ALBANY, New York — Gov. Kathy Hochul is defusing political landmines left by her predecessor Andrew Cuomo — narrowing the scope of criminal justice and climate change laws beloved by the left.
Her signals to scale back a Cuomo-approved law that set ambitious emissions reduction targets and a successful effort to pare down his cashless bail provision reflect the rapidly shifting political realities since Hochul ascended to the governor’s office in 2021. Restive voters in the post-Covid era want elected officials to address their affordability and public safety concerns. And some of Cuomo’s final acts in office became politically untenable as she seeks a second full term.
“It’s absolutely true that the dysfunctional Cuomo administration left her with a mess of laws that were never going to be implemented,” said Morgan Hook, a New York Democratic political strategist. “They left her with a mess she’s going to be cleaning up for years.”
The governor’s attempts to roll back some of Cuomo’s late stage — and most left-leaning — accomplishments underscore the clean break she has tried to make from her scandal-scarred predecessor whose presence loomed large over the Empire State during the decade he was in office.
Cuomo’s shortened third term is best known nationally for his pandemic leadership — a star turn that precipitated his eventual political undoing as one of the country’s leading governors. But after his 2018 reelection, the moderate Cuomo signed laws that had long been favored by the political left, including measures designed to prevent people from languishing in jail while awaiting trial, the legalization of cannabis and a sweeping package of energy goals to combat climate change.
During that time, left-leaning Democrats were eager to make blue states like New York a progressive policy bastion in response to President Donald Trump’s 2016 election. A combination of factors — voter angst over crime, Trump’s push to shelve renewable energy projects like offshore wind and sharply rising inflation — have led to a reconsideration.
Now Hochul is taking a scalpel to the final years of Cuomo’s administration — an enterprise that’s also differentiating herself from a predecessor who cast a long shadow over New York’s political world.
“On every decision she makes, Gov. Hochul tunes out the noise and does what’s best for working families across the state,” Hochul spokesperson Jen Goodman said.
Cuomo spokesperson Rich Azzopardi in a statement touted the former governor’s accomplishments in office — stricter gun laws, paid family leave, minimum wage increases, capped property tax hikes and major infrastructure projects among them.
“We always believed that the work doesn’t end with signing a bill — it’s all in the implementation — though it’s not uncommon to tweak laws passed years ago to address current circumstances, it happened before, during and after our administration,” he said.
Hochul has long insisted she was never close with the former governor, who hand-picked her to become his running mate in 2014. Her ascension as lieutenant governor amounted to a career revival after she lost her reelection bid in a deep red House district. Five years ago, as Cuomo’s political fate hung in the balance following sexual harassment allegations, which he continues to deny, Hochul did not defend him. She endorsed Zohran Mamdani’s successful mayoral bid last summer as Cuomo was mounting an independent comeback bid against him.
“It is no secret that the governor and I weren’t close,” Hochul told NY1 soon after being sworn in. “He had his own tight inner circle. I created my own space.”
Constructing her own political identity as governor would naturally require a break from Cuomo, who she served as a loyal No. 2 for more than six years. Republican opponents have tried to lash Cuomo to Hochul. Both are moderate Democrats who line up on issues like taxes, abortion rights, support for Israel and strict gun laws.
Politically, she has tried to build up the state Democratic Party’s infrastructure — an entity that Cuomo largely ignored during his time in office. And she moved early to purge Cuomo officials from her new administration even as she kept on some of his health and budget advisers.
“She made a very good effort as though she was never his lieutenant governor,” New York Conservative Party Chair Gerry Kassar said. “And he made a good effort to make it seem like he never had a lieutenant governor.”
Temperamentally, they couldn’t be more different.
Cuomo, a political scion with an infamously hard-charging personality, was one of New York’s most powerful governors, often twisting arms to achieve lofty goals and leaving a raft of enemies along the way. That reputation would ultimately leave him without a safety net when he was hit with a barrage of scandals and resigned.
Hochul, a buoyant 67-year-old grandmother, struggled early on with the levers of power. She suffered an embarrassing defeat when Democrats rejected her pick to lead the state’s top court — a setback unimaginable in the Cuomo era.
