What's Blakeman's next move? He has options.

A week ago, Republican Bruce Blakeman said he was looking to become governor of New York, even telling reporters after he cast his own Election Day ballot he believed he would win by a 4% margin.

But he drowned in a major blue wave, losing to Democrat Kathy Hochul by 20 percentage points statewide, even failing to deliver Nassau, his home county, where he is still the top elected official. This week, when asked what he has planned next, Blakeman, 71, of Atlantic Beach, firmly declared he's staying put. 

"My sole concentration is to continue to be the best county executive I can be," Blakeman told Newsday Monday in a statement.

What comes next in his career depends on several factors, experts and party insiders said, including what Blakeman wishes to do with his time, whether he entertains other job offers and the local political climate in 2028, when his term as county executive is up.

"There's a lot of moving parts to the question of what becomes of Bruce Blakeman," said Lawrence Levy, executive dean of the National Center for Suburban Studies at Hofstra University. "He first needs to figure out what he wants to do — personally, professionally, what he would like to do governmentally, how he would like to be remembered in terms of legacy." 

Levy and others said he might find he has less leverage and fewer options than he did a week ago after such a bruising loss, "when there may be people in his own party who are disappointed by his performance and might hold him responsible for some of the seats they lost." 

According to a Newsday analysis of county elections board data, Blakeman failed to deliver votes in some of the most reliably Republican areas of Long Island in last week's election compared with Lee Zeldin, of Suffolk, the last Republican to challenge Hochul, in 2022.

Zeldin, a former congressman whom President Donald Trump appointed in 2024 to lead the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, lost to Hochul by 6 points. 

Michael Dawidziak, a political consultant who mostly works for Republican campaigns, said the "poor showing this year would not forbid Blakeman from running again," particularly in Nassau County, where independent swing voters have a significant impact from year to year. 

"This was a blue tsunami. You don't make decisions based on blue tsunamis if you're a Republican. Two years is a long time in politics," Dawidziak said, noting examples of midterm elections that did not ensure the winning party's success two years later.

Dawidziak pointed out that when Democrat Bill Clinton was president, Republicans took control of Congress in 1994. Then, just two years later, Clinton came back and won big in 1996. Same for Barack Obama, also a Democratic president, who lost control of Congress in 2010 only to get reelected two years later in 2012, along with fellow Democrats.

"Blakeman had been very loyal to Trump," Dawidziak said. "And whether that opens the door to something like an ambassadorship or a White House job is way beyond our ability to know." 

While there's been no indication Blakeman would get a Trump appointment, it has for more than a year been something political insiders have talked about. Zeldin, after all, was successfully elevated into a Cabinet-level position.

Over the last week, Blakeman has kept a low public profile as county executive, and his social media activity has dropped from its campaign highs, with exceptions.

The morning after the election, he thanked New York voters, and late last week he weighed into an intraparty fight, calling Trump's initial gubernatorial candidate pick, upstate Rep. Elise Stefanik, "a selfish, do nothing politician." On Tuesday, from his official Nassau County executive account, Blakeman displayed his continued loyalty to the president when he took to the social media platform X to denounce a new impeachment effort to remove Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

Blakeman's predecessors have parlayed their experience into other jobs. Former Nassau County Executive Laura Curran and Suffolk County Executive Steve Levy went into media roles, offering political punditry. Former Suffolk County Executive Steve Bellone, an experienced attorney like Blakeman, landed a top spot at Northwell Health. Former Nassau County Executive Thomas Gulotta launched a successful consulting firm. 

And then there's the example of recently reelected Rep. Tom Suozzi (D-Glen Cove), who managed to get back into politics after losing his 2009 reelection bid as Nassau County executive, experts noted.   

Legis. Delia DeRiggi-Whitton, the leader of the Democratic minority caucus in the county legislature and a critic of Blakeman, however, said as county executive he now needs to tend to the Nassau residents he was elected to serve.

The county's property tax assessment system still needs to be addressed, she said, as do roads and critical county infrastructure. Understaffing in the Department of Social Services and the use of reserve funds to plug annual deficits also remain a huge concern, she said. The county's $4.6 billion operating budget for 2027 is still pending the approval of the state-appointed fiscal watchdog, the Nassau County Interim Finance Authority.

"For the past year, Bruce Blakeman has been completely missing in action. He's been all over the state campaigning," DeRiggi-Whitton said. "In my opinion, his heart has always been to use this position as a steppingstone to either run for governor, which he just did, or to get a job with the president." 

But Nassau County Republican Committee chairman Joseph Cairo said he believes Blakeman has "done a great job" as county executive and will continue doing that job.

"We haven't sat down and talked about it, but my understanding based on past conversations is that he will serve out the remainder of this term and he will run for reelection again," Cairo said. 

By Candice Ferrette

candice.ferrette@newsday.comcandiceferrette

Candice Ferrette covers Nassau County government and politics on Long Island. She has been a reporter at Newsday since 2011.