NY’s Kathy Hochul is the worst governor in America
Unless you’re really, really rich
Welcome to a Friday edition of Progress Report.
The violent and senseless murder of Jordan Neely was not a freak occurrence, but instead a culmination.
Neely, a homeless man experiencing what may have been a mental health crisis, made the mistake of expressing distress and asking for help in a city and state that are governed by leaders who are actively and publicly hostile to the poor, the unhoused, and the mentally ill.
Just as we rightfully blame Republicans for enabling mass shootings, Kathy Hochul and Eric Adams bear some responsibility for helping to set the social conditions in which somebody felt free to grab an innocent person because they were annoyed by their poverty and choked them until they died. That Daniel Penny, his murderer, is still walking free while homeless people get arrested every night is an embodiment of a failure in moral leadership.
I’ve been working on today’s story since late last week, and while I never wavered from its central assertion, this week’s events provide further confirmation.
After tense negotiations with the state legislature dragged on long past its due date, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul finally signed the all-important state budget on Wednesday, closing the books on the acrimonious annual ordeal. Late by a month, the $229 billion agreement still left nobody particularly happy, which is a good way to describe Hochul’s time in office thus far. That she likes it that way is one of many reasons why Hochul is the single worst governor in the country.
Now, before I continue, a few caveats:
I am not at all saying that Kathy Hochul is the worst person among the 50 current US governors, nor am I saying that she has the absolute worst policies. In both cases, Hochul’s flaws pale in comparison to the current crop of Republican governors, which is filled with corrupt, bloodthirsty sociopaths.
But here’s the critical distinction: There is a cynical political logic to what fascistic Republican governors are doing, delivering on the utterly detestable and Hague-worthy stuff that they’ve promised to their base, while Hochul’s approach in a deep blue state is neither politically nor practically useful.
There are a few baseline facts that you need to know about Gov. Hochul: She’s politically conservative, she takes an enormous amount of corporate money, and she is in the tank for big real estate interests. All three of those things frame the items below.
Kathy Hochul Blocks Popular Democratic Policies in a Deep Blue State
New York’s annual budget isn’t just a spending document, it’s a vessel for all kinds of must-pass legislation (sort of like reconciliation in Congress, but without all of the stupid rules). It’s also a tool to force votes for important policies that might otherwise get stalled or blocked in the regular lawmaking process.
With a Democratic trifecta, the budget represents the best way to get big, progressive new laws passed without having to deal with Republican games or the reluctance of a few conservative Democrats. And compared to what it could and should have been, this year’s state budget is an abomination.
This year, New York was flush with money and facing very obvious problems. The legislature proposed solutions, too, but nearly all of them died in negotiations with Hochul.
Take the minimum wage.
In 2016, New York became the first state to pass a bill to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour. It’s been stuck there for five years in NYC and several states and cities have now surpassed that once-landmark number.
To address the soaring cost of living, Sen. Jessica Ramos proposed a phased increase that would have raised the minimum wage annually until it hit $21.25 in 2026, then indexed it to inflation going forward. The proposal was included in the budget sent to Hochul, who had her own plan: No immediate raise, just simply indexing it to minimum wage.
During negotiations, Hochul pitched a “compromise”: Raise the minimum wage by 50 cents a year until it hit $17 in 2026 in NYC and in 2027 everywhere else — which is just about the same thing as indexing it to minimum wage right now.
A large number of Democratic legislators protested, but many of the working class members were hurting without the paychecks they miss when the budget is overdue. It’s a sorry state of affairs that rents are soaring everywhere, home purchases are hard to finance, food prices are through the roof, and a Democratic governor throttled a minimum wage increase to the lowest possible number.
And then there is the housing failure.
Hochul’s inability to find a way to generate even the most modest relief for people struggling with housing costs (ie most of the state) was even more complete and distressing.
In January, the governor introduced the New York Housing Compact, a plan to build 800,000 new homes over the next decade. The carrot and stick approach incentivized local governments to increase housing units between 1% and 3% over three years, with the state taking over zoning laws if they failed to do so. That was a threat to the suburbs, which have a legacy of largely restricting neighborhoods to single-family housing units as a way of keeping minorities out and property values climbing.
