Kathy Hochul’s Deserved Humiliation

By Noah Rothman

Monday, October 27, 2025

 

With typical understatement, the New York Times described the reception the roughly 13,000 Zohran Mamdani supporters gave three “New York power brokers” on Sunday — the state’s Democratic assembly speaker, its Senate majority leader, and the governor, Kathy Hochul — as “tepid.” In Hochul’s case, the reaction from the crowd that gathered in Queens over the weekend was more provocative than the Times let on.

 

As the governor rattled off the prohibitively expensive list of public services they will enjoy when Mamdani establishes his earthly utopia, the crowd began to jeer. “Oh, you’re fired up, you’re fired up,” the governor paused as the crowd chanted “tax the rich!” Hochul forced a smile. “Alright,” she piped up, her patience visibly exhausted. “I can hear you.” But the chants didn’t stop. Fed up with the impertinent socialist mob, she barked, “You want to see Zohran or not?”

 

Now that’s some fine crowd work. As every seasoned political hand knows, the way to endear yourself to a hostile crowd is to threaten them into giving you the welcome you know you deserve.

 

In the crowd’s defense, they probably didn’t know that their class-conscious incantation represented a direct attack on Hochul. “No,” the governor said simply when she was asked in a June interview if she would support Mamdani’s plan to boost corporate and individual income tax rates. “I’m not raising taxes at a time where affordability is the big issue.”

 

The rally was a foretaste of the torment Hochul will endure when her preferred mayoral candidate ascends to Gracie Mansion. While she has endorsed some elements of Mamdani’s profligate spending proposals, she has repeatedly stressed her opposition to raising New Yorkers’ tax burdens to pay for them. The cleverest hunt for “new revenue sources” will nevertheless fall short of the additional $7 billion per year the democratic socialist mayor would need to realize his vision.

 

If Hochul continues to balk at Mamdani’s demands, the likely next mayor and his socialist army will make the governor’s life miserable. They have no use for her save as an instrument of fleeting political utility. If she doesn’t give them what they want, they will have no qualms about making a casualty of this expendable governor’s career in politics.

 

And Hochul would richly deserve it. Hungry as she obviously is for political relevance, the governor made a point of endorsing Mamdani at a time when few New York Democrats were willing to do so. She sacrificed her dubious but nevertheless cultivated image as an upstate “moderate” in the process, alienating her colleagues who would not “put aside differences” with Mamdani to “stand up and fight back against” Donald Trump. And all to court a political movement that wants nothing more than to bury her and any other Democrat who would lend credence to the contemptible notion that there are tradeoffs associated with socialist policy preferences.

 

Hochul has earned everything that’s coming to her, including her probable loss in next year’s Democratic gubernatorial primary to her own lieutenant governor, Antonio Delgado. She has flitted in the political wind for too long, adopting whatever the popular posture on the left happens to be too late to present herself as a true ally to progressives but too early to ingratiate herself with the moderates she so often courts.

 

As a result, no one trusts Kathy Hochul, nor should they. The fate most often reserved for social-ladder climbers will be the governor’s due soon enough. And when her painful lack of political talent finally catches up with her, few will mourn — least of all, Hochul’s new Democratic socialist friends.