Andrew Giuliani spent the last full day of the primary campaigning in Buffalo, Syracuse and Rochester, pitching the policing agenda of his father, former Mayor Rudy Giuliani.
“And I would also look at ‘broken windows’ policing and ‘stop, question and frisk’ and reinstitute that on a statewide level, work with cities, work with localities,” the younger Giuliani said in Rochester.
What You Need To Know
- Andrew Giuliani and Lee Zeldin were on the campaign trail upstate
- Harry Wilson made an appeal via social media while Rob Astorino called up supporters
- Giuliani's father, Rudy Giuliani, seized a chance to discuss a confrontation on Staten Island
- Surveillance video shows the interaction to be less severe than the former mayor describes
Businessman Harry Wilson made this last appeal for votes on social media, saying he has the best chance in the general election.
“But to do all that, we have to win. And in the last 20 years, only one Republican has come close to winning statewide and that was me,” he said.
Former Westchester County Executive Rob Astorino spent the day calling voters.
And Congressman Lee Zeldin had a stop in Albany.
Zeldin, Astorino and Giuliani additionally celebrated the state Supreme Court’s striking down of a New York City law allowing non-citizen voting.
All four candidates were marking the end of a contentious Republican primary for governor jam-packed with bad-faith attacks.
“Now, Rolex Rob Astorino and Never Trumper Harry Wilson are dishonestly attacking Zeldin,” a narrator says in a Zeldin campaign TV ad released earlier this month.
Zeldin has been such a target that he used a campaign webpage and TV ad to try debunk some of his rivals’ claims, including this frequently used line of attack.
Astorino referenced “the Cuomo budgets that Lee Zeldin supported” in a Spectrum News debate earlier this month.
Wilson said at the same debate: “That’s the difference between Lee Zeldin and all of us up here who are fighting to change the state rather than roll over for the Cuomo agenda.”
Astorino and Wilson are only partially right.
During Zeldin’s time as a state senator, Cuomo had a relationship of convenience with Republican legislators who voted on a final, negotiated budget.
“The governor proposes a budget and then the Senate passes their own one-house budget and then you try to reach a three-way agreement,” Zeldin explained at a Newsmax-hosted debate earlier this month.
Also, Monday was another apparent instance of leveraging what you can to get votes in the hard-to-predict primary.
Rudy Giuliani appeared to play up a confrontation on Staten Island as evidence of the unchecked violence that he says his son, Andrew, would fight as governor.
The former mayor told reporters in a virtual news conference that he was struck so hard it felt like the weight of a boulder, but a surveillance video showed what appeared to be more of a slap or tap on Giuliani’s back.
Still, he said he had hoped prosecutors would favor “not letting criminals go free so they can start hitting other 78-year-old men and now I just get informed by the police, they’re going to downgrade the charges!”