Former Mayor Rudy Giuliani is set to wade into the March 20th special election to replace former State Senator Carl Kruger and endorse Republican candidate David Storobin, a GOP source told The Politicker this evening.
Mr. Giuliani’s expected announcement tomorrow next week comes as Mr. Storobin is seeking to score an upset victory in a district filled with ideologically conservative Democratic voters who may still think rather highly of the former mayor.
Mr. Giuliani and Mr. Storobin have some history. The state senate candidate actually got his start in politics by volunteering for Mr. Giuliani’s mayoral campaign. He described being inspired by spontaneously seeing Mr. Giuliani campaigning in an Orthodox Jewish neighborhood, something government officials would be disinclined to do in his native Soviet Union.
“I remember walking on 13th Avenue and all of a sudden I see a man speak and realize it’s Rudy Giuliani,” he said in a February interview with Shimon Gifter. “You can’t really campaign with Jews in the Soviet Union, it’s really going to be politically bad because of the antisemitism there … That impressed me very much because that’s really what I came to the United States for.”
This not the first instance of a former New York City Mayor entering the special election, however.
Ed Koch, who has been known to occasionally back Republicans, is backing the Democratic candidate, Councilman Lew Fidler, and even recorded a robocall for his campaign saying the candidate “has the honesty and the integrity that we desperately need in Albany.”
Update: Other sources told The Politicker that Mr. Giuliani’s endorsement is, in fact, coming next week.
