Bruce Blakeman, the best-dressed man in the diner parking lot, gazed upon a New York that seemed culled from his own campaign literature: gritty, exasperated, inclined toward Bruce Blakeman.
Standing last week in his striped gray suit beside a Bronx expressway, Mr. Blakeman, the Nassau County executive and the Republican nominee for governor, nodded gratefully at a man in a Yankees hoodie who shouted at him (“Hey, Bruce, bring our city back!”) and a retired sanitation worker distressed over costs (“You go to the store — fuhgeddabout the prices!”). Passengers in two separate passing Mercedes S.U.V.s (“Let’s go, Bruce!”) seemed to prefer a time before statewide Democratic rule.
Inside the diner, the candidate talked football with voters beneath two signed photographs of actors from “The Sopranos” that hang above the register of a place that proudly claims to have served the borough since “before most of you were born.”
He railed against the socialist policies of “Zohran Man-dami,” the New York mayor whose name he almost always mispronounces, and the disorder that he lays at the feet of Gov. Kathy Hochul, the opponent whom he consistently trails in what he has called “woke university polls.”
“Crime is rampant everywhere!” Mr. Blakeman told a small crowd of supporters outside the diner.
“Crime is rampant everywhere?” a television reporter muttered to himself, with citywide trends suggesting just the opposite. “Does he ever read the crime stats?”
Running for governor as a New York Republican circa 2026 was always going to be difficult. The blue is everywhere, especially in the big city. The math doesn’t math easily.
But despite trying to play the cards he has as intuitively as he can — by conjuring the bad old days; by promising to be a check on liberal excesses; by hammering Ms. Hochul on affordability at a time when many in the state are indeed lukewarm about her stewardship — Mr. Blakeman, a glad-handing 71-year-old Long Islander with a senatorial sweep of white hair, can also register as a man out of time.
He is positioning himself as the answer to runaway New York mayhem — as Lee Zeldin did in his closer-than-expected 2022 campaign for governor and as Eric Adams did in his successful mayoral run the year before — in a moment when surveys suggest that now crime is no longer top of mind for most voters.
He is an abortion-rights but largely MAGA-presenting Republican whose long relationship with President Trump helped clear the primary field but has also become a central focus of Ms. Hochul’s campaign in a state where the president is hugely unpopular.
He is a former U.S. Senate candidate (lost in a 2010 Republican primary), former state comptroller candidate (lost in the 1998 general election) and former House candidate (lost in the 2014 general election). But in 2021, Mr. Blakeman rode a wave of discontent over crime and state bail reforms to a surprise upset in the contest for Nassau County executive, often adopting a reliable strategy for Long Island Republicans across the decades: vowing that the unruliness of New York City must stop at the county border.
In this role, he has attracted national attention by opposing mask mandates and seeking to bar transgender girls and women from competing on women’s sports teams at county-operated facilities, earning him notice across conservative media as an eager and canny participant in the evolving culture wars.
He waxes nostalgic about the Gotham of Rudolph W. Giuliani, now a beleaguered figure among New Yorkers, and tries to channel very real voter frustrations over costs as a longtime lawyer, golf enthusiast and semi-serial political candidate who insists he has more to give his state.
“I have a lot of friends that their goal in life was to make a lot of money,” Mr. Blakeman said in an interview. “My goal in life was to have an interesting life and to be able to help people.”
He seems to have broadly succeeded on the first score, serving briefly as an aide and driver to the former first lady Nancy Reagan. And, most surreally, his former wife, Nancy Shevell, is now married to Paul McCartney. (“Life goes on,” Mr. Blakeman has said, echoing a refrain from a favorite Beatles song, “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da.”)
Yet his efforts at public service have often been thwarted over the last three decades.
In the late 1990s, after serving on the town board of Hempstead, N.Y., he became the presiding officer of the newly formed Nassau County Legislature. An article in The New York Times described him as someone with “movie-star looks who was being groomed for a promising future.” (“Central casting,” Mr. Trump has said of Mr. Blakeman, whom he met during his days as a New York real estate developer.)
After his unsuccessful House bid, Mr. Blakeman, the son of a state assemblyman, returned in 2015 to the Hempstead Town Council, where former colleagues said he relished mixing it up with Democrats and gadflies alike.
He tussled with a Republican who was pushing an ethics reform package that would have curtailed the outside incomes of elected officials and bucked his own local party to endorse a Democrat, Laura Gillen, for town supervisor. (Ms. Gillen now represents the area in Congress.)
That Mr. Blakeman has submitted himself to another uphill campaign, friends suggested, is a testament to his priorities and his self-belief.
“He’s not at Le Bernardin having dinner with friends reminiscing about how successful his legal career was,” said Dan Donovan, a former Staten Island congressman and prosecutor who has known Mr. Blakeman for some three decades. “Bruce is in the back of an S.U.V. eating Utica greens.”
And the towns he is visiting in that vehicle might not be as fruitful for New York Republicans as they once were. An exodus of residents — often to warmer environs — is a phenomenon Mr. Blakeman denounces as emblematic of the state’s poor management.
“There’s nobody left upstate,” Mr. Donovan said. “All those people who voted for George Pataki are gone.”
