After a lengthy review process, Harrison Town Councilman Joe Stout has been declared the winner in the primary for the Conservative Party line. The victory means that there will now be three candidates on the Election Day ballot.
However, Stout told the Review he did not plan on actively campaigning for the general election. He said he was unlikely to win as a third-party candidate, adding, “At this point, campaigning would only take votes away from the other [candidates], which wouldn’t be fair to them.”
Stout, a registered Democrat, lost the Democratic primary to Chris Rodier on Sept. 13, according to unofficial results from the Westchester County Board of Elections, BOE. But he also received 30 votes on the Conservative ballot after that party’s endorsement.
Republican town board candidate Rich Dionisio, who also ran for the Conservative line, ran as a write-in and received 23 votes, which was not enough to beat Stout, according to the BOE’s unofficial count.
Dionisio, who will run in the general election on the Republican, Independence and Working Families lines, said losing the Conservative line—and, therefore, gaining a second opponent on Election Day—does not change the way he will approach the remainder of his campaign.
“I’m going to be forging ahead,” Dionisio said. “Everything that I was going to do, I’m still doing. It really doesn’t change anything for me.”
Dionisio told the Review he feels confident that he can get enough support from Conservative voters in the general election for it to bolster his chances.
There are about 325 registered Conservatives in Harrison; at least 53 of them voted in the primary. By comparison, 406 of about 5,300 registered Harrison Democrats voted in that party’s primary.
A Democrat has not been elected to the town board since 2009, when then-Mayor Joan Walsh was re-elected over then-police Chief David Hall. In the 2015 town board elections, all three Republican candidates swept their Democrat counterparts; each Republican candidate won at least 65 percent of the vote.
All three of this year’s candidates will run to fulfill a one-year term remaining from Joe Canella’s unexpired term. Canella, a Republican, was elected to the town board in 2013, but vacated the seat in January 2016 to become a town judge. In January, the all-Republican town board appointed Stout to replace Canella until the Nov. 8 election.
