Tennessee transplant and former U.S. Rep. Harold Ford Jr. has decided not to challenge unelected incumbent Kirsten Gillibrand for her US Senate seat, sources said tonight.
“I heard from Harold Ford and he has decided not to run,” said Assemblyman Vito Lopez, the Kings County Democratic chairman who had strongly indicated a willingness to back Ford.
“After giving it considerable thought and talking it over with his wife, he reached the conclusion that he would not be running, although he said he would like to remain active in the Democratic Party here,” Lopez continued.
The Post broke the story on its website.
In a New York Times op-ed posted online for Tuesday’s editions, Ford said he believed he could have won but didn’t want to risk a bitter primary that could help a Republican take the seat.
“I’ve examined this race in every possible way,” Ford wrote, “and I keep returning to the same fundamental conclusion: If I run, the likely result would be a brutal and highly negative Democratic primary – a primary where the winner emerges weakened and the Republican strengthened.”
Sources said that the photogenic Ford, who comes from a deeply connected line of powerful Southern Democrat pols, had a meeting last week with state Democratic party leader Jay Jacobs, who’d been openly backing Gillibrand.
Jacobs — who requested the sit-down — extended an olive branch and told him that he thinks he’d be a great candidate but not this year.
For the past two months, Ford has been travelling the state and engaging in a war of words with Gillibrand as he considered challenging the former upstate U.S. representative.
Paterson selected Gillibrand just over a year ago to fill Hillary Clinton’s Senate seat.
While Gillibrand has been widely criticized for a lackluster performance in the Senate and has had surprisingly weak approval rating in recent public opinion polls, Ford failed to catch on with a large number of Democratic leaders.
Those same polls have shown that Gillibrand would have easily beaten Ford in a Democratic primary.
Read Ford Jr.’s Op-Ed Piece Here
Even though his campaign finished before it even started, Ford had initially come out swinging.
From the start, he blasted at the primary-phobic Democratic establishment — who’d been working behind the scenes to shore up support for Gillibrand — for trying to “bully” him out of the race.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid went so far as to call Mayor Bloomberg — no fan of Gillibrand — and ask him to stay out of the race. Even the White House flack said the administration was “quite happy with the leadership and the representation of Senator Gillibrand in New York.”
Seemingly undeterred, Ford jumped in with both feet — taking both Gillibrand and US Sen. Chuck Schumer to task over health care reform and calling on them to vote down the Senate bill.
The race that almost was got so heated, Ford accused Gillibrand of being a party parroting “parakeet” who would vote for anything the Dem bosses told her to.
The name-calling so enraged Gillibrand, she called a Post reporter — unsolicited — to push back at her rival.
“I really don’t know who Harold Ford thinks I am but I’m not gonna be pushed aside [by] his banker buddies,” she said.
In another bizarre twist, sources said Gillibrand was convinced that deep-pocketed Dem donor Maureen White was backing Ford over her because she’d once dated White’s brother.
Gillibrand was convinced the bad breakup was the reason White was going gaga for Ford, the sources said.
With AP