Herman McCall moved to Boston from Georgia and worked as a railroad porter; he abandoned the family when Carl was 11 years of age.

[citation needed] He left the Senate to accept an appointment from President Jimmy Carter as a member of the U.S. delegation to the United Nations with the rank of Ambassador.

After his primary opponent, former US Housing Secretary Andrew Cuomo, withdrew from the race,[4] McCall entered the general election as the uncontested Democratic candidate, but lost to Pataki.

[6] Cuomo proved to be a better fundraiser, and McCall's own campaign war chest was heavily depleted in the primary battle.

While Senator Hillary Clinton did not officially take sides during the primary, she loaned a staffer and a fundraiser to McCall's campaign and she marched by McCall's side at the West Indian American Day parade in New York City, as the Clinton wanted to retain strong African-American support in case she made a presidential run in the future.

[citation needed] In an unusual show of support, conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh urged his listeners to donate to McCall's campaign.

David Paterson, the incumbent and first African-American governor of New York, whom Rangel staunchly supported, fared poorly in polls due to several scandals and later abandoned his campaign re-election.

Some of the letters referred to the size of the state's ownership interest in the corporation targeted, which critics claimed amounted to a veiled threat to punish companies that didn't hire his relatives.

A Quinnipiac poll released October 16 showed that two-thirds of likely voters were aware of the letters and of those more than a fifth were less likely to vote for McCall as a result.

[9] McCall's daughter, Marci, was hired by Verizon, which received such a letter, but was subsequently fired for using her company credit card to pay for substantial personal expenditures.

Charges of larceny against her were dropped after some reimbursement to Verizon, and she was then hired as a marketer by McCall's running mate, Dennis Mehiel.

However, others point out that Pataki was able to make crucial inroads into traditional areas of Democratic support, such as unions and even African-American congregations.

The three-way vote-split efforts of Tom Golisano, who primarily ran against Pataki on his own third-party line, also diverted much of the anti-Pataki vote away from McCall.

Other political commentators attribute McCall's defeat to the growing popularity of the Republican Party after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, along with Governor Pataki's successful administration of the state.

[11] In May 2009, Convent Capital, the financial services firm run by McCall, was subpoenaed, along with other unregistered placement agents, by state Attorney General Andrew Cuomo's office as part of an inquiry into possible corruption involved in deals brokered between investment firms and the state pension fund.