2010 NY Comptroller: Why did Tom DiNapoli nearly lose?

[Suburbia]

Eliot "Client #9" Spitzer was forced to resign as Governor in 2009, and Lt. Governor David Paterson succeeded him.  Paterson was the first black Governor of NY State and the first legally blind Governor of NY State.  He was also notoriously incompetent, and his incompetence made daily headlines.  He appointed Richard Ravitch, a prominent Democratic insider and mediator, as his Lt. Governor, and Ravitch ultimately did much of the administrative running of the state.

From Wikipedia:

In February 2010, The New York Times reported that Paterson may have been involved in witness tampering in a domestic abuse case involving staffer David W. Johnson after New York State Police and Paterson allegedly talked to the complainant in an attempt to persuade her to drop the case. Paterson was said to have asked the woman if she needed any help a day before the case was dropped.[142] On February 26, 2010, Paterson withdrew his bid for a full term as governor of New York.[143]

In March 2010, the New York State Commission on Public Integrity asked Attorney General Andrew Cuomo to investigate allegations that Paterson had solicited an unlawful gift of free New York Yankees tickets.[144] He also faced allegations that he had lied under oath to the Commission on Public Integrity in 2010 during an investigation about the Yankees tickets.[145]

Andrew Cuomo, NY's AG, was "recruited" to run for Governor to save NY's Democratic Party from itself.  Cuomo won big because Businessman Carl Paladino, a truly horrible candidate, won the primary, upsetting former Rep.Rick Lazio, who wasn't a great candidate, but had been Hillary Clinton's 2000 opponent and had run a credible race.  Lazio wasn't the best candidate either; the best candidate the GOP had for Governor was former Suffolk County Executive Steve Levy, who had been elected as a Democrat and who was very much in favor of enforcing existing immigration laws.  This stance progressively put distance between Levy and the Democratic Party, albeit a calculated distance.  Levy certainly wanted to run for Governor, but he was not likely to win a Democratic primary.  His party switch was certainly contrived, but he was recruited by Edward Cox, Richard Nixon's son-in-law and State GOP Chair.  The problem was that the GOP State Committee (fools that they were) wouldn't give Levy a Wilson-Pekula waiver and allow him to run in the Republican Primary.  (NY law requires one to switch parties prior to October of the previous year in order to vote in the primary of one's new party, and Levy had switched after that.)  So Levy's candidacy died early.

If Levy had been nominated, he'd have been the strongest GOP candidate possible.  Under those circumstances, a downballot candidate such as DiNapoli may have lost in the GOP tide.  Paladino's nomination for the GOP was a gift that kept on giving for the Democrats.

As a New Yorker, I disagree that Levy would have actually been a stronger candidate than Lazio. He would have won Long Island (as would Lazio), but he would have done poorly upstate, whereas a Lazio campaign that fundraised well would have held most of upstate New York outside of Buffalo and Albany.

I think the Republicans's strongest possible candidate was Peter King, and he didn't run, for whatever reason.

Pete King would have lost---because he would have been exposed as a IRA sympathizer.....period...