Democrats have run the New York state assembly since 1975, every statewide executive office since 2007, a majority of the state’s highest court since 2015, and the state senate since 2019. New Yorkers have a great many reasons to be dissatisfied with how their state has been governed under one-party Democratic rule. Governor Kathy Hochul, who took over from Andrew Cuomo in August 2021, has done nothing to deserve their votes in her bid for reelection. Judging by the fact that her campaign is almost entirely negative and avoids discussion of her record, we suspect that she knows this.
To start with, the perennial ethical morass in Albany has only gotten worse as the Democrats have consolidated their power. “Resigned in disgrace” has become such a common ending for careers in state politics that one could be forgiven for thinking that disgrace was actually a suburb of the capital. Two of Hochul’s three predecessors (Cuomo and Eliot Spitzer) had to step down mid-term, and Spitzer’s successor, David Paterson, abandoned his bid for an elected term and paid a $62,000 ethics fine to avoid prosecution for perjury. State attorney general Eric Schneiderman preceded Cuomo in resigning in 2018 due to his abuse of women. State comptroller Alan Hevesi quit a month after his 2006 reelection and went to prison. So did Sheldon Silver, who was speaker of the state assembly for 21 years until he was arrested in 2015. The state’s corruption problem is bipartisan: State senate majority leader Joe Bruno, a Republican nearly as long-tenured as Silver, also went to prison, as did his next three successors, Democrat Malcolm Smith, Republican Dean Skelos, and party-straddling dissident Democrat Pedro Espada. But New York’s Democrats have by far the larger share of misdeeds, a full list of which would defy all constraints of space in this editorial.
As the Empire State’s first female governor, its first governor in a century from north or west of Newburgh, and a member of no family dynasty, Hochul entered office to a chorus of relief. As a Buffalo politician, she had opposed drivers’ licenses for illegal immigrants and been endorsed for Congress by the NRA. But her tenure has been characterized neither by ethical nor by moderate governance. Her first big appointment, lieutenant governor Brian Benjamin, lasted only eight months before resigning due to a federal indictment for a pay-to-play bribery scheme.
Hochul herself is under fire for directing $637 million in a no-bid contract to buy Covid tests at inflated prices from a company that had just hosted a Hochul fundraiser. It’s one of several shady deals for cronies that have emerged in Hochul’s 14 months in office. Most conspicuously, she pushed through a billion dollars in taxpayer funds for a wasteful subsidy of a new Buffalo Bills stadium, the second-largest government contribution to a sports stadium in American history. Hochul’s husband just happens to be the general counsel and senior vice president of the company that has the Bills’ current stadium concession contract. Conservatives aren’t the only ones horrified: Ralph Nader called the deal a “giveaway,” and a column in the Nation blasted it as a “boondoggle.”
The central issue in Republican Lee Zeldin’s campaign against Hochul is the 2019 bail-reform law that sharply reduced the power of courts to hold people charged with crimes pending trial, even though data show that a vast proportion of felony defendants have prior convictions or other pending cases. The law instantly set loose thousands of criminals. In the two and a half months after the law went into effect in January 2020 — before the pandemic — car thefts rose 68 percent in New York City, burglary 26 percent, and grand larceny 16 percent. More recent data analyzed by Charles Fain Lehman of the Manhattan Institute demonstrate that “bail reform was followed by a significant increase in criminal reoffending.”
The surge in crime and backlash against the new law led to a red wave on Long Island in 2021, in which Republicans won every single executive office on the ballot and flipped the Suffolk County legislature. New York City’s Democratic mayor, Eric Adams, has blasted the law, calling it “insane.” He continued: “It is dangerous. It’s harmful. And it’s destroying the fabric of our city . . . As a result of this insane, broken system, our recidivism rates have skyrocketed.” Yet Hochul has doubled down, declaring that she — along with the Democratic leaders of the assembly and the state senate — was still foursquare behind bail reform. Only weeks into her tenure, she ordered hundreds of detainees released from Rikers Island. Meanwhile, she has proposed letting transgender inmates choose which prisons to be housed in.
Crime, the pandemic, and the state’s grim business climate have helped drive the relentless exodus of New Yorkers out of the state, which is why it now trails Florida in population and has lost seats in Congress in every census since the Second World War. The state’s unemployment rate increased from 4.3 percent to 4.7 percent in August (it’s 6.6 percent in New York City), while food prices are up nearly 10 percent from a year ago. A recent report from the New York City comptroller finds that the city has the nation’s fastest-rising rents, up 10 percent in just six months, while the city has seen a 31.6 percent increase in its homeless-shelter population, which is projected to soon exceed its record high. Meanwhile, the state department of health warns of an “alarming increase” in opioid overdoses in Central New York, driven heavily by fentanyl abuse.
Hochul, however, is focused on increasing the state’s number of legal marijuana businesses, at a time when Manhattan streets already reek of pot smoke and the state lacks a reliable test for marijuana-addled drivers. While we have no quarrel with the governor’s preference for legalization, her priorities leave much to be desired. It’s telling that they don’t include support for ending New York’s prohibition on fracking, an industry that could bring jobs to a part of the state that needs them. Meanwhile, following California’s lead, rarely a good idea, she is implementing a ban on the sale of new internal-combustion-engine cars from 2035, a move that promises expense and inconvenience, but will have no effect on the climate.
