NEW YORK – After a recent poll put him 50 points behind Democrat Bill De Blasio and showed that only 22 percent of voters have a favorable opinion of him, Republican mayoral candidate Joe Lhota today announced that he will be changing both his name and the name of his party in order to appeal to New York voters.
Lhota said that, effectively immediately, he will be referred to as Joe LhoBlasio in all campaign literature, and confirmed that he will be changing his name legally before the election. The Republican Party of New York State has also agreed to change its name to the “Redemocrats,” according to LhoBlasio’s wishes.
LhoBlasio spokesman John Gattuso noted that their first campaign ad highlighted LhoBlasio’s support for same-sex marriage, abortion rights and decriminalizing small amounts of marijuana, “which are all Democrat positions, so relabeling the New York branch of the Republican Party as ‘Redemocrats’ just seemed to make sense.” LhoBlasio has also branded congressional Republicans “extremists” over the government shutdown.
The Redemocrat also rolled out a slew of new campaign promises, ranging from raising taxes on those making over $500,000 to opposition to stop and frisk (he previously said that New York could become Detroit after the program was found unconstitutional). LhoBlasio also told journalists that he spent time in Nicaragua in the late 1980s, and denied that he had been budget director and deputy mayor under Rudy Giuliani and Chairman of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority under Michael Bloomberg.
LhoBlasio was quick to point out that he did not blame the liberal media for making these claims, saying “I love the liberal media, and all things liberal, because I’m a liberal Redemocrat in the greatest liberal city in the world. ‘Liberal Joe LhoBlasio’ was my nickname in high school.”
Gattuso denied that the campaign’s strategic changes were simply designed to confuse voters by having names that were so similar to De Blasio and the Democrats, although did acknowledge that they would be handing out glasses at polling stations on polling day which limited peoples’ eyesight.