Republican Rob Russo dropped out of the race for Congress on Thursday and endorsed state Sen. Dan Debicella in the Fourth Congressional District.<\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n
“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.”<\/p>\n
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.”<\/p>\n
Instead, he said Republican voters in Fairfield County need to rally around a single candidate.<\/p>\n
“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.”<\/p>\n
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. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4001,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-547348","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/547348","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4001"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=547348"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/547348\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=547348"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=547348"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=547348"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}