With four days remaining for billionaire Thomas Golisano to change his party affiliation to Republican in time for the November 2006 primary election, one of his closest advisers said yesterday that the three-time gubernatorial loser has yet to decide whether to run again.

Citing a recent conversation she had with Mr. Golisano, the founding chairwoman of the Independence Party of New York, Laureen Oliver, said, “He told me straight out, ‘I haven’t made up my mind.'”

Ms. Oliver told The New York Sun that Mr. Golisano is likely to change his party registration before Friday’s deadline to “keep the door open” for another gubernatorial bid, this time with the potential for major party backing. Because today is Columbus Day, an official holiday, the earliest Mr. Golisano could register is tomorrow.

Mr. Golisano, 63, the founder of a billion-dollar payroll processing firm and owner of the Buffalo Sabres hockey team, has until Friday to register as a Republican to participate in next November’s primary election without having to attain special permission from the New York Republican State Committee.

If Mr. Golisano does not register by Friday, he could still run in the Republican primary, but only if he is granted what is called a Wilson-Pakula, referring to a New York election law statute that allows party committees to authorize a nonmember as a candidate for office. With deep bitterness in the party over Mr. Golisano’s three attempts to defeat Mr. Pataki, that scenario is highly unlikely. The party chairman, Stephen Minarik, has thrown his support behind the candidacy of William Weld, the former Massachusetts governor.

With no word from Mr. Golisano about his registration plans, some state officials grumbled about his agenda.

Mr. Golisano last week told the state Senate majority leader, Joseph Bruno, that he planned to register as a Republican last Friday, according to a high-level Senate official. The two had a breakfast meeting in Albany two weeks earlier at which the state’s second most powerful Republican leader is said to have urged Mr. Golisano to run for a fourth consecutive time.

“Senator Bruno thought he was go 257 841 358 852ing to switch on Friday,” the official said. “That’s what he told the senator. He might have just been shooting his mouth off.”

Some observers speculated that Mr. Golisano was waiting until the last moment to maximize public attention for his campaign. “It builds up the drama and creates more interest,” the publisher of the Legislative Gazette newspaper and a retired professor of political science at SUNY at Albany, Alan Chartock, said.

In the 2002 election, Mr. Golisano spent $75 million of his fortune in the campaign while only mustering 14% of the vote as an Independence Party candidate. He fared worse in the 1998 and 1994 elections. In a Quinnipiac poll from last week, Mr. Golisano was the strongest Republican contender – leading other declared and likely candidates including Mr. Weld, a former state Assemblyman, John Faso, and New York’s former secretary of state, Randy Daniels – but trailed Attorney General Eliot Spitzer by 34 percentage points.

While some political observers say Mr. Golisano’s positions on issues ranging from tax reform to education to Medicaid are somewhat of a mystery, Mr. Golisano’s wealth and name recognition appeal to Mr. Bruno, whose 35-27 Republican majority in the Senate is in jeopardy next November. Mr. Bruno needs a strong enough candidate to help bring more Republican votes to the polls who will vote down ticket for state Senate candidates.

On his bare-bones Web site, www.golisano.com, Mr. Golisano portrays himself as someone who can make government more “efficient, more responsive, and more accountable.” The Web site, whose content has remained the same for about two years, does not contain any policy prescriptions.

“It would be hard to know whether he would be good for the party or not,” said Lawrence Kudlow, CEO of Kudlow & Company LLC, an economic and investment research firm in New York City, and host of CNBC’s “Kudlow & Company.”

“I’m always leery of the idea that all you can find is somebody who is wealthy enough. State leaders do this too often without realizing how important ideas are,” Mr. Kudlow said.