Mr. Pataki, the state’s last Republican governor, has tried to help. He and Mr. Blakeman campaigned earlier this month in Washington Heights, flaming Ms. Hochul for high utility rates and calling to reinstate fracking.
“I think there is that sense that New York could be doing better,” Mr. Pataki said, “and the climate is such where they are looking to see about the possibility of change.”
Recognizing that Republicans alone cannot elect Mr. Blakeman, allies have hoped that getting him in front of as many disillusioned Democrats and persuadable independents as possible might bridge the gap and boost his visibility among those with little fluency in Nassau County municipal affairs.
Some testimonials have been more specific than others.
“Bruce is Bruce,” Peter King, a Republican former congressman from Long Island, said warmly.
“Bruce is Bruce,” said Mr. King’s daughter, Erin King Sweeney, with whom Mr. Blakeman served on the Hempstead Town Council.
Yet even at this late stage, some voters do not seem to know exactly what (or who) Bruce is. A recent Quinnipiac University poll, which gave Ms. Hochul a 14-point edge, found that nearly a quarter of voters had not heard enough to form an opinion about Mr. Blakeman.
“It was a learning process for people in the state,” Mr. Blakeman said diplomatically, adding that residents had since absorbed more about his record of economic success in Nassau County.
At public appearances, he presents himself as a savior, the last best hope for a deteriorating New York undone by unbridled leftism.
“It’s a death spiral right now,” he told supporters in Chinatown last week, his dark dress shoes clacking along a plaza so caked in bird droppings that the substance has become part of the neighborhood’s permanent infrastructure. “We need to pull out of it. I’m the pilot.”
In the online forever-war of modern campaigning, Mr. Blakeman has been particularly prolific in producing a slew of artificial intelligence-assisted ads that have drawn sharp criticism from Democrats.
One depicts a tattooed ne’er-do-well approaching an artificially rendered Ms. Hochul outside a police precinct. “Want some crack?” the man asks.
Ms. Hochul has tried to make the race a referendum on Mr. Trump, hoping that a rough midterm cycle for an incumbent president might allow her to coast to re-election in a solidly Democratic state. Mr. Blakeman’s ties to Mr. Trump have also shadowed his argument to voters about New York’s costs and tax burdens.
Asked whether he supports tariffs on Canadian farmers, Mr. Blakeman has sidestepped, calling the matter a federal issue that is out of his control. Neither cuts to Medicaid nor elevated oil prices amid the war in Iran have helped Mr. Blakeman’s cause.
Public polling makes it clear that economic issues are the most resonant in this race. Respondents to the Quinnipiac poll who listed the economy or the cost of living as their chief concerns favored Ms. Hochul by about 50 percentage points.
Mr. Blakeman has toggled between mocking the governor for fixating on the president (“That’s all she talks about,” he said in the interview, adding that he is “nobody’s puppet”) and mostly embracing Mr. Trump while appealing to his base.
At a rally with the president earlier this month in Syracuse, N.Y., where Mr. Blakeman took the stage to AC/DC’s “Thunderstruck” and chants of “Bruuuuuce,” the candidate uncorked a middling presidential impersonation (“You know, Bruce, this is huuuuge”) and tried his hand at Trump-style insult comedy.
“Mr. President, you like nicknames,” he said. “I have one. It’s Clueless Kathy!”
Mr. Trump nodded a little.
“He’s been a winner,” the president said later of Mr. Blakeman. “Everything he ever touches turns to gold.”
But Mr. Trump has also complicated Mr. Blakeman’s attacks on Mr. Mamdani, the campaign’s most conspicuous boogeyman, by consistently praising the mayor.
“It sort of undercuts,” said Mr. King, before summarizing Mr. Blakeman’s pitch and the president’s remarks. “‘Elect me, otherwise Mamdani is going to run the state.’ And then he’s running around saying Mamdani is a great guy.”
In June, the president and Mr. Blakeman caught up at Madison Square Garden during the Knicks’ championship run (Game 3 of the N.B.A. finals, their only loss in the series) in the company of James Dolan, the team owner.
Mr. Dolan and his family have supplied millions of dollars in support for Mr. Blakeman’s campaign and outside groups backing it, providing a late spending surge in a race in which Ms. Hochul has thoroughly out-raised and outspent her opponent.
Other would-be allies have been harder for Mr. Blakeman to crack — a testament to Ms. Hochul’s efforts to court titans of finance and real estate in her first full term.
Shortly after Mr. Blakeman entered the race last year, he and Ms. Hochul hustled to the same unusual forum for unsubtle pandering: a Manhattan screening of “Marty Supreme” hosted by John Catsimatidis, a billionaire former Republican mayoral candidate who is friendly with Mr. Trump (and who had a small role in the film).
Mr. Blakeman came prepared: He presented the host with a proclamation declaring it “John Catsimatidis Day.”
But despite the gesture and their broad political alignment, Mr. Catsimatidis has stayed neutral in the race, citing a cordial relationship with the governor, whom Mr. Blakeman has called a disaster.
“The good news is, he gave me that,” Mr. Catsimatidis said of the proclamation. “But the governor sat next to me and watched the movie for three hours. Bruce left.”
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