Defeated in their efforts to keep an avowed socialist out of New York City’s Gracie Mansion, some Big Apple business leaders are turning to next year’s race for the New York governor’s office.
As news of Democratic candidate Zohran Mamdani’s win in Tuesday’s mayoral race sank in, The New York Times reported Wednesday that Wall Street financiers are “already thinking about how they could blunt his most liberal initiatives, turning their attention to Albany, which has the power to block many of his proposals, like raising corporate taxes.”
And that could spell trouble for New York Gov. Kathy Hochul.
Hochul is the Democrat who succeeded now former Gov. Andrew Cuomo when Cuomo resigned in 2021 amid a sexual harassment scandal and lingering questions about his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic.
(“Lingering questions” is a charitable way to describe accusations that Cuomo’s administration was directly responsible for the COVID deaths of thousands of nursing home patients.)
She’s also the Democrat who endorsed Mamdani in a commentary piece published — naturally — in The New York Times in September, effectively tying herself to the new lunatic taking over New York City Hall come New Year’s Day.
And perhaps most importantly, she’s the Democrat who will be running for re-election next year after winning her own term outright in 2022.
That means the team that couldn’t stop Mamdani will have a second target to hit to slow down his socialist destruction of the financial capital of the world.
That team is also likely to have a legitimate candidate to back in New York Rep. Elise Stefanik, a straight-talking Republican who already has an established national reputation.
Will Kathy Hochul be re-elected in 2026?
(She would almost certainly be President Donald Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations right now, if it weren’t for the fact that Republicans need every vote in the House they can get to keep their razor-thin majority.)
After Mamdani won the New York City Democratic mayoral primary in June, his opponents didn’t have a legitimate candidate to take him on.
On the Democratic side, he’d already defeated both Andrew Cuomo — making an attempted political comeback he never deserved — and incumbent Mayor Eric Adams.
His Republican opponent was Curtis Sliwa, who’s been a fixture of New York politics for half a century since founding the Guardian Angels subway security group in 1979. While Sliwa would no doubt be a better mayor than Mamdani — if only because he thinks crimes should be prevented and criminals punished — he didn’t have a chance in deep-blue Gotham.
But that fight is over, and Mamdani has swept the field, with his socialist utopia plans of free buses and free child care and rent freezes on already-rent-controlled apartments, and government-run grocery stores. (Democrats should ask immigrants from the former Soviet bloc countries how that turns out.)
Now, other than leaving New York entirely (which is probably what the smart money eventually does), the best option his opponents have is adding their strength to the campaign to defeat Hochul next year.
It’s not written in stone that her GOP candidate will be Stefanik, but it would not be a bad idea to bet in that direction.
And even if it’s not going to be Stefanik, it’s going to be someone, and that someone is going to be dangerous to the woman currently holding the office.
Mamdani is going to be an embarrassment to New York and the country as a whole, with the potential to do terrible lasting damage to a once-great city. That much is a certainty.
The only question is how much damage, and how much his opponents will be able to stop him.
The answer to that is in the governor’s office — and that means real questions about Kathy Hochul’s future.
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