Hochul’s plan notably lacked anything that would provide immediate relief, especially for renters, who make up 46% of the state’s population. It wasn’t for lack of options; along with a nascent housing voucher plan that could have been expanded, dozens of nonprofits, unions, and prominent members of Congress — and some landlords — worked to place a “good cause” eviction law in the state budget.
Preventing predatory landlords from evicting residents unless they have a verifiable good cause is hardly controversial, but Hochul, whose career has been built by real estate largesse, wouldn’t even consider it. And when suburban NIMBY lawmakers pushed back against the Housing Compact’s construction requirements, Hochul decided just to scrap housing legislation altogether in the nation’s second-most expensive state.
The hits kept on coming: While undocumented immigrants in NYC have access to government health care coverage, Hochul refused to extend insurance to the 245,000 undocumented immigrants living elsewhere in New York. It didn’t matter that 80% of New Yorkers approved of the idea, or that it would have been paid for by the federal government — Hochul just didn’t want to help a quarter of a million people live healthier lives.
Negotiating with Hochul is “a nightmare” for progressive activists and lawmakers, says Theo Oshiro, the co-executive director of Make the Road Action.
“On various key issues, her team has stonewalled, actively spread confusion, and even openly acknowledged making decisions based on tabloid headlines rather than facts.”
This isn’t the first time that Hochul very publicly punished immigrants — when she was county clerk in upstate Erie County, she threatened to call ICE on undocumented people if they applied for driver’s licenses after then-Gov. Spitzer proposed that the state permit them to do so.
Hochul did an awkward about-face on the declaration a decade later when asked about the episode during her campaign for lieutenant governor, but her instincts seemed to have kicked in during negotiations.
“Though she has tried to change her image over time, she really seems to just be a conservative Democrat at heart,” Oshiro says.
There are five weeks left in the legislative session. With a veto-proof supermajority, lawmakers could theoretically get some of these proposals passed without Hochul’s help, but it’s pathetic that it’s come to this with a Democratic governor.
Worse, Hochul wasn’t just playing defense during the budget slog. At the same time that she was stopping tangible progress for middle- and working-class New Yorkers, she was fighting hard to further roll back bail reform, but more on that further below.
Hochul also fought to open 100 more charter schools in NYC, where public education funding is already being reduced. Alas, she had to settle for 14 new money pits. Her quest to hike tuition to New York’s public colleges was a failure, too. Much to her relief, Hochul’s quest for half a billion dollars for state-owned horse racing tracks — some of which do business with her husband’s company — was a total success.
Kathy Hochul Chooses Donors Over Voters
There’s a very simple reason why Hochul’s housing plan was a statewide mandate to lavish money on real estate developers and investors and offered nothing to renters: Real estate developers and investors donated millions of dollars to her campaign and renters did not.
That’s not hyperbole — of the $55 million that Hochul’s campaign raised last cycle, only 1% of it came via small-dollar donations of $250 or less. And while a number of unions gave Hochul the individual max, they were dwarfed by the fundraisers thrown by lobbyists and tycoons.
Big real estate developers were particularly generous in their largesse once Hochul took office. Her various accounts received hundreds of thousands of dollars from more than a few major real estate players, many of whom wound up scoring big favors and sweetheart deals from the governor’s office.
All told, Hochul raised nearly $10 million from real estate interests, including city-dominating developers such as Related Companies’ Jeff Blau ($139K) and Stephen Ross ($69,700), Larry Silverstein of Silverstein Properties ($139k), and Tishman Speyer’s Jerry Speyer ($69,700). Five members of the Rubin family, who run a giant commercial property management firm, gave a combined $226,000.
By November, Hochul had received 51 donations from billionaires, including revolting conservatives such as Knicks and MSG owner James Dolan (nearly $600K). She also got nearly $1 million from charter school interests, which should answer any questions about why she wanted to open 100 charter schools in the city.
Kathy Hochul Hurts Democrats and Sucks at Politics
Hochul was re-elected by just seven points in a state that Biden won by 23. This, just over a year after taking over for disgraced Gov. Andrew Cuomo, becoming the first woman to serve as governor of New York, and starting off with enormous goodwill.
One would assume that she’d start gravitating toward an agenda of poll-tested economic populism, especially after polls indicated that New Yorkers felt as if she made little progress on their biggest concerns last year.
