This week, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul marked her fifth year in office. She assumed the role five years ago while serving as Lt. Gov. to former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who resigned under pressure.
As the Democrat runs for a second full term, WAMC's Lucas Willard spoke with Times Union reporter and Capitol Confidential author Dan Clark about how Hochul has carved her own political path.
INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT
Editor's note: This conversation has been lightly edited for clarity.
Clark: Her tenure has been so different from how Cuomo was. If you speak to her privately, she'll talk to you about that. She'll talk about how she wanted to be seen as somebody who is more of a collaborator. Whereas Cuomo was really somebody who liked to strong-arm and lead from the top-down. She saw it as, 'let's spread the power, spread it out among people.'
Willard: There's a very noticeable way when you think of those COVID-era Andrew Cuomo press conferences when you had the governor and his team sitting at the table six feet apart.
Fast forward to Gov. Hochul's conversations today. There was one this morning about the new state law that bans 287g agreements, and she's flanked with local police chiefs.
She's not surrounded by members of the cabinet. She's surrounding herself with stakeholders that she brings on, whether it be a data center moratorium roundtable or something related to federal immigration. This definitely seems to be a part of her style.
Clark: She's never needed to be that person who had a dais of her cabinet officials with her. That kind of image really is meant to project 'I am the leader here, you are my employees.'
Whereas Gov. Hochul has led in a very detached way from her agency heads, the DEC, for example. You never see her appear with the commissioner of the DEC because she trusts that Amanda Lefton, the commissioner, is doing what she wants her to do.
You would see during Cuomo's administration all the time that he would have press conferences, press events with Basil Seggos, his DEC commissioner at the time. That's just one example though. You see all across state government and different agencies, different entities, that she has really delegated this power to the people who's she's chosen to lead them. That's the whole point of having these officials in place and being able to choose them.
Willard: How about the governor's relationships with the legislature? She often touts her past as a Hamburg town official. She talks about sometimes, her time in Washington. She touts her legislative experience. But as we know, there's been a lot of late budgets. There's been a lot of fights over policy in her annual state budget proposals.
How has her relationship with the state legislature evolved over the last five years?
Clark: She has learned the buttons that she should press and the buttons that she should not press in terms of the state legislature.
In her first couple of years, the state budget was late because of policy disagreements, and she didn't want that. She will openly tell you that she didn't want the budget to be late. In some sense, it was because she wasn't experienced with that process. Cuomo never brought her into budget negotiations. During the first couple of times, I don't think that she knew step-by-step how it was going to pan out.
After the second budget, she started to realize that if she kept the budget late, it had literally no impact on her personally or her politics. She's been using that for the past couple of years to have a late state budget and keep those negotiations going as long as she wants to, as long as she gets most of what she wants in terms of policy in that budget. It's been a remarkably effective strategy.
Just in this year' state budget in 2026 — it didn't pass until the end of May. That is a really late state budget. It was the latest state budget since 2010.
Hochul held it out because she wanted a permitting reform for environmental projects and for housing projects. She really wanted these changes intended to lower the cost of auto insurance. Lawmakers did not want those things in January when she announced them, but she held out when they came around.
Willard: Republican lawmakers at the New York State Capitol in Albany are in the minority, but they're not the only ones who have been critical of this approach with leading with policy in the state budget.
Republicans in particular have made the argument that the governor is using the legislation in the budget to make political statements, whether it's about gun safety, banning ghost guns, immigration and customs enforcement, and refusing local agreements between state agencies, local agencies, and the federal government.
The governor has tuned her legislation into the political moment. Does that open her up for political attacks? I mean, she's running for governor again right now. Has that been effective for her in crafting her message and delivering not only legislation for New York, but also making a case for the Democratic Party?
Clark: I think it opens her up to a lot of attacks on all sides of issues. You saw it in June with the primaries across the state for congress and state legislature, where there were socialist candidates and progressive candidates battling with incumbents and moderates. In a lot of those cases, the progressives went out in those races.