Then, there’s the climate of intolerance fostered by Hochul, building upon the works of Cuomo. In August, she told a campaign rally that conservatives should “just jump on a bus and head down to Florida where you belong, okay? Get out of town. Because you do not represent our values. You are not New Yorkers.”
After a racially motivated massacre at a Buffalo supermarket, Hochul rushed to demand that social-media platforms be investigated for allowing “hate speech” and ordered the creation of a new state task force to surveil speech online — moves that at best push the envelope of government power to regulate speech.
Hochul has thumbed her nose at the Second Amendment, calling the legislature into special session to pass restrictive new gun laws immediately after the Supreme Court struck down New York’s unconstitutional restrictions on concealed carry. A federal judge recently blocked much of that new law as well, finding it an unconstitutional limit on the rights of New Yorkers.
When a Buffalo crisis pregnancy center was firebombed, Hochul snubbed an invitation to its reopening, while focusing on signing a bill to sic investigators on such centers and funneling $10 million of taxpayer dollars to for-profit abortion clinics.
Individual liberty has never counted much to Hochul, unless it involved sex or abortions. Her Covid policies have been notably overzealous, reflecting a woman who wears a “vaxxed” necklace and told a Brooklyn church that she needed them as “apostles” because as vaccinated people, “You’re the smart ones, but you know, there are people out there who aren’t listening to God and what God wants. You know this. You know who they are.” In Brooklyn, “who they are” is thinly veiled code for the borough’s Orthodox and Hasidic Jews, although we suspect that Hochul also intended to insult non-Jews.
Putting these biases into practice, Hochul fought all the way to the Supreme Court for the right to strip religious exemptions from the state’s vaccine mandates. Hochul also fought a rearguard action in the courts to keep indoor mask mandates in place into 2022, in part as a punitive measure against places with relatively low vaccination rates — and applied that mandate to churches. County executives in Nassau, Rockland, Putnam, Dutchess, Rensselaer, Madison, and Niagara counties all refused to enforce the mask mandate, complaining at its heavy-handedness. She did not abandon the state’s absurd and unscientific mask mandate for schoolchildren until March 2022. At one point this spring, Hochul was even requiring masks in portions of Penn Station after the mandates were abandoned by Amtrak and New Jersey transit in the rest of the complex. She only abandoned the formal mask mandate on public transportation in September 2022, long after much of the state had stopped enforcing it.
Hochul’s ideas about health care are subordinate to ideology, however. Her enthusiastic embrace of taxpayer-funded abortion illustrates her disregard for the lives of the unborn. Her health department pledged openly to use outright race discrimination in rationing Covid treatments.
Lee Zeldin offers New Yorkers a real choice. The four-term congressman and former state senator from eastern Long Island served in Iraq with the 82nd Airborne, and would bring a no-nonsense approach to restoring law and order in the state, from repealing the bail-reform law to Zeldin’s pledge to remove Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg for refusing to enforce state criminal laws. He has been as solidly conservative in the House as one could ask from a suburban New Yorker. He has not renounced his pro-life principles under fire, but he has bowed to political reality in vowing not to change New York’s liberal abortion laws. The simple fact of disrupting the dysfunctional Democratic status quo would do wonders for Albany.
Zeldin has faced no shortage of hazards. In July, he was attacked by a drunken man with a small handheld blade while giving a speech in upstate Fairport; Zeldin correctly predicted that the man would be immediately released under the bail-reform law. Just last week, two people were shot outside his home while his teen daughters were inside.
It has been a long time since New York gave a serious hearing to a Republican in a statewide election. In the headline races for president, senator, and governor, only two Republicans have come within 20 points since George Pataki’s last gubernatorial race 20 years ago: Rob Astorino lost by 14 points to Andrew Cuomo in 2014, and George W. Bush lost the state by 18 points in 2004. In statewide races for attorney general and comptroller, only one Republican has come closer than a twelve-point loss: Harry Wilson, who was defeated by Alan Hevesi for comptroller by a 51–46 margin in 2010. Zeldin defeated both Wilson and Astorino, as well as Andrew Giuliani, to win the gubernatorial primary in June.
Does Zeldin have a realistic chance at unseating Hochul? Polling in the race has been inconsistent, with some pollsters showing a wide Hochul lead, but Trafalgar’s two most recent polls show Zeldin narrowing to a five-point and then a two-point race. The latest Marist poll also has a single-digit race, with Hochul up eight points, and a poll by Schoen Cooperman Research shows Hochul up six. Certainly, Hochul is no political juggernaut. Elected lieutenant governor in 2014 and 2018 on Cuomo’s ticket, she last ran for office in her own right in 2012, when she was defeated for reelection to her single term in the House. Before Congress, the highest office she held was as a county clerk. With little to tout, she has taken to running a barrage of television ads focused entirely on abortion and January 6.
The choice belongs to New York’s voters. They should choose Lee Zeldin.