The political threats aimed at Gov. Hochul by mad-dog leftists are almost enough to make you feel sorry for her. Almost.
The hitch is that Hochul has only herself to blame. She ignored the warning not to feed the alligators.
Instead, she foolishly assumed Mayor Mamdani and his ravenous crew of radicals would be satisfied when she gave them billions of taxpayer dollars for their Socialist agenda.
Chomp, chomp, but that only whetted the alligators’ appetite for more, and now the governor is on the menu.
“She knows we’re coming for her,” declared a boastful Gustavo Gordillo, co-chair of the city wing of the Democratic Socialists of America.
A comrade who runs the DSA political team, Osman Chaudhary, even claimed that “we have a Democratic Socialist mandate in New York City.”
Dems vs. Dems
After Tuesday’s results, he might have a point. Although turnout was abysmally low in most areas, DSA candidates were superbly organized and emerged undefeated in a select group of congressional and legislative primaries against incumbent Democrats.
With zero chance that a Republican will win a general election race in those districts, November will usher in a new wave of radicals for Congress and the state Legislature.
In effect, the political battleground is being reshaped. Instead of left vs. right, it is now increasingly a battle of left vs. far left.
In addition to Hochul, state Attorney General Letitia James was caught off guard by the success of the Mamdani acolytes.
James was cheering him on when he won the mayoralty, but was seething over Tuesday’s results. 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.”
She seemingly doesn’t realize that blowing up the Democratic Party is the whole point. The Mamdani movement is not interested simply in defeating Republicans.
It aims to destroy the priorities and leaders of the Democratic Party because it views them as not sufficiently different from Republicans. The young insurgents, whom I regard as the worst generation, want government at all levels to have more power and more money so they can impose their benighted views on every nook and cranny of American life.
To hell with the private sector and individual rights, they declare themselves the sole arbiters of right and wrong.
Indoctrinated instead of educated at largely elite colleges, they are ignorant of human nature and basic economic principles. That many are also antisemites illustrates how little they understand about events that took place before they were born.
The only hope is that millions of New York voters will realize that the radicals cannot be trusted with more power. Already, working middle and professional classes have watched helplessly as Albany and City Hall raised taxes and spending beyond reasonable limits.
Yet it is never enough to satisfy the left’s rapacious appetite for more.
In recent years, violent crime and a soaring cost of living sparked an exodus of middle-income families and wealthy voters from New York.
The shrinking GOP has been marginalized, and those trends accelerated when Mamdani captured City Hall last year and raised his red flag over America’s largest city.
Shape shifter
Hochul, in her fifth year in office, has spent too much time shape-shifting her political identity. She poses as a moderate when she thinks it will help her, but it’s a ruse to fool those not paying close attention.
Her record reveals she is a tax-and-spend leftist who spews platitudes about the sky-high cost of living, but lacks the courage to do anything that would require her to take on her own party.
Indeed, the targeting of her by the Mamdani crew now is possible only because they know she is a weather vane and not guided by strong convictions. They won’t vote against her, they just want to scare her so she does their bidding.
Like most of New York’s Democratic leadership, she initially opposed Mamdani’s push for higher income and corporate taxes.
But she broke with the establishment to endorse him in the mayor’s race, and after his victory began yielding on his reckless agenda.
Although she continued to reject his demand for higher income and corporate taxes by saying it would drive even more taxpayers to Florida, she soon forked over billions of state dollars to fund his handouts.
She also pushed through the Legislature a pied-à-terre tax on second homes valued at more than $5 million, promising it will yield $500 million annually to Mamdani before she even figured out the details.
Of course, her moves were designed to help her re-election bid as much as help Mamdani deliver his red agenda.
That’s because the math of statewide elections is clear. Republicans get the majority of votes in lightly populated counties, but Democrats win by running up huge margins in the city, parts of Long Island and Westchester, along with urban areas like Buffalo.
Gov’s leverage
Hence Hochul’s help to Mamdani, and it’s working for her so far. Polls show her running far ahead of GOP nominee Bruce Blakeman, the Nassau County executive.
A Siena poll last week found Hochul padding her lead over him to 20 points, a gain of four points since April.
In that context, the threats against her by the Mamdani crew shrink in importance. They can make her life difficult, but she knows they’re never going to vote for Blakeman.
That gives her space to move toward the middle, but don’t count on that happening. It would take more courage and conviction than she has shown.
