It’s far too early to know what the next Democratic administration might look like. But an early indicator may come from an unlikely source: Kathy Hochul.
It’s worth remembering the position the New York governor has been in the past few years. After becoming governor in 2021, she was immediately faced with some of the country’s worst spikes in post-COVID crime and disorder. Her first lieutenant governor resigned amid a corruption scandal, and her poor performance during a 2022 campaign for a full term helped Democrats lose four House seats in the Empire State — incidentally, the entire margin by which it lost the House majority. By the next year, it had become an open secret that her second lieutenant governor was angling to take her out. New York City’s mayor was indicted on corruption charges, throwing the state’s largest city into chaos, then struck a shocking deal to drop all counts in exchange for cooperating with the new Trump administration, which had come to power promising to lay siege to the state. Amid persistently low approval ratings, frustration from both moderates and progressives pinched her from both sides.
In retrospect, 2024 marked a turning point. That year, Hochul’s heavy investment in the state party played a central role in winning back three of the seats Democrats lost in 2022, entirely fueling the party’s overall net pickup of two seats. While that comeback was the product of a partywide effort — the 2022 losses were a particular embarrassment for Hakeem Jeffries, the New Yorker who was now leading the House caucus — her efforts were considered key. “She was instrumental,” one Democratic operative who worked in the 2024 races told me. That Trump made such inroads in the state (it swung more to him than any other) also cast Hochul’s 2022 margin in a slightly better light; that underperformance now appeared less an aberration and more an early marker of a party-wide challenge.
In the time since, she has, in one light, emerged as a success story of the second Trump term, navigating both the president and the rising socialist movement while watching her own approval ratings rise. But the final verdict may come in a few weeks.
Populism, slopulism, and moderation
Most interesting about Hochul’s comeback, if it indeed can be called that, is that it is not easy to pinpoint ideologically. Over the past two years, she’s signed a series of measures zig-zagging through the party’s internal battles.
Hochul delivered “Abundance” advocates one of their crowning achievements, spearheading a successful effort to rewrite New York’s environmental regulation earlier this year. She was out ahead of most other Democrats on the tech backlash, passing strict regulations on social media algorithms, making New York the biggest and bluest state to ban cellphone use in classrooms, and enacting the country’s first statewide data center moratorium in 2026. She signed measures to both increase police funding and curtail departments’ cooperation with ICE. She built an unexpectedly solid rapport with the president — to the point that, the New York Times reported in March, he privately said ICE would not be sent to the state “unless Kathy asks” — while defeating the administration in a major court battle over congestion pricing. All the while, Hochul embraced the kind of “slopulist” measures that have gained popularity in both parties, ending taxes on some tips and sending what she called “inflation rebate checks” to many households.
Many of those victories have been early markers of Democrats’ national movement. The fight over congestion pricing gave name to the “No Kings” movement, which became the first real proof of life for the liberal grassroots. The governor's steamrolling of environmental groups was considered remarkable back in the spring; now, Democrats in D.C. are on the brink of rolling the same groups in a major permitting reform deal. And while no one would characterize themselves as a Hochulcrat, Democrats in competitive races, including progressives, are almost universally running as pro-police and anti-data centers.
A detente with the left
Then, there are the socialists. Last year, Hochul provided Zohran Mamdani with a crucial endorsement during the Fall mayoral campaign, going where both of the state’s Democratic senators and even the state Democratic Party chairman refused to. Her alliance with Mamdani both defused a major challenge from her left — her second lieutenant governor, Antonio Delgado, dropped his primary challenge days after the mayor endorsed Hochul’s re-election — and heralded a decidedly different tone than other moderates. That may have been part necessity: New York is the epicenter of the modern democratic socialist movement, and DSA representation in the state legislature is projected to rise even more after this year’s primaries. But it was at least partly a product of Hochul’s choice to strike a different tone from other moderates, including Andrew Cuomo and Jeffries, who both actively leaned into conflict with the DSA. That positioning has earned if not admiration then a begrudging degree of respect, according to several people in the organized left I spoke to. “I would not say anyone likes her,” one office holder in New York who was elected with the support of DSA told me. “But she has not been the barrier to [Mamdani] we were afraid of.”
Her detente, of sorts, with the left could quickly take on new relevance in the next few weeks. A spate of new hard-left House members, including Melat Kiros, Adam Hamawy, Chris Rabb, Darializa Avila Chevalier, Claire Valdez, and Donavan McKinney, are set to be inaugurated in January — regardless of November’s results. Depending on the size of Democrats’ (presumed) majority, party leaders may soon be looking to Hochul’s record in New York as a model for navigating a newly empowered left flank.
Beyond November, one can see the makings of what may well characterize the next Democratic president’s tenure: a combination of populism, slopulism, centrism, and tech-skepticism, held together through an alliance between the party’s center and left factions.
The November question
Despite all the markings of a comeback, there remains one huge impediment to a full rehabilitation of Hochul’s image: the size of her victory in November.
Virtually no one doubts a Hochul win in a few weeks. Unlike four years ago, when some conservative pollsters found her trailing her Republican opponent, she’s led every survey this cycle, often by dominant margins. Still, a good deal rides on Hochul’s final margin, and polls in the last few weeks have varied notably on that question. Interestingly, the difference in her lead seems to track the difference in Trump’s approval rating. Two polls this month, from Marist and Emerson, that found Hochul leading by an underwhelming 12 and 11 points, also found the president’s approval rating underwater by only 22 — virtually identical to his national standing. By contrast, a September Quinnipiac survey placed Trump down by 37%, closer to what one would expect for a blue state in the current environment, and found the governor with a 19-point lead.
Where exactly Hochul lands will have an outsized impact on the narrative that gets written about her choices. Kyle Kondik, the Managing Editor of Sabato's Crystal Ball at the UVA Center for Politics, set the bar at her predecessor’s performance during the red wave of 2014.
“Cuomo's smallest win was about 14 points,” Kondik told me. “I'd think anything less than that would look fairly meager, and it would also be roughly around Harris's underwhelming 2024 victory.”
Worthy reads
ProPublica has a dive into the wild, warped world of still-unregulated online sports gambling.
In The Atlantic, Stephanie McCrummen writes a wrenching profile of the Springfield truck driver whose route became the avenue of suicide for a Haitian man whose residence in the U.S. was revoked.
In the Wall Street Journal, Damien Paletta analyzes the emerging “political horseshoe” in which both Republican and Democratic candidates are targeting corporate America.
Semafor’s Brendan Ruberry scoops how some major unions are evolving their approach as labor’s popularity rises.
The New Republic’s Monica Potts writes about the unusually high number of Democrats in high-profile races who come from blue-collar or union backgrounds.
And Politico’s Jonathan Martin has a sobering look at the donor incentive problem that could limit some Democratic gains this November.
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