At a lakeside setting in rural New York, it was not difficult for Bruce Blakeman, the Republican hopeful for governor, to read the room.
“When I become governor on Jan. 1, the first executive order I’m going to sign: New York State is no longer a sanctuary state!” Mr. Blakeman said on Sunday, drawing cheers from the crowd and prompting several middle-aged women to throw their arms up in victory.
He criticized what he saw as the state’s unwarranted generosity to immigrants and its failure to uphold heterosexual family values. And he showered the event’s host, Anthony Constantino, a fellow Republican running to succeed Representative Elise Stefanik in the state’s North Country, with Trump-coded praise.
He said he first met Mr. Constantino at Mar-a-Lago sometime last year, referring to President Trump’s home in Palm Beach, Fla.
“Great guy, business leader, patriot, great American,” Mr. Blakeman gushed on about Mr. Constantino, who is favored to win his House race in November.
Mr. Blakeman, who is seeking to become the second Republican governor of New York in the last 50 years, is more of a long shot.
This is the third time that Mr. Blakeman, the Nassau County executive, has run for statewide office. In his latest iteration, Mr. Blakeman, 70, has taken inspiration from Mr. Trump’s playbook — mocking his opponents with A.I.-generated content, barring transgender girls from playing sports with their peers in county facilities and working with Immigration and Customs Enforcement to deport people in the state illegally.
His path is tricky. Although he is fiercely loyal to the president, Mr. Blakeman seldom invokes Mr. Trump’s name on the campaign trail, making no mention of him in the TV ad he has been running statewide since May. He was similarly mum at the Sunday event at Great Sacandaga Lake, despite its MAGA vibe.
Mr. Trump’s popularity is spotty at best in New York. In a Siena University poll released on Wednesday, 60 percent of likely voters held an unfavorable opinion of the president; Mr. Blakeman fared better, with 33 percent of respondents holding a favorable opinion and 26 percent unfavorable.
The same poll had Gov. Kathy Hochul, the incumbent Democrat, leading Mr. Blakeman 49 percent to 39 percent among likely voters — a smaller lead than the governor held four years ago at this time against the Republican candidate, Lee Zeldin. (Ms. Hochul would go on to defeat Mr. Zeldin, who now leads the Environmental Protection Agency, by six percentage points.) Forty-six percent of likely voters held a favorable view of her, while 49 percent disapproved.
John Faso, a former Republican congressman who ran for governor in 2006, said that “Democrats want to make the election about Trump, and Republicans need to make the election about state and local issues under Democratic one-party rule in the state.”
Even so, Mr. Blakeman has avoided criticizing the president, or any of his initiatives. When reporters asked him this week whether he disagreed with Mr. Trump on any issues, Mr. Blakeman gestured vaguely toward differences on the economy and guest worker visa programs.
“I’m going to come out in the next couple of weeks and talk about things that I think are important that the administration may not agree upon,” he vowed.
Indeed, it would be easier for Mr. Blakeman if Mr. Trump were to avoid bringing attention to himself. Instead, the president plans to visit Mr. Blakeman in Nassau County on Friday.
Mr. Blakeman said in a statement that he was “grateful” that the president was coming and looking forward to paying tribute with him to the county’s law enforcement officials.
For a few weeks last year, it appeared that Ms. Stefanik would carry Republicans’ hopes of unseating Ms. Hochul. Ms. Stefanik is a longtime ally of Mr. Trump, but so is Mr. Blakeman — dividing the president’s loyalties.
When asked to weigh in on the two candidates, Mr. Trump refused to take a side, saying both were “great people.” Ms. Stefanik dropped out of the race a short time later.
Since then, Mr. Blakeman has defended the president’s deportation agenda and the tactics of ICE agents, even as they have come under increased scrutiny after a handful of interactions have led to the deaths of U.S. citizens.
If Mr. Blakeman hopes to defeat Ms. Hochul, he will need to replicate Mr. Zeldin’s successes on Long Island and Rockland County, where he won a majority of votes, while keeping Ms. Hochul’s margins in New York City largely in check.
But while Mr. Zeldin did well in the rural portions of Western New York and the North Country, the most populous counties upstate, which include Syracuse, Rochester and Buffalo, chose Ms. Hochul by roughly six points — the same margin by which she carried the state.
Ryan Radulovacki, a Hochul campaign spokesman, said that voters will recognize that the governor “has put money back in New Yorkers’ pockets at every opportunity, invested billions in public safety, and stood up against Donald Trump’s endless attacks on this state.”
The last Republican to win statewide was Gov. George E. Pataki in 2002, who won Erie, Onondaga and Monroe Counties by double digits.
Mr. Faso said that winning upstate had gotten harder in the past 30 years.
“Many of the Republican constituencies have moved out of state, or they’ve gone to their great reward,” he said, noting the population decline that has accompanied the shrinking of the private sector in Monroe and Onondaga Counties. Today those areas are dominated by educational and medical institutions, whose employees tend to skew more liberal.
“People are voting with their feet, and often the people who are more mobile are people who might be a little more affluent, or might be retirees,” he said.
Ms. Hochul, a Buffalo native, is a stronger competitor upstate than many of her predecessor Democrats. And as an incumbent, she also wields a significant fund-raising advantage, finishing the last reporting period with more than three times as much funds as Mr. Blakeman’s $6.5 million cash on hand.
That shortfall is exacerbated by the decision of one of the state’s largest Republican backers, the cosmetics heir Ronald Lauder, to seemingly step away from politics. But other groups including the Republican Governors Association and a political action committee called Strong and Safe New York, backed by the Knicks owner James L. Dolan, have signaled they intend to bolster Mr. Blakeman.
There was little evidence of a cash crunch at the event on Sunday, where an ice cream cart and truck offering wood-fired pizzas supplemented the pasta and seafood buffet in the center of the room.
The appearance of Mr. Blakeman alongside Mr. Constantino seemed somewhat noteworthy: Like the rest of the Republican establishment, Mr. Blakeman declined to endorse Mr. Constantino, whose provocative style had led to several high-profile spats with state Republican leaders.
Mr. Constantino, who won a decisive victory in his primary, appeared to have no intention of holding a grudge against Mr. Blakeman. A representative for Mr. Constantino noted that the businessman, who was entirely self-funding his congressional campaign, had also covered the Sacandaga event.
“We want to welcome everybody back into New York State,” Mr. Constantino told a group of reporters before the event. “We want people to start coming back here, living here, wanting to stay here, and you know the best way to do that is to elect Bruce Blakeman.”
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