Tragedy struck for Andrew Giuliani, Rudy Giuliani’s large adult son who is now attempting to run for New York governor as a self-professed “politician out of the womb,” on Monday.
Republican New York county chairs and state committee members met in Albany for a candidate forum, where 2022 gubernatorial hopefuls like Giuliani pitched their campaigns right before the party leaders held an informal straw poll that was weighted according to each county’s GOP voter population.
And apparently not one of them was convinced that Giuliani — who recently filmed himself ranting about his father’s law license suspension as his head floated at the very bottom of the camera lens — should be their guy: He failed to receive a single vote in the poll, according to the New York GOP’s announcement of the results.
Trump loyalist Rep. Lee Zeldin (R-NY) won the poll in a landslide with 85 percent of the vote, making him the presumptive GOP nominee in the race to face off against either incumbent Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D), or another Democrat who isn’t swamped in scandal, next year. It makes the decision a bit easier for former President Donald Trump, who has reportedly already told his ex-attorney’s son and his favorite golf partner that he intended to throw his weight behind Zeldin.
The only other candidate who got any votes was Rob Astorino, who also made an unsuccessful bid for governor in 2014. He received 5 percent of the straw poll vote, while the rest of the 10 percent of poll participants abstained. Both Giuliani and Michael Carpinelli, the sheriff of Lewis County, New York, did not receive any votes.
But Zeldin’s victory at the GOP meeting isn’t necessarily binding. Giuliani and the other candidates could force a primary for June next year, but they’d have to get thousands of signatures for a petition or at least 25 percent of the weighted vote at the party’s nominating convention to do so, according to the Democrat and Chronicle.
Astorino shrugged the results off as “meaningless” in a statement to the local newspaper.
“The three million Republicans throughout New York will be deciding who the strongest candidate is in next June’s primary, not a few dozen party insiders, many of whom have told me they were pressured into making an endorsement they weren’t ready to make,” he said.
Giuliani, the other loser, isn’t giving up the fight either.
“I think this is too early,” he told Politico. “I think if you just look at the numbers, I think you’ll see that we perform better in blue states whenever there’s a primary.”
