In the waning days of August, Bruce Blakeman visited the New York State Fair in Syracuse for a political rite of passage, examining agricultural exhibits, contemplating corn dogs and making the case to a captive electorate why he should be elected governor.
Mr. Blakeman, the Republican Nassau County executive, centered his pitch on bread-and-butter economics, blaming Gov. Kathy Hochul for soaring energy bills across the state.
A few days later, he appeared alongside the rapper Flo Rida at a free concert that Mr. Blakeman hosted in East Meadow on Long Island. Earlier that day, he slammed Ms. Hochul for wearing a hijab during a visit to an Islamic Cultural center. (Soon after, Mr. Blakeman’s campaign released an A.I.-generated ad that depicted Ms. Hochul putting on a head covering to hide from the public.)
And this week, as he campaigned outside Brother’s Ravioli in Howard Beach in Queens, Mr. Blakeman, 70, attacked Ms. Hochul, a 68-year-old Democrat, for sending $200 utility rebate checks to most residents, calling them “peanuts” and an “election-year gimmick.”
The message was well received by Angelo Pellegrino, the store’s co-owner.
“There are a lot of people who work really hard in this neighborhood,” Mr. Pellegrino said at the event. “And we want to keep it alive. Whatever anyone could do, we appreciate it very much.”
In trying to become the first Republican governor of New York in 20 years, Mr. Blakeman must swim against a profound political tide.
Registered Democrats outnumber Republicans more than two to one in the state, an advantage that Mr. Blakeman may find hard to overcome in a midterm election where turnout is expected to be high. Ms. Hochul, a Buffalo native, also enjoys a huge fund-raising advantage over Mr. Blakeman, even as his campaign has so far outspent the governor’s on campaign ads.
But Mr. Blakeman says he believes he can win by attacking Ms. Hochul, who is now viewed unfavorably by a slight plurality of poll respondents, 49 percent to 46 percent. He blames her for increases in the cost of housing, electricity and food; deploys Trump-like tactics to accuse her of being weak on crime and immigration; and used another ad generated by artificial intelligence to portray her as a comrade-in-arms with Mayor Zohran Mamdani of New York City.
President Trump’s agenda and divisive persona also loom over the contest. A recent statewide poll found that 60 percent of voters in New York hold an unfavorable view of Mr. Trump. The same percentage of voters also believe he is doing a poor job as president.
A longtime friend of Mr. Trump’s, Mr. Blakeman has tried to thread a needle. Although he supports many of the president’s policies and actions, he has carefully danced around issues where he might disagree with Mr. Trump.
When the president first proposed renaming Lake Ontario as Lake America, Mr. Blakeman said it was a “fun” idea, though not likely to happen. (It happened.)
He has deflected questions about Mr. Trump’s tariffs against Canada, even as they have had a profoundly negative impact on the economy of upstate New York. And he has mostly avoided mentioning Mr. Trump by name in his campaign ads and stops, seemingly wary of alienating moderate voters.
That has not always been easy to do, especially when the two appeared at a rally together last month in Nassau County, gleefully attacking Democrats for their positions on policing and immigration while trumpeting drops in crime in the county.
Mr. Blakeman said he believes his strategy is working.
“Every single day someone walks up to me and says: ‘Mr. Blakeman, I’m a lifelong Democrat. I’ve never voted for a Republican in my life,” he said in a recent interview.
“You’re common-sense. You’re moderate. We feel comfortable with you, and our party is insane.”
A recent survey from Siena University suggested Ms. Hochul led Mr. Blakeman by 10 percentage points, a finding that caused some apprehension among Democrats who recall the 2022 election. That year, she beat Lee Zeldin, then a member of Congress from Long Island and now the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, by just six percentage points.
Her margin of victory was closer than most expected, and some Democrats blamed her for dragging down the party’s ticket, leading to losses in congressional races on Long Island and in the Hudson Valley.
Mr. Blakeman believes he can do better than past Republican governor candidates in New York City, and pick up pockets of moderate Democratic support in suburban enclaves like the lower Hudson Valley.
“When Bruce says it’s a race about New York and local issues, voters here believe him,” said Marc Molinaro, a former Republican congressman in the Hudson Valley who later ran the Federal Transit Administration.
Yet there is no mistaking Mr. Trump’s imprint on how Mr. Blakeman has positioned himself on some of those local issues. He hired armed citizens to serve as special deputy sheriffs in times of crisis and deputized county police detectives to engage in immigration enforcement.
He decreed that transgender athletes be barred from playing at county-owned facilities unless they are competing on coed teams or teams that match their birth gender. And he has echoed the rhetoric of Mr. Trump by signaling his distrust with the integrity of the electoral process, predicting that Democrats would try to “cheat” to win this race.
While these stances may invigorate Mr. Blakeman’s core supporters, they are likely to alienate Democrats — even those who might dislike Ms. Hochul, according to Jay Jacobs, the New York State Democratic Party Committee chairman.
“You can tell he really doesn’t think he’s running to win this race because he’s leaning so far to the right,” said Mr. Jacobs, who is also a longtime Democratic leader in Nassau County and has known Mr. Blakeman for decades.
“He’s embracing Donald Trump,” Mr. Jacobs added. “How do you think you’re going to win an election by standing on side of a guy who is enthusiastically promoting policies people don’t like.”
Ms. Hochul’s campaign has been singularly focused on tying Mr. Blakeman to Mr. Trump, spending about $3 million since June 30 on television ads showing the two embracing, according to AdImpact, a media tracking firm.
At the same time, Mr. Blakeman has spent about $5.7 million blanketing the airwaves with spots attacking Ms. Hochul for rising utility costs and the billions of dollars the state spent to house migrants who relocated to New York in recent years.
“It’s not about Trump or Washington,” Mr. Blakeman said, though he has struggled to delineate what policy disagreements he has with the president.
“She’s trying to make it that,” he added. “She never talks about her record.”
Mr. Molinaro said this moment is far different from the 2018 midterms, when Mr. Trump was two years into his first term and his divisive policies and demeanor angered Democrats and brought them to the polls en masse.
He recalled in an interview that when he ran against Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and lost that year, voters were singularly focused on Mr. Trump. Now, he said, the environment has shifted in a way that could benefit Mr. Blakeman.
It’s an uphill battle, Mr. Molinaro said, but one that Mr. Blakeman can win.
“I think people have made up their mind about Donald Trump, but that doesn’t mean they won’t accept a Republican governor,” he said.
Mr. Jacobs noted that between the state party and her own campaign, Ms. Hochul should have millions of dollars more to spend than Mr. Blakeman in the race’s final weeks. (The state party and Ms. Hochul’s campaign had about $40 million in their coffers as of the last fund-raising deadline in mid-July.)
But he also said that he has told the Hochul campaign that it should be reminding voters of the governor’s accomplishments, pointing to her efforts to ban cellphones in schools and make school lunches free and her investments in child care programs across the state.
“We need to do a better job informing people in the state of not just who Kathy Hochul is, but what she’s already done that is great,” Mr. Jacobs said.
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