Carl Paladino is hoping to win a Republican primary Tuesday for the U.S. House in a heated race versus New York’s GOP chairman Nick Langworthy.
Bill Mahoney/POLITICO

“One of the underrated difference makers is that Carl has a professional staff this time,” said Jack O’Donnell, a Buffalo Democratic consultant.

“He still has some of the regular cast of characters,” O’Donnell noted. But he’s also been helped by individuals with ties to officials such as New York Rep. Elise Stefanik, who endorsed Paladino before he launched his campaign and helped him get on the ballot. And those staffers “are running this and running it in a professional manner — and that includes not letting him say crazy things.”

Paladino entered the statewide political consciousness with a 2010 gubernatorial campaign in which he declared himself “mad as hell” about Albany, seizing on the Tea Party movement and removing all the traditional restraints on political discourse. He then built a relationship with Donald Trump, getting Trump to speak at a pro-gun-rights rally in Albany and encouraging Trump to run for governor in 2014 — an idea the future president toyed with before setting his sights on Washington.

Every occasion Paladino has reentered public life since then has ended with him doing something to offend even people who aren’t easily offended, prompting Republican allies to distance themselves. That has, at times, included Trump, who is not expected to make an endorsement in the race of two people he has considered as friends.

“Carl’s comments are absolutely reprehensible,” Donald Trump’s transition team said in 2016 after Paladino said he wanted Barack Obama to die from having sex with a cow and Michelle Obama to “return to being a male” and start living with a gorilla in Zimbabwe.

With the backing of Stefanik as she looks to help Republicans retake the House and boost her leadership role, Paladino launched a campaign in early June to represent Buffalo’s suburbs and much of New York’s border with Pennsylvania in the House.

And the initial tenor of his campaign quickly promised more of the same inflammatory comments he is best known for. Within a week of his launch, he gained national attention for reports highlighting comments he made in a 2021 radio interview saying that America needs more leaders like Hitler and a Facebook post made just days prior saying that the racist mass shooting in Buffalo in May was a “false flag.”

Then he largely went silent.

Paladino regularly touted the value of debates in his first run for high office. While challenging former Rep. Rick Lazio for the Republican gubernatorial nomination in 2010, he had a staffer in a chicken suit follow Lazio around.

And it became a regular talking point after he stunned Lazio to set up a general election matchup with then-Attorney General Andrew Cuomo. He handedly lost that race after a campaign that included the disclosure of emails he had sent that included pornography, racist imagery and the N-word.

“Come out and debate like a man!” Paladino challenged Cuomo in a 2010 ad that was most famous for his attempts to deflect criticisms over an extramarital affair by declaring that “Andrew’s prowess is legendary.”

Now, he has deemed Langworthy’s request for debates a “political stunt.”

“I would ask Carl, why don’t you go back and read your own headlines from 2010 when you called Rick Lazio a coward because he refused to debate? What are you afraid of?” Langworthy said. “He doesn’t want to answer for his record.”

Broadcaster and former Westchester County district attorney Jeanine Pirro, left, and former Republican gubernatorial candidate Carl Paladino, address the audience during a Second Amendment rally on Tuesday, June 11, 2013, in Albany, N.Y.