Thursday, October 1, 2026
With Elise Stefanik, the six-term Republican member of the House of Representatives from upstate Schuylerville, deciding that she would not run for governor this year — and Lt. Gov. Antonio Delgado dropping out of the Democratic primary — the race became a two-way contest.
Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman, after a big re-election win in November, is now the presumptive Republican nominee. He was just sworn in to a second term as county executive, but has his eye on Albany. “I’m on a journey,” he said. “I don’t know where the path will end.”
Blakeman is a former presiding officer of the Nassau Legislature and Hempstead town councilman. He is a staunch supporter of President Trump, who has endorsed him for governor.
Hochul, who is seeking a second term, and Blakeman were both at a recent Long Island Association event, at which she criticized him for having Nassau County coordinate with Immigration and Customs Enforcement in federal immigration enforcement efforts. Hochul also denounced Blakeman’s launching a program for deputized, armed county civilians to function as a reserve force with a mission including working with local police in assisting ICE.
In the 2014 New York gubernatorial election, then Gov. Andrew Cuomo selected Hochul as his running mate, for lieutenant governor. She had been a member of the House of Representatives. The pair won, and were re-elected in 2018. Hochul ascended to governor in 2021 when Cuomo resigned amid allegations of sexual harassment.
Hochul, of Buffalo, who became the state’s first woman governor, chose Delgado, of upstate Rhinebeck, also a former House member, as her replacement lieutenant governor in 2022. They ran together that year, but their political relationship subsequently soured, and Delgado announced last year he would not run with Hochul in 2026 but instead take her on for the Democratic nomination for governor.
In an interview before he ended his campaign, he charged that Hochul had been “capitulating to Trump.” He faulted her, for example, for the state’s turnaround on a pipeline pushed by the Trump administration, previously rejected by the state, which would send fracked gas from Pennsylvania to New York.
Many of Delgado’s charges focused on environmental and energy issues. He said Hochul had not sufficiently implemented the state’s Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act of 2019, which aims to substantially reduce climate change-causing greenhouse gas emissions and emphasizes the use of green, renewable energy.
Delgado also differed with Hochul on nuclear power — a dominant issue in this area for decades, as the Long Island Lighting Company sought to build seven to 11 nuclear power plants, with the first constructed in Shoreham. Because of grassroots and governmental opposition, including from the administration of Governor Mario Cuomo, the Shoreham plant never went into commercial operation, and the multi-plant scheme failed.
Last year Hochul began calling for new nuclear power generation in New York and pushing for the state to become the center of a nuclear power revival in the U.S. In her recent State of the State address, she said: “Last summer I took the bold step of green-lighting the first nuclear power project in a generation … At the time we set a goal of building one gigawatt of nuclear power” — the power generation equivalent of one large nuclear power plant. “But if there’s one thing I believe, it’s this: Go big or go home. So I’ve decided to raise the bar to five gigawatts. That’s more nuclear energy then has been built anywhere in the United States in the last 30 years.”
Delgado said that nuclear power was a “distraction” from an emphasis on renewable energy led by solar and wind power. In terms of economics and rapid implementation in the face of climate change, he said, that was the sensible energy route.
Blakeman is also a supporter of nuclear power.
Karl Grossman has been an investigative reporter in a variety of media for more than 50 years. He is a professor of journalism at the State University of New York at Old Westbury.
