With three weeks until the election, Hochul and Blakeman will face off in a lonesome debate over New York governor

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul and Republican challenger Bruce Blakeman will face off in their only debate Tuesday night, marking the only chance for voters to hear both on the same stage before heading to the polls.

The hour-long debate, moderated by political anchors Errol Louis and Susan Arbetter, will begin at 7 p.m. and will be broadcast on NY1 and other Spectrum News channels across the state, as well as on their YouTube pages.

The event takes place three weeks before the November 3 elections. It’s an opportunity for Hochul, the Democratic incumbent, to make her case for reelection directly to New Yorkers, as public polls show she has a comfortable — but far from insurmountable — lead.

For Blakeman, this is the Nassau County executive’s best opportunity to sell his competing vision for the state and try to create a viral moment that could provide a last-minute boost to his candidacy. This comes as his campaign faces a cash crunch that could make it difficult to keep its ads rotating in the final stretch before Election Day.

The debate comes as polls show most voters have already made up their minds.

A Marist University poll found Hochul with a 53-42 percent lead last week, with only 5 percent of voters saying they were undecided. Among those who support Hochul or Blakeman, only 2% said they would be willing to change their vote before Election Day.

“There aren’t a lot of convincing voters, and there aren’t a lot of undecided voters,” Marist pollster Lee Miringoff said. “But what (a debate) does is it gets to the heart of the motivator. So if you’re every candidate, you want to tell your voters, your base, how important this election is because electing the other party is just a recipe for disaster.”

The governor hopes to do better than in 2022, when she beat Republican Lee Zeldin by 5.5 percentage points. That relatively narrow margin in a deep blue state helped Republican candidates win a handful of key congressional seats in New York and take control of the House of Representatives.

Both Hochul and Blakeman leaned on the stars of their respective parties in hopes of increasing their supporters’ turnout this time around.

Hochul appeared at a Fishkill farm with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez last week, where they touted the governor’s one-year moratorium on the construction of new data centers — an issue on which the moderate governor and progressive lawmaker share common ground. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani also said he had offered to jump into Hochul’s election campaign in recent weeks.

Blakeman, by contrast, held a rally with President Donald Trump in Syracuse on Friday, a move intended to motivate the Republican base in much of upstate New York.

Both of these maneuvers could be considered risky.

Hochul’s campaign repeatedly reminded New York voters of Blakeman’s friendship with Trump, who had a job approval rating of just 39% in the Empire State in last week’s Marist poll. That includes blanketing the airwaves with ads showing Trump and Blakeman together, with the latter saying he will never be “disloyal” to the Republican president.

Blakeman has tried a similar tactic with Hochul and socialist politicians, including Ocasio-Cortez and New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, both of whom support the Democratic governor. He’s counting on the fact that suburban and upstate voters — many of whom are wary of socialism, according to polls — will be turned off by the combination.

“Governor Hochul, if she is well informed, will say the word Trump and Blakeman as if they were running mates,” Miringoff said. “And for Blakeman, it’s just the opposite. He needs to talk about AOC and Mamdani as the direction of Democratic politics in New York State and New York City.”

Both gubernatorial candidates, meanwhile, have tried to position themselves as champions of a more affordable New York, while pointing fingers at each other for driving up costs in the first place.

Blakeman centered his campaign on a promise to slash income taxes and utility rates, blaming Hochul for the escalating electric bills that have put a strain on New York voters.

Hochul, in turn, touted his administration’s efforts to increase child care subsidies and send energy rebate checks directly to New Yorkers, while criticizing Blakeman for his failure to fight Trump’s tariffs on international trade.

The 10-day early voting period begins October 24 statewide.