In the strongest signal yet that he’s thinking of running for governor, Rudy Giuliani’s aides yesterday gauged support for a loyalist to run the state GOP after the party’s longtime chairman announced he wouldn’t seek another term.
Joe Mondello, who was at the helm of the withered state Republican Party when Giuliani ran for president in 2008, announced he would step down after this term — a decision sources said he came to after a private lunch with the ex-mayor last Friday.
In a statement announcing his decision, Mondello said he wanted to focus “exclusively on achieving a Republican victory in my home county” of Nassau, where he is county chair.
Now Giuliani is wading into the fight between Ed Cox, Richard Nixon’s son-in-law who backed John McCain in the 2008 presidential primary and was his campaign chair in New York, and Henry Wojtaszek, the Niagara County GOP chair who was Giuliani’s first county endorsement in his own White House run.
Giuliani hasn’t yet picked a candidate and is monitoring the situation, sources said.
Giuliani’s three top political advisers, Tony Carbonetti, Jake Menges and Matt Mahoney, made a round of calls to GOP chairs yesterday to measure whether Wojtaszek has enough support to win, several sources said.
“It wasn’t a hard sell,” one person who received a call said, noting that Giuliani himself isn’t making calls.
Still, Giuliani has rarely waded so visibly into state party infighting, and the fact that he is letting his name be used indicates he’s watching for what would be best were he to decide to run.