Republican Rob Russo dropped out of the race for Congress on Thursday and endorsed state Sen. Dan Debicella in the Fourth Congressional District.
Russo, a former aide to U.S. Rep. Christopher Shays and a former state senator, said that Debicella is the best Republican to run against U.S. Rep. Jim Himes, a Greenwich Democrat who ended Shays’s 21-year tenure in the 2008 election.
“This has not been an easy decision, but I am convinced it is the right one,” Russo wrote in a letter to supporters. “I entered the race for Congress seven months ago because I strongly believed that Fairfield County desperately needed that independent leadership in Congress that we all admired so much in Christopher Shays and Stewart McKinney before him.”
He added, “We cannot afford to re-elect a Congressman who blindly follows his party bosses while he ignores the people he was elected to serve. Seven months later, I still believe all this to be true. Having talked with many of the delegates to the Fourth District Republican convention, it is my belief that I would garner more than enough votes to qualify to challenge the party-endorsed candidate in a primary. However, I do not believe that forcing a primary is in the best interests of our party.”
Instead, he said Republican voters in Fairfield County need to rally around a single candidate.
“We need to support a fiscal conservative who understands the federal government cannot solve all of our problems,” Russo said. “We need a strong candidate who understands how the Democrats’ health care bill will harm our country, and will do what needs to be done to fix it. I believe this candidate is my good friend, Dan Debicella.”
Debicella is a Shelton Republican who graduated from the University of Pennsylvania and received an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School. Himes is a Rhodes Scholar from Greenwich who once worked at the investment powerhouse Goldman Sachs.