Gov. Kathy Hochul took a jaunt to her GOP gubernatorial challenger Bruce Blakeman’s Long Island home turf Monday — swiping back at his attacks as a bombshell new poll showed the race tightening.
During back-to-back appearances in Nassau and Suffolk counties, Hochul cast a Blakeman campaign mailer that blamed her and socialist New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani for “sky high taxes, rising utility bills and out of control crime” as pure fantasy.
“That’s interesting — because it’s not based on fact,” she claimed, as she announced a new $100 million grant package for law enforcement tech in Freeport.
The Democratic governor instead blamed Blakeman’s fellow Republicans in Washington, DC, for driving up costs by backing President Trump’s war in Iran and tariffs.
She also said the Trump administration’s recent move to block federal disaster funds for New York’s response to devastating blizzards during February was “political.”
“They think it’s hurting me, but it’s backfiring,” Hochul insisted.
But a recent poll shows Blakeman, the Nassau County executive, trailing Hochul by just 6 points in the governor’s race.
Hochul leads 47% to 41% among likely general election voters with 12% undecided, according to the new survey conducted by the firm co/efficient for the right-leaning Coalition to Protect Nassau Taxpayers.
The firm accurately predicted in 2022 that the race between Hochul and then-Long Island Republican Rep. Lee Zeldin would be closer than public polling had anticipated.
She ended up winning by 6 percentage posts — the same spread that co/efficient had between the candidates in its September 2022 polling.
The new poll’s findings clash with other public surveys showing Hochul is up by a comfortable double-digit margin or as much as 20 points.
But it also hinted that Blakeman could capitalize — if he’s not already — on voters’ worries about rising socialism.
The survey found that 55% of voters were very concerned or concerned about socialism, while 45% were not concerned.
But Hochul tried to cast herself as a big-tent pragmatist willing to work with everyone across the political spectrum, from Trump on the right to Mamdani on the left.
“We are not becoming a socialist state because of an election of a number of individuals in New York City,” Hochul insisted during an interview on 103.9 Long Island News Radio Monday morning, ahead of her visit there.
“My job is continue to work with whomever the voters want me to work with,” she told host Jay Oliver — apparently in reference to Mamdani and the wave of his fellow Democratic Socialists of American candidates who just swept in last month’s primaries.
Hochul finished her Long Island adventure in Suffolk County, where she signed legislation allowing the MTA to buy the former Lawrence Aviation site. The move will help protect the Setauket-Port Jefferson Station Greenway Trail.
“You can stage all the photo ops you want, Kathy. New Yorkers know you created this mess — and I actually made our neighborhoods safer,” Blakeman snipped in a statement.
His campaign spokesperson, Madison Spanodemos, added about the mailer: ““Every New Yorker needs to know that the Hochul-Mamdani team is the reason their taxes and utility bills are soaring, while Bruce Blakeman has the plan to slash income taxes and cut utility bills in half.”
Hochul’s own popularity isn’t helping her re-election campaign, as the poll found only 32% of likely voters have a favorable view of her.
“Hochul is deeply disliked across the state,” said co/efficient pollster Ryan Munce.