Everything was a mess: Her messaging, her refusal to show up on the campaign trail, and her lack of any legislative accomplishments save for giving $850 million in taxpayer money to the billionaire-owned Buffalo Bills to build a new stadium that will benefit her husband.
Hochul’s weakness hurt other Democrats. Members of Congress from swing districts got demolished, and after surprisingly strong results in fewer blue states, those bad losses cost the party control of Congress.
A governor is supposed to be a net positive for their party. In Michigan, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer cruised to re-election and helped Democrats to flip both chambers of the legislature; Ron DeSantis, as much as I hate him, won re-election by a huge margin and expanded the Florida GOP’s majorities.
Democrats have a thin two-seat advantage in both chambers of the Michigan legislature, and in Minnesota, they now hold a trifecta thanks to a one-seat advantage in the state Senate. Instead of staying cautious in their moderate Midwestern states, both Whitmer and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz have gone for broke with their minuscule majorities, outpacing Hochul in big accomplishments.
Whitmer has signed a red flag law on gun purchases, further protected abortion, and repealed the odious “right to work” law. Walz signed a bill that made Minnesota a safe haven for abortion and gender-affirming care, put $1 billion towards housing, and extended free school meals to all kids in the state.
Hochul worked to block universal school meals in New York, and the budget only provides money to help some schools qualify for federal aid. Minnesota’s new plan covers all students, and at $144 million per year, it’s got $10 million more for 300,000 fewer students.
In safer blue states like California, Washington, and New Mexico, governors have taken the lead on an excess profit tax on oil companies, banning assault rifles, and giving huge raises to public school teachers. With a supermajority in the legislature, Hochul could have led New York to the front of the pack as the most forward-looking, economically just state in the country. It was deliberate sabotage.
Kathy Hochul Regularly Spites Her Base
Things were looking dicey for Hochul’s re-election prospects against the truly detestable Lee Zeldin, with some polls showing a dead heat. It was really only the help of organized labor, the Working Families Party, and other left-leaning organizations — none of whom liked her very much — that wound up saving the governor’s skin.
Just over a month later, those same unions and progressive activists were furious with her for nominating a conservative judge to serve as chief justice of New York’s highest court.
The Appeals Court catastrophe was vintage Hochul.
New York for years had been hamstrung by a conservative majority on the Court of Appeals, the state’s highest court. When the chief justice was forced to resign over an ethics scandal, it gave Democrats the chance to finally obtain a progressive majority that wouldn’t throw out legislative maps and empower out-of-state conservatives to redraw them.
A commission drew up a list of potential nominees for the newly open chief justice position (it’s a weird process), and just about every Democratic-aligned organization asked Hochul not to choose one person: conservative NY Appeals Court judge Hector LaSalle.
And who did she nominate? Hector LaSalle.
The outrage came fast, thick, and loud. Unions cursed her name in angry public rants. Democratic lawmakers spoke out and mobilized against LaSalle’s nomination. Yet Hochul stubbornly refused to pull his name. In fact, she even publicly flirted with suing her own party over blocking him.
Democrats in the state Senate eventually shut it all down by rejecting LaSalle in a full floor vote. The mini-saga fractured the caucus before the legislative session even began. Hochul eventually elevated Rowan D. Wilson, a liberal justice already on the Court of Appeals, but insisted on installing a moderate, former state solicitor Caitlin Hannigan, to fill Wilson’s slot.
The whole affair was utterly pointless, but indicative of the kind of politics that Hochul and her cadre of consultants like to pursue. Perhaps the most vocal supporter of LaSalle’s doomed nomination was Jay Jacobs, a centrist summer camp owner from Long Island who also happens to be chair of the New York Democratic Party.
This winter, Jacobs compared state Senate Democrats to Mitch McConnell for their disinterest in giving LaSalle a full floor vote — a nonsensical analogy, since they’re all Democrats — and blamed progressives in November for the subpar performance of moderate candidates. Jacobs exists to raise gobs of money from corporate donors, but he’s so disinterested in actually winning elections that he’s a net negative to the state party.
Democrats across the state urged Hochul to boot Jacobs from the top of the party, but she was having none of it. They share too similar a political worldview, which is how we got Hochul’s obsession with rolling back bail reform.
