Republican Hopefuls Pounce As Malliotakis’ Lackadaisical Campaign Limps Along
The Republican primary in New York’s 11th District is heating up, and that can’t make Washington Republicans happy about their handpicked candidate.
Another candidate, Joe Caldarera, jumped into the already crowded field today after Nicole Malliotakis was unable to secure endorsements from local elected officials, and her latest FEC report showed another weak fundraising quarter.
Nicole Malliotakis, who will have to answer to Republican primary voters for her support of sanctuary cities AND her bashing of Trump, is more concerned with pleasing the establishment than winning over voters, and Staten Island Republicans have noticed.
“No matter how hard they tried, Washington Republicans failed to clear the primary field for their hand-picked candidate,” said DCCC Spokesperson Christine Bennett. “It’s no wonder another Republican is jumping into the primary after seeing lobbyist Nicole Malliotakis’ lackadaisical campaign. Malliotakis has been unable to secure a single endorsement from a local elected official, and her weak fundraising declines quarter after quarter, all with no record of accomplishment to run on despite nearly a decade in Albany.”
—
Another Staten Island Primary Threatens Top GOP Target
Republicans could see an expensive nomination fight again after losing New York’s 11th District last year.
Zach C. Cohen & Alex Clearfield | October 24, 2019
A crowded primary threatens to complicate Republican chances to flip a competitive House seat in New York City that it lost in the 2018 wave.
As state Assemblywoman Nicole Malliotakis, the party’s front-runner, gears up to face Democratic Rep. Max Rose in New York’s 11th District, her GOP opponents hope to use her previous criticisms of President Trump as a wedge in the Staten Island-anchored district that Trump carried by 9 points in 2016.
It’s a familiar story to New York Republicans. Rose’s upset victory followed a bruising primary between incumbent Republican Dan Donovan and his predecessor, former Rep. Michael Grimm, in a race focused mainly on which candidate supported Trump more.
[…]
Joe Caldarera, a 27-year-old Brooklyn prosecutor, told National Journal he hopes to launch a campaign for the seat next month as long as he finds the “political and financial backing” to run a viable campaign. He launched a preliminary website and resigned his job as an assistant district attorney, effective Friday, in preparation for a bid for the lone Trump-won House seat in a city that last year elected Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
“I see that there’s an opening for young vibrant leadership on Staten Island,” Caldarera said, “an opening for somebody to go down to Washington and propose reasonable ideas and solutions to effectively change some of the issues that the Left have identified as affecting my generation.”
Caldarera says his “primary concern” is the impeachment inquiry, which Rose belatedly joined as evidence mounts that Trump sought assistance from foreign governments in his reelection race. Caldarera supported then-candidate Trump in the Republican primary as far back as April 2016, when in a live CNN town hall he pushed back on Sen. Ted Cruz’s broadside against Trump’s “New York values.”
Malliotakis by contrast backed Sen. Marco Rubio in 2016. A year later, she tried to avoid national politics in her campaign to unseat New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio as he sought to link her to the unpopular commander-in-chief. She told the New York Daily News that she opposed some of Trump’s immigration policies and expressed regret that she didn’t write-in Rubio instead of voting for Trump in the general election.
“They [voters] see her as a flip-flopper, someone who talks a lot but doesn’t get anything done,” Caldarera said. “Someone who when [she] was running for mayor against Bill de Blasio was a never-Trumper. And now when she’s running for Congress on Staten Island, she supports Donald Trump and all of his policies. It’s funny how things change over the course of a year.”
[…]
Along with a financial disadvantage, Caldarera would also enter the race with less name recognition than Malliotakis’s other primary opponent, Joseph Saladino.
The viral, controversial internet prankster known more commonly online as “Joey Salads” launched his campaign for the GOP nomination in April with frequent references to Malliotakis as “Never Trump Nicole” and “RINO.”
Saladino raised only $30,000 by Sept. 30 and financed the rest of his campaign on a personal loan and debt to vendors.
However, Rose has outraised Malliotakis by 3-to-1 and posted a $1 million cash-on-hand advantage.
“I see there being an opening because in Staten Island, and in Brooklyn, the candidate that has been put forth so far as the Republican front-runner doesn’t seem to have the enthusiastic support behind her,” Caldarera said.
If elected, Caldarera said, he would also focus on addressing issues that plague Staten Island, including transportation, the opioid crisis, and “law and order” issues, based on his time assisting prosecutions of sex crimes. Malliotakis has made a cornerstone of her campaign her work for the district in the aftermath of 2012’s Superstorm Sandy, including writing legislation restricting development in affected areas to “resiliency projects” to act as a buffer in the event of future storms.
Rose’s reelection campaign, for its part, touts his work to secure funding for the Staten Island seawalls and discounted bridge tolling for borough residents, permanently renew the 9/11 Victim Compensation Fund, and sanction fentanyl dealers.
“We wish the former lobbyist Nicole Malliotakis well as she tries to explain why her zero accomplishments over 10 years in office makes her more qualified to be the Republican nominee than a YouTube star who pees in his mouth for video clicks—or whoever else enters the race,” a Rose spokesman said.
If anyone knows the dangers of a GOP primary, it’s Staten Island Republicans. The president eventually endorsed Donovan in the Grimm face-off last year. But the primary drained over $1.2 million from his campaign coffers, just shy of half of his total spending for the race, before he faced Rose.
“Donovan’s campaign made this mistake that the primary was going to determine who the congressman was going to be and that the general election was going to be easier than the primary,” Cortese said. “Dan and his team completely miscalculated that. Instead of ramping up they ramped down after the primary, and that was a fatal mistake.”
###