On Tuesday night, New York gubernatorial candidates incumbent Gov. Kathy Hochul and Bruce Blakeman will face off in a debate.
Times Union Capital Confidential newsletter author Dan Clark spoke to WAMC's Sam Dingman and Josh Landes on Northeast Notebook about the differences of each candidate.
INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT
Editor's note: this conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
Dingman: Obviously, a lot of polls have shown Kathy Hochul with a fairly comfortable lead. There's been some variance there, but there's still some stakes to this debate. What do you have your eye on at a high level?
Clark: For both candidates, it's about who's going to sell affordability the best to most voters. I mean, the governor is ahead by about 10 points in most polls that we've seen. In one poll, she was ahead by 19 points. But one thing that you'll know about Kathy Hochul is that she doesn't take anything for granted. So she's going to be coming to this debate ready to swing against Bruce Blakeman with all that she has in her now. Blakeman's job is to really show that he's the antidote to all these policies that he says have driven costs higher, that haven't helped anybody since Hochul's been in office since 2021, and frame her as somebody who doesn't have solutions essentially, and present his as the answer.
Landes: I want to lean into this because the last decade of American politics has been this era of bruising political combat at almost every level of the democracy. It's terrible. Things that were unsayable not that long ago are now quite sayable. So with that in mind, give us your analysis of the styles we're seeing from the last challenge against Hochul from Lee Zeldin to this election. What's different about the Republican effort in this year's? Certainly the waning popularity of Trump and the MAGA movement must be weighing over this. But also, how has Hochul changed her approach since last time?
Clark: Well, it's a very different situation. Last time it was 2022, so this was the Biden midterms. Biden was in office. Hochul was very closely aligned with Biden. So at that point, she won that election by about seven points, and a lot of people will say that the president probably had a pretty deep impact on that. At that point, President Biden wasn't the most popular president that we've had. This time around, it's a very different dynamic with Trump in office, and Hochul has that working for her at the polls, and especially with voters in New York, where Trump's favorability has never been high and likely never will be high. Same with his job approval. So Hochul's job now is to try to tie Bruce Blakeman to Donald Trump as much as possible, and that's what you're going to see at this debate tonight. You'll see the same thing on the other side from Bruce Blakeman trying to tie her to people like Zohran Mamdani, the mayor of New York City, AOC, of course, the famous representative from Queens. The rhetoric around it is very different than what we've seen at the national level. Bruce Blakeman is somebody who does not pull his punches necessarily, but you're not going to be seeing somebody who is presenting himself like Donald Trump. He mirrors those positions that he has, but maybe not his rhetoric around the entire race, if that makes sense. But you also have a candidate this time, Bruce Blakeman, who has differences between Lee Zeldin. A big one is that Bruce Blakeman is pro-choice. Kathy Hochul made that a big issue of the 2022 campaign, so she doesn't have that in her arsenal this time.
Dingman: What do you see Hochul doing this time around in terms of her campaign style? Maybe something you're looking for her to do a little differently in the debate that is distinct from the way she approached the campaign last time. This is her second time running for a full term.
Clark: Last time, she did not have her sea legs, and I think everybody knows that she was not an experienced executive. Her job now tonight is to show that she's been in office for five years now. She knows the job, and she can do it moving forward. Whether she's able to sell that and sell to voters that her accomplishments over that time have benefited them, that's the big question.
