Joe Suhrada has announced he will step down as chair of the Saratoga County Republican Committee effective Thursday.
The move comes after he was heard using slurs during a leaked phone call with a staffer for Republican Allen Caruso, the party's nominee to unseat Democrat Carrie Woerner as the representative for New York's 113th Assembly District.
Southern Adirondack Bureau Chief Aaron Shellow-Lavine discussed the latest with Sam Dingman on Northeast Notebook Live.
INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT
Editor's note: This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
Dingman: Aaron, we've got a lot of breaking news to get to today. Let's start with a story involving the chair of the Saratoga County GOP.
Shellow-Lavine: That's right. Republicans across the county, including state Sen. Jim Tedisco, who is a fixture in state politics, have called on Joe Suhrada to step down. Suhrada fills two important roles at the county level. He is simultaneously the chair of the Saratoga County Republican Party and serves as the Republican elections commissioner at the County Board of Elections. This afternoon, Suhrada announced he would leave his role with the Saratoga County Republican Committee effective by the end of the day tomorrow.
Dingman: So, what led to these calls for him to step down?
Shellow-Lavine: Pretty simply, he was recorded on a phone call using racist and homophobic slurs.
Suhrada: It's it's no, it's a bunch of n----- running around in their underwear playing a f-----'s ...
Dingman: Wow, OK. That is very intense audio.
Shellow-Lavine: Yeah.
Dingman: Where does it come from?
Shellow-Lavine: So it was courtesy of Allen Caruso and his campaign. He is currently running as a Republican for the 113th District State Assembly seat. In an Oct. 12 letter to roughly 200 county Republicans, Caruso accused Suhrada of making disparaging remarks about his campaign, saying he appears more focused on protecting his position as county chairman and his employment at the Board of Elections than on helping Republican candidates succeed. The recording was from a conversation between Suhrada and a Caruso staffer discussing a March Madness campaign fundraiser. Suhrada has not responded to my personal request for comment, though he referred me to a Facebook post made, again, at that county GOP committee's Facebook page. But he told the Times-Union that he was quoting the 1994 movie Cobb about the infamously racist baseball legend Ty Cobb, adding, again to the Times-Union, "I'm not hateful. I'm not going to hide from it. There's a cultural context, and I don't feel guilty because I would never stand up in front of people and say that to someone or describe somebody that way. Personally, my brother was a homosexual, so I feel very comfortable around gay people." But again, he's now announced as of 2:30-ish. He will step down, saying he doesn't want to be a distraction from any campaigns being so close to Election Day. Early voting starts Saturday.
Dingman: Alright. Well, we will perhaps have more to come on that.
