Bruce Blakeman spent the last day of early voting on Sunday campaigning upstate and on the North Shore of Long Island, a final push before Tuesday's New York governor election. The Republican executive of Nassau County was trying to close a polling gap that had him trailing Kathy Hochul by 11 to 14 points.
That gap matters because the race was already deep into the final stretch. About 1.97 million New Yorkers had voted over the nine-day early voting period, including about 691,000 city residents, with turnout up 66 percent statewide and 60 percent in the city from four years ago.
Hochul was making her own closing argument on Sunday, too. She campaigned in Astoria, Queens, in a white Buffalo Bills bomber jacket, then visited diners on the Upper West Side and gay bars in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, as she sought a second full term as New York's first female governor. She appeared in Astoria with Zohran Mamdani and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Blakeman dismissed the polls showing him behind as “voter suppression” and called them “a gift to Kathy Hochul.” He also brushed off the state energy rebates of $100 to $200 as “peanuts” and “an election-year scam,” even as one voter at Murphy’s Sports Bar, Phil Sutherland, thanked Hochul “for the check.” The exchange captured the split in the campaign: a race defined less by persuasion than by whether the vote totals already tell the story.
Hochul has kept leaning on governing alliances and breadth of support, saying the contest is not about her political views dominating the conversation but about who she can work with to deliver results for New Yorkers. Even with ideological gaps inside Democratic ranks over taxes and Israel, the final-day turnout suggests the election is drawing a larger share of voters than it did four years ago. Tuesday will show whether Blakeman's late sprint on Long Island and upstate was enough to matter at all.
