EXCLUSIVE: Why George Santos Backs Barstool's Billy Football in Race to Succeed Him
The only Republican to win this House seat in a while has thoughts on why Billy Football can win–but does Football want his support?
The race to succeed George Santos in Congress is already endlessly fascinating. Following Santos’s expulsion from Congress, Republicans nominated Mazi Pilip, a local legislator and IDF veteran, who lost to the district’s former representative, Tom Suozzi.
The race to tackle Suozzi has been roiled by developments in recent weeks, namely Santos’s decision to run–in a different district, as an independent, against the incumbent Republican, Nick LaLota, and Barstool Sports’s Billy Football, getting in the race as a Republican. Billy swapped the last name Football for Cotter, and swapped podcasting for campaigning–although he’s still podcasting.
Cotter is not alone in the GOP primary, however. While Pilip passed on running again, local Republicans are mostly lining up behind ex-assemblyman Mike LiPetri, who’s backed by the powerful Nassau County GOP machine.
So, that leads to the obvious question: who would George Santos vote for? Well, Santos is now running in New York’s 1st, not 3rd, district, and he presumably will be voting for himself–which means he’s not actually voting for anyone here. However, he told me he’s on Team Football.
“If I were still a registered Republican in NY3 I’d vote for him out of all the people in the race,” Santos said. Interestingly, he added that he actually met Cotter “when I did his podcast last year and he told me he wanted to run for office.” Now, is Santos shocked to see Cotter jump in the ring so soon? Nope, he’s “not surprised,” because Cotter is “a young man and has the disposition.”
Now, I’m not calling this a full-blown endorsement of Cotter just yet. Santos also publicly tweeted that “in #NY03 the best candidate is @Billyhottakes not this pandering establishment shill,” referring to LiPetri. Again, I wouldn’t yet call that an endorsement either, despite what Wikipedia says.
Beyond whether Santos officially endorsed Cotter, the question is also: does Cotter even want Santos’s support? He suggested that he does not, in an interview with the Daily Mail, dismissing Santos as “irrelevant to this race,” and said that the former congressman “frankly embarrassed the party and embarrassed America as a whole.”
While Santos’s first term in Congress ended with a historic expulsion, he is still the only Republican to actually win this district in quite some time, and he explained that Cotter does have built-in advantages that others running don’t have. Cotter, Santos said, “has name ID and he’s a good guy.” Cotter’s name ID stems heavily from his years in the Barstool universe, and his fellow Stoolies have predictably rallied behind him.
“All you Republicans, vote for Billy,” the site’s Stu Feiner said in a video. “Billy for Congress,” the legendary sports handicapper screamed many times.
As Republicans across the country grapple with how they want to position themselves heading into November, Cotter is firmly in the Barstool Conservative camp. He told Fox News that while he may not be a Trump supporter, he’d love for Trump to be a Cotter supporter.
“If he offers his support, I’d accept it with open arms,” he told Martha MacCallum. “You’d have to be an idiot not to take a former president’s support.”
As for the odds of Congressman Cotter? It all starts in the June 25th primary.