Republican candidate for governor Bruce Blakeman speaks during the New York State Conservative Party convention on Feb. 2 at the Hilton in Albany. The state’s Public Campaign Finance Board has denied Blakeman matching funds.
Will Waldron/Times Union
Let’s call Tuesday an up-and-down day for Bruce Blakeman, the Republican running for governor. He received some good news and some not-so-good news.
I’ll start with the newly released poll from the Siena Research Institute in lovely Loudonville. Its survey of 804 registered voters found that Blakeman is losing to Gov. Kathy Hochul by 13 percentage points.
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Now, it may surprise you to learn that I’m classifying that poll result as good news, given that it suggests Blakeman would get smoked if the election were held today. But a 13-point gap is better than a 20-point gap, which is what Siena found when it last sampled voters in February.
The margin appears to be shrinking, and it might be significantly tighter when Siena narrows the survey pool from registered voters to likely ones. Notably, the poll found that 64 percent of respondents said they didn’t know enough about Blakeman to have an opinion of him, meaning the Nassau County executive still has room to convince New Yorkers that he should be their choice.
But that brings me to the bad news, which came in the form of a grossly partisan vote by the state’s Public Campaign Finance Board. Its four Democratic members, a majority, denied up to $7 million in campaign matching funds to Blakeman based on a rule change that, as the Times Union’s Timothy Fanning reports, staffers failed to communicate to campaigns.
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Recent changes to the law treat candidates for governor and lieutenant governor as a joint candidacy, and the application to participate in the matching program was supposed to reflect that. But that detail was news to just about everyone involved.
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And so, Blakeman and five other gubernatorial candidates were denied public funding on a deviously imposed technicality.
Well, it just so happens that the Democrat isn’t participating in the public financing program, even though she signed it into law. Hochul doesn’t need to, you see, because she has raised massive amounts of money from the deep-pocketed donors who pull the strings in Albany.
Here’s a reminder that public financing was pushed, mostly by Democrats, as a way to boost the competitiveness of elections while reducing the influence of big-money donors. Yet here are Democrats using underhanded tactics to weaken the competition faced by the big-money incumbent.
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Words like “ironic” don’t do justice to this bare-knuckled nastiness. The vote reeks, and it validates the skeptics who warned that public campaign financing would inevitably be abused to rig the system for incumbents. That’s exactly what happened. In Albany, that’s what always happens.
As a result, Hochul heads into the campaign with a $20 million advantage, while Blakeman may struggle to publicize his campaign.
Democrats didn’t need to do this. Blakeman is a significant underdog regardless of whether he accesses public matching funds. Democrats could have done the right thing without worrying much about the gubernatorial election. They could have looked, dare I say, magnanimous.
Instead, they look petty enough to amplify all of Blakeman’s criticisms about how New York is run and the dangers of one-party rule. They risk putting wind in Blakeman’s sails.
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I’m reminded of how Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg resuscitated Donald Trump’s presidential prospects. Early in 2023, Trump looked dead in the water, only to experience a polling surge when Bragg indicted the Republican for making payments to Stormy Daniels. It was a gift to Trump, regardless of the subsequent verdict.
I’m not suggesting Blakeman will experience a similar boost. But the vote by the Public Campaign Finance Board, with a chair appointed by the governor herself, allows the Republican to argue that he’s the victim of an injustice, that Hochul and the Democrats are afraid of a fair fight, that they’ve rigged the system against him.
Blakeman’s campaign has struggled to inspire the Republican base, particularly upstate. Well, nothing motivates partisan voters quite like believing that the other party is cheating them.
“I’ve never seen a situation where we are potentially using the raw power of this particular board to disenfranchise a candidate and its voters,” said Peter Kosinski, a Republican and one of the board’s longest-tenured members.
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And nobody has seen a situation in which laissez-faire New York election officials are so interested in enforcing the rules. The about-face is remarkable. Suddenly, they’re sticklers.
The vote was wrong. Undemocratic. Cynical. It was politics at its worst. But I suppose it was naive to expect anything better.