Republican Bruce Blakeman has narrowed his deficit against Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul to nine points in New York's gubernatorial race, a gap that keeps shrinking in a state where Democrats outnumber Republicans more than two to one.
A Siena University poll conducted September 11, 17 among 1,144 likely voters found Hochul leading Blakeman 50 percent to 41 percent, with a margin of error of 3.9 points. That represents a tighter contest than the 10-point lead Hochul held in Siena's previous survey, when she led 49 percent to 39 percent. Six weeks before Election Day, the incumbent governor's position is far from comfortable, and Blakeman, the Nassau County executive, knows it.
The New York Post reported that Blakeman dismissed the Siena numbers outright, pointing to the pollster's track record in the 2022 governor's race as evidence the gap is smaller than it appears.
Blakeman told reporters:
"I think that latest poll is fugazi, right? I mean, they had Lee Zeldin down 17 points four years ago and he ended up almost winning."
He added: "So, if they're nine points off then I win by three-and-a-half points. I think they're accurate in their inaccuracy." That claim, that Siena had Zeldin down 17 points at a comparable stage, has not been independently verified, but Zeldin did lose the 2022 race by just six points after trailing badly in public polls for most of the cycle.
The regional breakdown in the Siena poll tells a more competitive story than the top-line number suggests. Blakeman leads Hochul 47 percent to 44 percent among upstate voters and trails by only two points, 48 to 46, in the downstate suburbs. Hochul's advantage is built almost entirely on New York City, where she leads 61 percent to 27 percent.
Blakeman also holds a five-point edge among independent voters, leading 44 percent to 39 percent, Fox News reported. He has consolidated Republican support at 88 percent, compared to Hochul's 81 percent hold on Democrats, a gap that gives the Republican candidate more room to compete in a state where the registration math heavily favors his opponent.
Siena pollster Steven Greenberg framed the results as a mixed bag:
"With six weeks until election day, voters offer good news to both Hochul and Blakeman. She now has the support of 50% of voters and saw her favorability and job approval ratings edge into positive territory. He now trails by single digits, well, nine points, in a state where Democrats outnumber Republicans by more than two-to-one."
Hochul's favorability sits at a dead split, 48 percent favorable, 48 percent unfavorable, and her job approval is nearly identical, with 48 percent approving and 47 percent disapproving. Those are not the numbers of a popular incumbent coasting to reelection. They are the numbers of a governor whose own voters are ambivalent.
Forty-nine percent of likely voters told Siena that New York is going in the wrong direction. Only 38 percent said the state is on the right track. Nationally, the mood is even darker: 66 percent of respondents said the country is heading the wrong way, with just 28 percent saying it is on track.
That wrong-direction sentiment is the kind of environment that historically punishes incumbents. Hochul has governed through rising costs, public-safety concerns, and an illegal immigration crisis that strained city and state resources. Voters gave her only narrow edges on the issues that matter most: 49 percent said she would do better on affordability versus 40 percent for Blakeman, 49 to 43 percent on public safety, and 47 to 43 percent on addressing illegal immigrants.
Those margins are thin for a Democrat running in one of the bluest states in the country. A Republican pulling 43 percent on safety and immigration in New York signals real dissatisfaction with the status quo.
Blakeman's vulnerability, meanwhile, is simple: name recognition. Nearly one-third of voters told Siena they either do not know who he is or have no opinion of him. His favorability sits at 35 percent favorable, 34 percent unfavorable, numbers that reflect a candidate still introducing himself to the electorate with six weeks left.
Not every survey agrees on how close the contest is. A Quinnipiac University poll released the same week showed Hochul with a far larger lead, 58 percent to 39 percent, a 19-point margin. That gap is more than double what Siena found.
On the other side, polls commissioned by pro-Blakeman groups show a much tighter race. The "Strong and Safe" Super PAC released a survey last month putting Blakeman down just four points, 47 to 43. Blakeman's own campaign poll, released earlier this month, showed him trailing 50 to 46, also a four-point gap. And a poll conducted by the firm co/efficient for the right-leaning "Coalition to Protect Nassau Taxpayers" had Hochul up six points, 47 to 41.
The spread between Quinnipiac's 19-point Hochul lead and the campaign-aligned four-point deficit is enormous. It reflects different methodologies, different samples, and different assumptions about who will actually show up in November. Blakeman is betting that the independent polls are overstating Hochul's strength, just as he argues they did with Zeldin four years ago.
Blakeman put it bluntly:
"All polls continue to show Kathy Hochul's downward spiral and me closing the gap as New Yorkers learn more about my plan to cut income taxes by historic margins and slash electric bills in half."
President Trump has endorsed Blakeman, and Hochul is spending millions of dollars on television ads designed to tie the Republican to the president. The strategy has some basis in the polling: roughly half of likely voters told Siena that Trump's endorsement is a negative for Blakeman's campaign. Among Democrats, 69 percent called it a negative. Among independents, the voters Blakeman needs most, 49 percent said the same.
Even 24 percent of Republicans said the Trump endorsement hurts Blakeman. In a blue state where Trump lost by double digits, the endorsement gives Hochul an obvious line of attack.
But Hochul carries her own political baggage. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, a self-described democratic socialist, has endorsed the governor. Blakeman and the GOP are running ads arguing that Hochul is beholden to Mamdani's agenda. Half of voters told Siena that Mamdani's endorsement is a positive for Hochul, but only 40 percent of independents agreed, and just 22 percent of Republicans said the same.
The Mamdani connection gives Republicans a mirror-image weapon. If Hochul can frame the race as a referendum on Trump, Blakeman can frame it as a referendum on the progressive governance that has driven New Yorkers' wrong-direction sentiment to 49 percent.
New York Democrats have also filed a formal ethics complaint alleging that Blakeman improperly used taxpayer-funded facilities, the Nassau County David Mack Center for Training and Intelligence, a police academy, to host a partisan rally with Trump. State Democratic Chairman Jay Jacobs argued the event functioned as a GOP campaign platform and potentially constituted an illegal in-kind campaign contribution. A similar 2024 Trump rally at the same facility cost Nassau County more than $1 million in security costs.
Blakeman dismissed the complaint, saying Hochul was simply criticizing the president "for coming to tour our outstanding law enforcement facilities and honor law enforcement professionals."
The governor's struggles are not new. A May 2025 Siena poll found that only 36 percent of New York voters supported Hochul's reelection, a 10-point drop from the previous month, the Washington Free Beacon reported. Fifty-five percent of voters preferred a different candidate, including 38 percent of Democrats and 64 percent of independents.
Those numbers from more than a year before Election Day signaled that Hochul was vulnerable long before Blakeman became the nominee. A governor whom a majority of her own party's voters were willing to replace faced a structural problem that no amount of ad spending could fully repair.
Two-thirds of voters in the current Siena poll still expect Hochul to win, including 37 percent of Republicans. But expectations and enthusiasm are different things. Hochul is the favorite. She is not the popular choice.
When half the state says things are heading the wrong way and the incumbent's own approval barely cracks 48 percent, a nine-point lead is a cushion, not a mandate. Blakeman has six weeks to make the case that New Yorkers deserve a change. Hochul has six weeks to explain why the direction voters dislike is somehow still the right one.