Kathy Hochul Supports a Regressive Police State
Long Island Republican Lee Zeldin ran a spirited campaign against Hochul — by spirited, I mean racist — that hammered relentlessly on an uptick in crime around New York City. Boosted by such favorable coverage from the New York Post that it could have been reported to the FEC as an in-kind donation, he whipped up a frenzy among suburban residents and exploited tension in outer-borough neighborhoods.
After failing to bully Black lawmakers into rolling back a bail reform law that eliminated cash bail for most misdemeanors and non-violent offenses, Hochul largely stayed quiet on the issue, and when she was prompted to discuss it, she focused on data. She went hard in crime in the last month of the campaign, all but trashing the city.
There’s no doubt that Zeldin’s obsessive focus on crime helped him climb up in the polls, but it’s not clear that Hocbul doing so as well would have done her any good. Republicans are now so disinterested in telling the truth, and as we’ve seen, Democrats engaging too much just pushes them further to the right.
Other Democrats were better able to neutralize the issue, in much more purple states, by running actual campaigns that engaged with voters in person, whereas Hochul mostly just showered the airwaves with mediocre commercials. And instead of recognizing her miscalculation, Hochul decided to double down on conservatism after the election, disregarding the people who saved her from ignominious defeat.
Just why she decided to leave out obvious labor protections and fair pay requirements in her ultimately failed proposal to get 800,000 new homes built in the state is simply baffling — until you remember that real estate developers, her top patrons, are not fond of fair pay or safety regulations. Even her initial proposal for public renewable energy projects, the one really tangibly innovative and progressive thing in the budget, did not have fair labor standards.
Hochul wound up getting her rollback of bail reform, which will force non-violent pre-trial detainees into filthy, dangerous cells if they don’t have the money to hand over to the court to buy the freedom they legally deserve. As the governor said herself last year, there is zero evidence that progressive changes to bail laws lead to more crime; in fact, it’s quite the opposite. Now, four years before any re-election campaign, she’s not only condemning many New Yorkers to misery, but she’s also contributing to the sort of paranoid, tacitly racist, and aggressively defensive mentality that got Jordan Neely murdered this week.
Eric Adams is the most culpable for this culture shift, having spent his first year in office running to crime scenes and holding press conferences to publicize the grisly details. But Hochul bears responsibility, too. I’ll give her credit for introducing or funding programs to help New Yorkers suffering from mental health crises, though they haven’t really been implemented yet either due to time, staff, or money issues. Other efforts have gone awry, including one that explicitly sought to keep the subways free of tired homeless people, who Adams described as a menace.
Hochul’s policies all contribute to dehumanizing people. She’s pushing unhoused and unhealthy people to the brink by refusing to take action on illegal evictions and using rhetoric like “New Yorkers don’t feel safe in their communities.” Convincing people that they are right to feel under siege and in desperate need of more police — the budget adds money for cops too — creates tacit permission for violent acts of “self-defense.”
Hochul’s inability to show empathy when first discussing the Jordan Neely murder sums up this dynamic. Her initial reaction was to focus on the issue of crime on the subway, which is exactly the sort of thing that got Neely killed.
“And that caused a lot of fear in people,” she said of the murder. “And actually the mayor and I are working so hard to restore that sense of safety. We have the cameras on the subways. We have more police officers, we're assisting with overtime. We've been doing so much. And the numbers have been improving. The number of crimes on subways has been declining.”
The next day, in trying to fix her awful original comments, Hochul acknowledged that Neely shouldn’t have been killed and sent her condolences to his family. The best she could do was say she was glad the DA would be looking into the killing, which she called “a very extreme response.”
Slapping a guy is “an extreme response.” Using military training to choke a poor Black man to death is a lynching.
Why now?
With GOP governors embracing cruelty and autocracy in ways that we haven’t seen since the Jim Crow era, it may seem odd to be going after Hochul. So why am I doing it?
First, the 20+ million people in New York deserve far better than the crumbs of the billions that Hochul’s donors are hoarding. And second, it’s not just about New Yorkers. Politics doesn’t work when the only concern is stopping the worst possible scenario, because there needs to be a viable and inspiring alternative. New York should be the counter-argument, the proof that we can have a government that truly takes care of its people.
Hochul isn’t just blocking progress for New Yorkers, she’s blocking it for all Americans.
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Hochul is motivated by greed and power, zero empathy. She needs to go.
Worse than Texas's Greg Abbott? I think not.