We now have less than 100 days to go until Election Day 2025. Mayoral races are featured in Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse, Albany, and New York City. Locally, dozens of town races are uncontested. The major contest is for supervisor in the Town of Amherst.
It is not too early, however, to turn to the statewide offices that will be on the ballot in November 2026. Incumbents include State Comptroller Tom DiNapoli, Attorney General Tish James, and Governor Kathy Hochul. Beginning next year the candidates for governor and lt. governor will run as a team from the primary right through the general election. The focus, of course, will be on the election for governor. There has been lots of activity already.
On the Democratic side we began the year with the on-the-outs Lt. Governor Antonio Delgado and Congressman Richie Torres from the Bronx looking to challenge Hochul in a Democratic primary. Torres’ campaign never got off the ground and he subsequently announced that he would not run. Delgado remains an active candidate.
Delgado’s July campaign financial report shows that he had about $1.5 million in his campaign treasury. Almost a million dollars of that total, however, came from a transfer from his lt. governor campaign account that he had raised over the past three years. Hochul reported $17.5 million.
Hochul has had polling problems but a recent Siena College poll showed her headed in a more positive direction. It showed her with a 49 percent to 12 percent lead over Delgado.
The poll shows her job approval rating at 50 percent. A majority of the poll indicated that the respondents wanted “someone else,” but we have real names to fill in the blanks about who that someone else would be – Delgado; and three Republicans: Congresswoman Elise Stefanik, Congressman Mike Lawler, and Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman. Hochul holds about a two-to-one advantage in the poll over each of the Republicans.
There is always the possibility that a Democrat besides Delgado will enter next June’s primary. A statewide campaign, however, takes a lot of time and effort to get off the ground and we are only seven months away from the date when 2026 petitions will hit the streets.
The Republicans are doing some sorting of their own. As this blog suggested a couple weeks ago might happen, Lawler has dropped out of the race already. Either Stefanik or Blakeman could be the Republican nominee.
Stefanik has been having an interesting but not really positive 2025 thus far. She was nominated by Donald Trump for the position of United States Ambassador to the United Nations. But then, fairly quickly, the nomination was withdrawn. The reason, the public was told, was the Republicans needed her for their razor-thin margin of control in the House of Representatives.
That’s strange. If she had been confirmed by the Senate in January like most other major appointees, the law on filling elective vacancies in New York would have had a special election concluded before a vote from her likely Republican replacement would have been needed for voting on Trump’s mega-maga legislation.
Stefanik in the previous Congress held a major leadership role in the Republican House hierarchy but after the UN job was gone Speaker Mike Johnson could only come up with a token face-saving new role for her with the leadership team. The final insult to Stefanik then came when Trump nominated Mike Waltz for the UN job. Waltz had been pushed out of his job as national security advisor for his train-wreck role in the Signal-gate scandal involving military attack plans.
Stefanik, originally a more moderate member of the House, has totally immersed herself in everything Trump and MAGA. Republicans have loved how she has attacked college presidents in committee hearings. As a House Republican she voted for the mega-maga bill, so going forward she will carry all that comes with that legislation.
For New York Trump’s big bill will cut health insurance for hundreds of thousands of people. It will deprive New York children and adults of food assistance both through cuts in SNAP and reduced funding for public food availability at community organizations. It will reduce education assistance including mental health services for school children. It will eliminate or drastically reduce educational Head Start programs. No amount of Republican gaslighting will cover up those actions.
As a candidate for governor Stefanik will wear all of those issues. It may explain in part why the Siena poll shows her trailing Hochul by a 47 percent to 24 percent margin.
Stefanik has indicated that she will make her decision about running for governor in the fall. Currently seen as the first choice among the party, she is doing the party no good by that delay.
It seems highly likely that sometime between August and November Stefanik will announce that she has decided that she can best serve her president and party by remaining in the House. She can then focus on trying to work her way back into the House Republican leadership.
So for the Republicans that leaves… Bruce Blakeman unless maybe Andrew Guiliani wants to take another shot at it. Blakeman is the least known among the Republican contenders for governor in 2026. To help you learn about him, here are some facts:
- Blakeman is currently completing his first term as Nassau County Executive. He won the office for the first time in 2021 by a margin of about 2,000 votes. There has been some history in Nassau County about a county executive being elected by the candidate whose party does not control the White House.
- He is up for re-election in November and most recently reported that his campaign has $3.3 million cash-on-hand. Some of that money is being devoted to his 2025 campaign.
- Blakeman briefly held elective town Council and county legislator positions in Nassau County during the 1990’s. He was appointed to a town Council position in 2015.
- His political resume includes a loss of the county legislative seat; a loss in a Republican primary for United States senator; a loss in a race for Congress; and a landslide loss in an election for state comptroller.
- As County Executive he manages an annual county budget totaling $3.6 billion.
- Nassau County’s finances have been badly muddled for a long, long time. The Nassau County Interim Finance Authority (aka Control Board) was created in 2000. It has been in a “hard board” management control position for all but three (2011-2013) of its 25 years of existence. By contrast, the Erie County Fiscal Stability Authority was only in a “hard board’ status for three years since 2005 (2006 until 2009).
- Like with other control boards around the state the Nassau County version requires the county administration to submit a four-year plan to the Authority along with the proposed annual budget.
- Blakeman’s fiscal management of the county does not seem to have made a very positive impression on the Authority. Here is part of the conclusion from the Authority’s most recent review of the county administration’s work:
- The Authority has “identified risks that may threaten the County’s long-term fiscal stability. We currently project growing deficits in the Out-Years for which the County has not supplied us with its proposed solutions. The projected Out-Year deficits, which could reach more than nine times the one percent threshold requiring a control period, could worsen if, among many reasons, future weakness in the local economy causes sales tax revenue to grow more slowly.”
Blakeman, like Stefanik, has wrapped himself in Trump and his legislation, so he will have to answer for that in a campaign. Blakeman will also have to explain why Nassau County’s finances are still a mess under his watch.
Things can happen quickly in politics but with every passing week the campaign for governor of New York in 2026 is coming into clearer focus. It’s heading for Blakeman versus Hochul.
Bluesky @kenkruly
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