“She knows we’re coming for her,” Gustavo Gordillo, co-chair of the city wing of the Democratic Socialists of America, said of Gov. Kathy Hochul. His colleague Osman Chaudhary, who runs the group’s political team, went further: “We have a Democratic Socialist mandate in New York City.”
New York Post columnist Michael Goodwin wrote on June 27 that after Tuesday’s primaries, Chaudhary “might have a point.” Turnout was very low in most areas, Goodwin noted, but DSA candidates were well organized. They finished undefeated in a select group of congressional and legislative primaries against incumbent Democrats. Because no Republican has a realistic chance in those districts, Goodwin argued, November will send a new wave of far-left members to Congress and the state Legislature.
His view is that the political fight in New York is shifting from left against right to left against far left.
Hochul’s role, in Goodwin’s telling
Goodwin, writing as an opinion columnist, blames the governor for her position. He says she ignored the warning not to feed the alligators. In his account, she gave Mayor Zohran Mamdani billions of state dollars for his agenda and assumed that would satisfy his allies. It did not, and “now the governor is on the menu.”
The record he cites is mixed. Like most of the state’s Democratic leadership, Hochul first opposed Mamdani’s push for higher income and corporate taxes. She then endorsed him in the mayor’s race and, after he won, began giving ground. She kept rejecting the tax increases, saying they would drive more taxpayers to Florida. But she did provide billions in state money for his programs. She also pushed through the Legislature a pied-a-terre tax on second homes valued at more than $5 million, and said it would raise $500 million a year for Mamdani.
Goodwin calls her a weather vane. He writes that the DSA’s pressure works only because it knows she is “not guided by strong convictions.”
Letitia James and the polls
Attorney General Letitia James was also surprised by the results, Goodwin writes. She had cheered Mamdani’s mayoral win. This week she told CNN that “some of the candidates that he supported are individuals who do not understand the politics of New York City, the cultural differences from district to district, who have not been part of the history and the struggle of some of these districts, and are relatively new to the body politic.”
Goodwin sees a larger aim behind the primary wins. In his reading, the Mamdani movement wants to replace the priorities and leaders of the Democratic Party, not simply beat Republicans.
Hochul, in her fifth year in office, is running for re-election against Republican nominee Bruce Blakeman, the Nassau County executive. She leads comfortably. A Siena poll last week put her ahead by 20 points, up four since April. Goodwin’s own conclusion is that the DSA can make her life difficult but will never vote for Blakeman, which leaves her room to move toward the middle. He doubts she will use it. “It would take more courage and conviction than she has shown,” he writes.