In the last several months, though, she has found surer footing, starting the year with her highest favorable rating ever in the closely watched Siena University poll. She leads her likely Republican opponent, Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman, by double digits. Hochul’s sole Democratic primary challenger, her own estranged Lt. Gov. Antonio Delgado, dropped out of the race.
That standing has given her political capital to spend. Without an electoral challenge on her left flank, Hochul is signaling to Democratic state lawmakers she wants to change a Cuomo-approved measure that sets ambitious targets for significant emissions reductions — goals her administration fears will lead to a spike in energy costs.
The push to overhaul the climate law comes after Hochul previously moved to pare back a cashless bail law blamed for a rise in crime amid the Covid pandemic. Cuomo also sought and made some tweaks to the criminal justice reforms before leaving office. Nevertheless, the bail law was wielded as a cudgel by 2022 GOP candidate for governor Lee Zeldin, who came within 6 points of beating Hochul.
And just this weekend, the governor embraced a union-supported effort to change a less generous pension tier that was approved at Cuomo’s behest in 2012 as a way to save on costs. Like the climate law and the bail measure, the pension change was a product of a different political era as Cuomo pursued government belt tightening in the wake of a devastating recession.
Cuomo, too, came to see some of the laws he signed as troublesome. Out of office, he urged Albany Democrats to make changes to the bail law as crime spiked. While running for mayor, he also supported labor-driven calls to overhaul his decade-old pension reform.
This year, Republicans, including expected GOP nominee Blakeman, have railed against high utility bills, blaming the renewable energy and climate law. The measure sets legally mandated goals for reducing carbon emissions — targets that are increasingly considered by the Hochul administration as out of reach and too costly. The law set strict deadlines for reducing emissions, with a plan to achieve those goals finalized by an agency-dominated panel during Hochul’s tenure.
“What I’m trying to do is sound the alarm,” Hochul told reporters this month. “What I’m foreseeing then is for us to meet the goals by the timetable set by the legislature, there’s going to be enormous costs to families.”
Unwinding these measures has generated left-flank opposition in the Democratic-dominated state Legislature. Twenty-nine senators signed a letter this month opposing any changes to the climate law.
“I believe very strongly that she has been peddled an enormous amount of misinformation,” state Sen. Liz Krueger, an influential Manhattan Democrat, told Spectrum News. “She has decided to go down a road of trying to convince the rest of us that we have no choice but to turn our backs on what we know are the right answers and shift into a more Trump-like set of policies.”
Republicans are skeptical Hochul is truly interested in making a clean break from the Cuomo years now that her tenure is firmly established.
“It’s the old Colin Powell thing,” said Republican strategist Dave Catalfamo, a former adviser to ex-Gov. George Pataki. “You break it, you own it. It’s not like she’s been there for five minutes. She’s been there for five years now.”
Many of the measures Hochul is now addressing aren’t top line legacy achievements for the ex-governor. Cuomo’s long list of accomplishments in office — a renovated LaGuardia Airport, a massive Hudson River bridge in the New York City suburbs and the legalization of same-sex marriage — are in some instances literally etched in stone. Yet as he entered his third term, the Democratic Party’s leftward tilt in areas like criminal justice and the environment forced the hand of the centrist governor.
Soon after moving to the governor’s mansion, Hochul showed little hesitancy celebrating Cuomo’s achievements, like the LaGuardia renovation, and ultimately she championed a controversial Manhattan toll program that had been backed by Cuomo after initially delaying it. But when it comes to laws Cuomo approved alongside a Democratic dominated Legislature, Hochul has taken a more critical view as the political world shifted.
Democrats in Albany gained control of the state Senate in 2018, bringing to power a generation of new state lawmakers who wanted to leave their mark on policy. Cuomo’s final years — marked by a Democratic base enraged by Trump’s election and Democratic supermajorities in Albany eager to flex its muscles — were an overwhelming combination, said former Democratic Gov. David Paterson.
“His strength was development, major construction projects,” Paterson said. “But those issues of crime and affordability — those issues came up after he left. That’s politics. That happens, and Hochul has walked in right around the time the public was going in a different direction.”
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