Now Kathy Hochul can come along and say, 'I'm a progressive,' when she's really more of a moderate, but some of her policies that she pushes, like universal child care that she cares about so deeply really align her with progressives.
Maybe it's not the same exact way that they would want to do it as Hochul has plotted out. But she tries to find these silos, I would say, of issues that everybody can get behind.
Everybody wants to feel safe, right? Everybody wants to have an affordable way of life in New York. If she can push those issues in a way that both accomplishes what she wants politically in terms of making people safe, doing things that would lower crime rates or lower costs while also trying to satisfy progressives, that's the sweet spot that she's trying to hit.
For example, this year, in the state budget, she enacted a pied-à-terre tax for New York City — a tax on luxury second-homes in New York City.
She very much opposes raising income taxes on high-income earners and wealthy individuals. So, that was her way of saying, 'I hear what you're saying. I'm not going to do the thing that you want me to do, but I'll at least give you this.'
And as we've seen, as New York City's rolled out that tax, it's hit a little bit of a bump here and there, but it's still something that both Mayor Mamdani down in New York City and Hochul can align on. That's saying something because they don't align on much when it comes to policy.
Willard: Tell me about the governor keeping an open dialogue with President Trump. The governor has not been shy about saying when she's had conversations with the president or the president's team. There have been a lot of conversations, whether it's around the MTA or gas pipelines going through downstate areas, wind turbines and offshore wind.
There's a whole host of topics where she's had to negotiate with the White House, and she hasn't refused the dialogue.
Clark: You wouldn't think that they have a respectful relationship given how they speak about each other in public appearances or on social media. There's a lot of back and forth on X between members of the Trump administration and the governor's press office. It doesn't look like a productive relationship publicly. Privately, when they do speak, what I'm told is that they do have a a good cadence. They seem to understand where each other is coming from.
I think the governor knows that she's not going to be able to convince President Trump to change any of his grounded political beliefs. But if she can say something like, 'Hey, help me get infrastructure funded here in New York State,' — that's something that politics really isn't part of. That's how she tries to leverage her her presence here in New York with something of a common interest that they can both share, especially him being somebody who lived in New York for so long, he understands the unique issues that are faced here.
When you look at other issues like immigration, they're they're gonna butt heads. There's not a huge role for the state to play there in terms of federal immigration policy. But what she can say is, 'I'm going to enact these policies on the state level. I disagree with you, and I will see you in court.' And that's where it ends. I think the president respects that to some extent too, of her being able to publicly oppose him on something, but at the end of the day, a lot of this is gonna play out out of both of their hands.
Willard: Hochul is running for reelection and there seemed to be some fretting four years ago when Lee Zeldin came closer than Republicans may have in recent years to thwarting a Democratic governor. Did Hochul learn anything from that first campaign for governor that she seems to be applying the race against Bruce Blakeman?
Clark: For sure. 2022 was a very unique situation as it is, because you had Kathy Hochul, who, as we mentioned, nobody really knew at the time, versus Lee Zeldin, and people were already hungry for there to be some sort of change at the top in New York State.
It wasn't a huge surprise that the election came out to be so close. That same year, New York lost three-to-four seats in Congress from Democrats to Republicans as well.
That was a real shift for Kathy Hochul. And what she did immediately after the 2022 election was start to build up the state Democratic Party. She started to aggressively fundraise for the party itself.
In 2024, they launched a Coordinated Campaign. They ended up winning back those seats that they lost in 2022.
Not only has she tried to learn from that in terms of what she is as the de facto head of the state Democratic Party, you now see her as a more aggressive candidate running for re-election too. It helps that now she has four years of policies that she says that she can run on to defeat Bruce Blakeman. His argument is that the past four years of policies aren't what New Yorkers asked for. It'll be really interesting to see if it turns out to be that close again this November, or if what she's actually done made a difference with voters, and if she comes out further ahead than she did with Zeldin.
