Kathy Hochul’s Highly Uncertain Future

K athy Hochul enters the second half of her first elected term as governor of New York with historically low poll numbers and an electorate that appears to have taken a sharp turn to the right. The year ahead presents the state’s chief executive with an almost unimaginable number of political challenges.

Hochul’s first major test of 2025 will come before she is even able to lay out her agenda in the State of the State address. On January 7, 2025, the New York Court of Appeals, the state’s highest court, will hear oral arguments in the challenge to the state ethics commission created by Hochul in 2022. The lawsuit challenging the Commission on Ethics and Lobbying in Government comes from an unlikely plaintiff: former governor Andrew Cuomo, whose resignation set the path for Hochul, his lieutenant governor, to rise to the top job.

In his lawsuit, Cuomo, who is fighting to keep the $5 million he earned from a book deal while serving as governor, argues that the structure of the Hochul-created ethics panel is not permitted by the state constitution. So far, this argument has been successful. Cuomo won in the trial court, and the Appellate Division, the Empire State’s intermediate-level appeals court, unanimously agreed to uphold the trial court’s decision.

Should the Court of Appeals agree with Cuomo and hold that the commission is unconstitutional, it will be seen as a major political defeat for Hochul. Establishing the commission was a significant Hochul initiative in her first full year as governor, and the commission’s invalidation by the courts will leave state government without an ethics watchdog. From Albany insiders to regular New Yorkers, most already see Hochul as inept and ineffective; a defeat like this will only reinforce this perception.

The Cuomo lawsuit isn’t the only legal challenge giving Hochul headaches in 2025. She faces a number of lawsuits over her congestion-pricing plan, a wildly unpopular toll on drivers traveling into the Big Apple. This fee, which has been imposed by the Hochul-controlled Metropolitan Transportation Authority, is being challenged in court by a number of New York City suburbs, including the Town of Hempstead and Rockland County, and even by the State of New Jersey. So far, the courts have allowed congestion pricing to remain, but the legal battle is likely to continue for some time. Regardless of what the courts ultimately decide, for Hochul the political damage is done.

The governor’s fellow Democrats are already testing the waters for a 2026 primary challenge. Things have gotten so politically perilous for Hochul that one possible opponent is Antonio Delgado, her own lieutenant governor. When the New York Times reported that he was considering a primary challenge, not only did Delgado not deny the story, he retweeted it.

A former congressman from a purple upstate New York district, Delgado became Hochul’s lieutenant when the first person to hold the post was forced to resign after being hit with federal corruption charges. Beginning last summer, Delgado began showing independence from Hochul and her administration. When she stuck with President Biden after his disastrous June debate performance, Delgado broke with his boss and called on Biden to step aside as the Democrats’ 2024 presidential nominee. After the dust settled from the 2024 election, Delgado, almost certainly without Hochul’s knowledge or blessing, penned an op-ed laying out his vision for the Democrats’ future. Another likely primary contender is Bronx congressman Ritchie Torres, who for months has been using X to issue condemnations of the governor and her administration. While Torres began his tenure in the House as a progressive, today he is one of the Democratic Party’s most articulate critics of the far left. Since the October 7 attack on Israel, Torres has been one of the Jewish state’s most stalwart supporters on Capitol Hill, and he has even been willing to denounce his fellow Democrats when they unfairly criticize Israel’s actions in the war in Gaza or show sympathy for Hamas.

Torres’s stinging attacks gave Hochul fits in 2024. After the governor triumphantly tweeted about subway safety on the same day a woman was burned to death on a train and two others were stabbed, Torres took to X to make a blistering attack on the governor. If Torres continues these hits on Hochul into 2025, he’s very likely to enter 2026 as the governor’s most formidable primary opponent.

It’s easy to see why an ambitious Democratic pol would be gearing up for 2026: Hochul simply isn’t well liked. In a December 2024 Siena College poll, only 39 percent of respondents had a favorable view of the governor, and 49 percent had an unfavorable view. Hochul, from western New York, is the first upstater elected governor since Syracuse’s Nathan Miller over a century ago, but a majority of upstaters polled viewed her unfavorably. Her numbers in the New York City suburbs were no better. Only in heavily Democratic New York City did a plurality of those polled have a favorable view of the governor. When asked if they’d support Hochul or someone new in the 2026 gubernatorial race, 57 percent of poll respondents said they’d prefer someone new. A majority of voters in every region of the state responded that they’d oppose Hochul’s reelection; even 40 percent of Democrats said they’d take someone new.

Hochul’s poor poll numbers, however, don’t come as a surprise to longtime students of New York politics. In 2022, running for her first full gubernatorial term, she defeated Representative Lee Zeldin, her GOP opponent, by a margin of 53–47 percent, or only about 300,000 votes. This narrow win was in a state where Democrats outnumber Republicans almost two to one. Hochul’s 2022 victory was the closest win for a Democrat running for governor of New York since 1982, when then–lieutenant governor Mario Cuomo squeaked by Republican businessman Lew Lehrman.

While Hochul’s personal unpopularity will make 2025 a politically difficult year for her, the Empire State’s shifting political winds also pose a threat. New York remains a blue state, but the results of the 2024 election show that the Democrats’ dominance of Empire State politics isn’t what it once was. In 2024, Trump saw bigger vote gains in New York than in any other state. The shift in votes in the Empire State was most striking in New York’s bluest region — New York City. While Harris won the Big Apple handily, her 37-point win over Trump was far less than Biden’s 53-point win over Trump in 2020.

With a 2026 reelection that already appears to be in jeopardy, Hochul has 2025 to turn things around. She has her work cut out for her.