Lockport didn’t like Mike, and despite the Republican Party’s award of its official endorsement to him, local party committeemen likely will do the bidding of Jane Corwin in the 142nd District state Assembly race.

So predicted Henry Wojtaszek, Niagara County GOP Committee chairman, on Friday.

Scandal-tainted incumbent Assemblyman Michael Cole, R-Alden, stunned political veterans with his taking of the GOP nod, in close, weighted party convention voting this week.

The spoils of a nominating win, including the right to count on its foot soldiers as signature-gatherers in the coming designating petition process, should belong to Cole automatically — but Wojtaszek said that’s not likely to happen.

His own canvass of town and city GOP committeemen after the Wednesday convention suggests none of them voted for Cole, and since Corwin has signaled her intention to keep running for the GOP ballot line, Wojtaszek said committeemen will not be bound by the convention results.

“Niagara County voted overwhelmingly for Jane Corwin,” he said, “and in this instance, I think there will be people carrying for both (candidates).”

Republican Mayor Michael Tucker, who seconded Corwin’s nomination in the convention, said he will continue campaigning for her. Cole’s victory was a fluke, he added.

In the convention, each committee member was given a blank ballot marked with points determined by the number of Republican voters in their election district.

Tucker and Deborah Gaskill, chairman of the Town of Lockport GOP Committee, both said Cole ended up with 300 points more than Corwin, representing only two or three votes in the packed convention.

“It was an upset,” Gaskill said. The town committee has not met to decide how to handle Assembly nominating petitions yet, Gaskill said. Members could decide to follow tradition and carry for Cole, despite their own preferences; protest the convention results by carrying for Corwin; or decline to carry for either candidate.

The convention apparently split Niagara’s GOP contingent in the two-county Assembly district. Robert Johnston, Town of Royalton GOP Committee chairman, seconded Cole’s nomination and said as far as he knows, all five Royalton committeemen who attended voted for Cole. He said they did so as a show of loyalty to the incumbent who’s been “good” to the town and as a sign it is time to forgive Cole the indiscretion that sullied his name last year.

Cole was censured by the Assembly within months of being elected to his first full term of office, after confessing he’d spent the night at a female intern’s apartment. Cole, a married father of two young girls, said he’d been at a gathering with the intern, had too much to drink and couldn’t make his way back to his own apartment. In addition to censure, he was stripped of his seniority and Assembly committee leadership posts and was barred from the legislative intern program. Since then, he’s nearly been dubbed “persona non grata” in local GOP circles.

Corwin, a wealthy Clarence businesswoman, who’s never held political office, so far has made only fleeting references to the incumbent’s character troubles in public comment, but Wojtaszek, Tucker and Gaskill, who all supported her campaign kickoff in Lockport last month, aren’t dancing around the hot button topic.

“There are consequences to people’s actions, and Mike Cole will suffer the consequences,” Wojtaszek said. “It’s something that will come back to haunt him, and (Republicans) intend to hold onto this seat.”

The taint of scandal makes Cole “unelectable,” Gaskill said.

Tucker, who once eyed running for the Assembly seat, himself, said Lockport’s GOP should not hesitate to assert a preference for Corwin — or its rightful place in the district’s Erie County-dominated political pecking order.

“The City of Lockport is the only city in this district. The city and town together represent 42,000 people. That is not to be taken lightly,” he said.