Blakeman says unions will back Republicans this year

Republican gubernatorial nominee Bruce Blakeman has a plan for the GOP to win back the governor’s mansion: organized labor.

“The Republican party is going to get unprecedented support from union workers because they share our values and not the values of Kathy Hochul and Mamdani the Commie,” the Nassau County executive said in his speech at the New York Republican State Committee’s annual gala Tuesday night at The Plaza in Manhattan.

Blakeman pointed to a number of recent strikes – including last year’s wildcat strike of corrections officers, the nurses’ strike earlier this year and the recent Long Island Rail Road strike – to suggest that unionized workers were unhappy with the governor.

“We just had a little strike here on Long Island, on the Long Island Rail Road. Think about it. The first strike by (those) railroad workers in 30 years,” he said. “Republicans (and) Democrats never had the problems Kathy Hochul had with labor. Corrections officers (were) fired because they brought to the attention of the governor the unsafe conditions, that prisoners are running our prisons. She fired them when they went on strike. I will hire them all back! Governor Hochul wanted out-of-state nurses to break the picket lines of our nurses.”

Despite Blakeman’s hopes, it’s unlikely that the very progressive New York State Nurses Association will endorse him just because they’re frustrated with Hochul. The more conservative corrections unions and LIRR unions very well could, but the idea that members of labor unions would line up behind a Republican candidate over the Democratic incumbent is almost certainly a fantasy.

So far, Blakeman has garnered little labor support besides police unions. Hochul has had a sometimes rocky relationship with organized labor, but she has largely made up with the traditionally Democratic constituency. She does not have unanimous labor support – “she is not a trade-union supporting Governor, she is the Bosses’ Governor,” outspoken Transport Workers Union International President John Samuelsen told the New York Post in February – but her campaign told City & State she’s already been endorsed for reelection by more than several unions, including heavy hitters like 32BJ SEIU, District Council 37, the Hotel and Gaming Trades Council, the Civil Service Employees Association and the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union. 

Blakeman’s pro-labor posturing is somewhat at odds with his appeals to the anti-union Conservative Party – he shouted out Conservative Party Chair Gerard Kassar from the stage – and felt out of place with the rest of the gala, whose main theme seemed to be “New York should become Florida.”

Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, Republicans have contrasted the increasingly conservative Florida with Democrat-controlled New York. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis was the guest of honor at the NYGOP gala, and the event featured plenty of cracks about New Yorkers escaping to “the Free State of Florida” to escape leftist policies.

“When I got the invitation, I was excited to come because, quite frankly, I've got a lot of people in my state that have a lot of roots here,” DeSantis said in his keynote speech. “How can I turn down an opportunity to address some of my future residents? … Honestly, I should go, in some respects, to the New York Democrat convention, just to thank them for their failures, and how that's driven business and opportunity in my state.”

DeSantis later suggested that Florida could serve as not just a foil to New York, but a model for the state’s Republican minority. He said that when he was first elected in 2018 with a slim 35,000-vote margin, Florida was a swing state – “every major race for the previous decade was decided by 1 percentage point or less” – and Democrats had a registration advantage of close to 300,000 voters. In the years since, Florida has turned bright red and registered Republicans now outnumber registered Democrats by 1.5 million.

Blakeman and state GOP Chair Ed Cox told the crowd they were confident they will be able to beat Hochul this year, after former Rep. Lee Zeldin came within 7 points of unseating her four years ago. At one point, DeSantis joked that he wished he could have given Zeldin some of the votes he received from ex-New Yorkers who had moved to Florida over the past decade, which could have given him a winning margin.

In addition to DeSantis and Blakeman, the event also featured speeches from Republican attorney general candidate Saritha Komatireddy, state comptroller candidate Joseph Hernandez and congressional candidate Mike LiPetri, who is challenging Democratic Rep. Tom Suozzi on Long Island.

The crowd included numerous other Republican congressional and state legislative candidates – as well as ex-Gov. David Paterson, a longtime Democrat who has increasingly been cozying up to the right. Paterson left the event early, but a person seated at his table later told City & State that the former governor has been a frequent presence at GOP events in recent years.