Andrew Giuliani — the son of embattled Trump ally and former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani — received no support in a straw poll covering the New York Republican gubernatorial primary that was conducted this week at a meeting of New York Republicans in Albany. The poll incorporated responses from county GOP chairs and committee members across New York, with 85 percent of them expressing support for Rep. Lee Zeldin (R-N.Y.) in the gubernatorial primary race. Former Westchester County Executive Rob Astorino, another Republican hoping for the party’s nomination to take on incumbent New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, received 5 percent of the support in the straw poll. Ten percent of the GOP leaders who were present abstained from participating in the survey.
Andrew responded to the dismal poll results by insisting that the race is really “up to the 2.9 million registered Republicans in New York State,” adding that he “ultimately can win this thing.” It’s unclear, of course, whether that actually is the case. A survey that was commissioned by the Giuliani campaign itself found Andrew with an eight-percent lead over Zeldin, scoring 35.2 percent of the support compared to 27.2 percent for Zeldin — although even in that survey, a full 31.6 percent of respondents said that they were undecided. Those voters obviously constitute a bloc far large enough to swing the election either direction.
Reached by phone on way back from Albany, @AndrewHGiuliani says @NewYorkGOP straw poll results don’t phase him — he didn’t get a single vote from county chairs.
“It’s up to the 2.9 million registered Republicans in New York State…we ultimately can win this thing.”
— Bernadette Hogan (@bern_hogan) June 28, 2021
Cuomo, a Democrat, has faced scrutiny recently over issues including revelations of sexual harassment that he perpetrated and his administration’s attempts to cover up the impact of COVID-19 at New York nursing homes. The last time that New York had a Republican governor was in the mid-2000s, when George Pataki left office. Before Pataki originally took office in 1995, it had been about two decades since the state’s last Republican governor.
