Vickie Paladino has no love for the Queens County Republican Party. The feeling is mutual.

The lifelong Whitestone resident, an insurgent Republican primary candidate for state Sen. Tony Avella’s (D-Bayside) seat, wants a “clean and fair fight.” And she is furious over the party picking a favorite in the primary: Douglaston resident Simon Minching, her one opponent in September. He is also backed by the Queens County Conservative Party.

Paladino is known by many for berating Mayor de Blasio in Whitestone last year over his flying to a protest in Germany a day after the killing of an NYPD officer. A video of the incident went viral and led to stories about the situation in nationwide conservative publications. The candidate characterizes her campaign as being a dedicated band of volunteers.

She also says the party is afraid of her.

“These people are having their power threatened for the first time in a while,” Paladino told the Chronicle. “We are citizens running a grassroots campaign. We don’t have a lot of money and we don’t have a lot of power.”

The voters will pick the winner in the race on Sept. 13 and that person will face either Avella or his primary challenger, former councilman and comptroller John Liu.

Joann Ariola, the chairwoman of the Queens Republican Party, dismissed the notion that the Whitestone resident is a political threat to her organization.

“I think that Vickie Paladino is a radical who is very much what we don’t want our party to be affiliated with,” she said.

Councilman Eric Ulrich (R-Ozone Park), the sole Republican elected official in Queens and a powerful figure within the borough party, feels similarly.

“I’ve barely spoken two words to Vickie Paladino and I’m not sure that she has the temperament to hold public office,” the lawmaker said.

The candidate said the Queens GOP is refusing to have a “fair and square primary.”

Ariola shot back, calling the endorsement practice “standard operating procedure for a county organization.”

It is a common practice. The Queens County Democratic Party also picks favorites in primaries.

Ariola also brought up how Paladino was interviewed by the Queens County Republican and Conservative parties like Minching was.

“I went for their vetting because it was the right thing to do,” Paladino said in a sitdown with the Chronicle’s editorial board last month about the interviews.

Ultimately, none of the district leaders in the Queens GOP voted for Paladino when making the endorsement decision. Her primary foe got all votes in favor, but one of the district leaders, Queens Village Republican Club President Phil Orenstein, abstained.

By doing so, he kept in line with his club’s longstanding neutrality policy for primaries.

“We made it very clear: This is what we’re doing, this is our policy,” he said in an interview. “I know some people were upset, but hey, that’s our opinion.”

Orenstein personally collected petition signatures for Paladino. However, as he explained, his club encourages people to petition for all candidates in Republican primaries, keeping with the neutrality rule.

Paladino praised the Queens Village Club for, in her words, “playing by the rules.”

When discussing her opponent, her tone is much different.

She accuses Minching of being a “sock puppet” for the Queens Republican organization.

Speaking with the Chronicle, Minching dismissed the insult and pointed out how Paladino was interviewed just like he was.

“With all due respect to my opponent this kind of comes across as sour grapes,” he said, adding that he believes his primary foe “would be all gung ho” about the party if she had won its endorsement.

His GOP rival, he charged, has “morphed into a nihilist ... committed to dragging down individuals associated with the party.”

Robert Hornak, an advisor to Paladino, was executive director of the Queens GOP back when the late Phil Ragusa of Whitestone was its chairman. He says the acrimony between the candidate he’s backing and Ariola reflects an older schism between the North and South Queens factions of the party that goes back years.

He believes the fact that he was working with the insurgent candidate played into the party’s move to support Minching.

“I think that’s part of it; they most certainly expressed to her an unwillingness to work with me,” Hornak said. “They initially had some people reach out to her, some of their local operatives, to say she shouldn’t be working with me as soon as they found out that I was advising her.”

“Vickie did not interview well with the district leaders from the 11th Senate District and interviewed poorly with the leadership at large with the county,” Ariola said. “And that’s why she did not get the endorsement.”

Before abandoning the effort, the Queens GOP was planning on getting Paladino kicked off the ballot by challenging her petition signatures.

The party had filed general objections to Paladino’s signatures, which would be followed by the filing of specific objections were it to move forward with an attempt to kick her off the ballot.

The Paladino campaign categorically dismisses the idea of any petition collection fraud.

“It was the smartest move they ever made not to challenge me,” the candidate said. “Let’s do it the American way, the fair way, and that’s a primary.”

Ariola told the Chronicle that the decision to not proceed with the petition signature challenge was not made because of a lack of “fraud” in the Paladino camp.

“Her campaign is as corrupt as she accuses others of being,” Ariola said of the candidate, who dismissed the comment.

Among the malfeasance alleged by Ariola are 900 signatures she says were collected by Paladino’s son, Thomas Paladino Jr., over a period of seven days. Gathering so many signatures over such a short period, she said, would be “impossible.”

She said it would be extremely challenging to invalidate the signatures, though.

“We would have to subpoena all 900 of those voters,” Ariola explained.

The candidate’s son said the Queens GOP head’s accusation is a “complete fabrication,” and claimed the party is “simply shocked at the number of signatures we were able to gather without” its backing.

The Queens Republican Party leader also said Paladino’s campaign was operating “almost like a slush fund” because of its payments to Thomas Paladino Jr. The Whitestone resident’s campaign has raised $13,930; of that, $1,800 has been paid to her son in consulting fees.

Ariola also pointed out that the son’s place of residence in state records is recorded as his mother’s house, though he told the Chronicle that he has “an apartment in Manhattan but I’ve always maintained my residence in Whitestone as well.”

Thomas Paladino Jr. rebutted the Queens GOP chief’s remarks about the payment, pointing out that he has extensively worked in brand strategy and saying he is being compensated “modestly” relative to the work he has put in to his mother’s campaign. He handles all of her social media pages.

Ariola also accuses the insurgent state Senate hopeful of “threatening” her and Ulrich when Paladino was speaking at an event earlier this year. The candidate was being filmed while she gave the remarks.

“Bring on a fair and square primary or face the consequences, Joann Ariola. Face the consequences, Eric. Face the consequences,” she said in the video. “Anybody, anybody who wants to dare do this to me, realize this fair and square, I will go for your throat. It’s not a threat, it’s a fact.”

In an interview, Paladino insisted that she wasn’t threatening Ariola and Ulrich with physical harm. “I would never want to hurt them in any way, shape or form,” she said.

But the candidate doubled down on the idea of a “clean” primary, one she defines as a race in which county party organizations do not anoint a candidate.

If Paladino won the primary, support from the party would be unlikely.

Asked if he would support her in the event of her defeating Minching, Ulrich said, “I would really have to think about that.”

Ariola also would not be rushing to endorse the candidate in the event of her winning.

“Ms. Paladino has stated that she’s not interested in my endorsement, even though she sought it previously,” the party leader said in an email.

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