National Review Online
Friday, March 20, 2026
Back in 2022, Hochul built upon the work of her predecessor, Andrew Cuomo, in making the case
that Republicans were unwelcome in the Empire State. “Just jump on a bus and
head down to Florida where you belong, okay,” Hochul said of her gubernatorial
opponent, Lee Zeldin, among others. “Get out of town because you don’t
represent our values. You’re not New Yorkers.”
Evidently, her audience was paying attention, for,
between 2022 and today, around 250,000 New Yorkers did as Hochul asked, and
headed down to Florida where they belonged. Given the vehemence with which she
issued her order, one might have assumed that this development would have
filled the governor with joy. But one would have been wrong. Indeed, far from
celebrating the exodus, Hochul now sounds as if she is on the verge of putting
together a modern Lewis and Clark Expedition tasked with bringing them back.
“The fact is,” she said this week, “I need people who are high net worth to
support the generous social programs that we want to have in our state.” That
being so, she is urging the New Yorkers who stayed to go down to the Sunshine
State, rummage around in the homes and gardens of Palm Beach, Naples, and
Miami, and “see who you can bring back home, because our tax base has been
eroded.” New York, Hochul concluded, is “in competition with other states who
have less of a tax burden on their corporations and their individuals.”
Apparently, that competition is not going especially well.
It may not have escaped the notice of New York taxpayers
that the state’s budget is twice that of Florida, despite the latter having a
larger population. Indeed, Mayor Zohran Mamdani proposes to spend more money in
New York City’s local government than the entire Florida budget, and
that on top of state spending. Hence, the endless appetite for taxes.
Hochul’s plea is notable for many reasons, but none so
galling as that she appears sincerely to believe that America’s citizenry works
for her. If anyone has a patriotic obligation to the State of New York, it is
not those Americans who choose to live in other states. In Hochul’s mind,
“generous social programs” are self-evidently virtuous. And yet, clearly, not
everyone feels the same way. Ultimately, politics involves trade-offs, and for
a considerable number of Americans, the judgments being made in Albany are less
attractive than those that are being made in Tallahassee, Austin, and
elsewhere. In a particularly embarrassing turn of phrase, Hochul demanded that
rich families ought simply to “cut me the checks.” But they don’t want to. And
who could blame them? As pitches go, there are few that could do with more
improvement than, Hey, non-New Yorker. You don’t belong here! Now pay me
lots of money for the dysfunctional government I run.
More than anything else, Governor Hochul’s about-face
betrays an intellectual exhaustion within the progressive movement. Granted,
nobody is likely to mistake Kathy Hochul for a scholar or a wit. But, at the
very least, one would expect the governor of New York to be able to make a case
for social democracy that does not sound as if it has been sourced from the
minutes of the East German Council of Ministers. Now, as in the past, Americans
are permitted to move around within their own country. This is not a flaw, or a
problem, or a loophole; it is one of the core features of our constitutional
order. Over time, this arrangement has facilitated the creation of different
sorts of states under the same national flag: some with high taxes and bigger
governments, others with lower taxes and smaller governments. As conservatives,
we are not agnostic on the question of which is preferable. But even we
understand that there is a better case for the high-tax model than “hand over
the cash, you traitor.” That Kathy Hochul has been so profoundly incapable of
making it suggests that the model she is championing is finally breaking down.
Internal migration is a complicated topic, but, by and
large, the trends tell us a clean and useful tale. It is possible that a given
person or family might act irrationally when relocating; it is far less
possible that hundreds of thousands will. Over the last decade, millions of
Americans have voted with their feet, and, in the vast majority of cases, they
have abandoned the sclerotic big-government model in favor of more frugal
climes. If Governor Hochul wishes to reverse this seemingly inexorable course,
she will have to amend her ways. That will mean less cajoling and berating, and
more learning and understanding. It’s up to you, New York.
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