behind John Faso while former Massachusetts governor Bill Weld expressed interest in running.
However, statewide Republican primaries do happen from time to time. Yonkers Mayor John Spencer defeated former Defense Department official KT MacFarland for Senate in 2006 before losing to Hillary Clinton.
Meanwhile, Governor David A. Paterson is showing no signs of stepping aside. Appearing like a candidate running for re-election, he has unveiled proposals for caps on spending and legislative term limits. Nevertheless, his standing remains perilous. A Siena poll released on January 19 shows that Lazio ties Paterson at 42 percent each.
Lazio’s numbers will only improve, as 43 percent of voters don’t know enough about Lazio to form an opinion of him, while only 10 percent don’t have an opinion about Paterson, and of those who do, 52 percent view the governor negatively.
There are second acts in American life and New York politics. Whether Rick Lazio’s second act takes him to the governor’s mansion will be played out in the year to come.
Daniel Egers serves on the staff of Councilmember Dan Halloran, is executive director of the Queens County Republican Party, a trustee of the Bayside Historical Society and president of the Friends of Oakland Lake, among other affiliations. The views expressed in this column are his own.
