When Kathy Hochul becomes New York’s governor in two weeks, cleaning up after Andrew Cuomo will be only one of her newfound problems.
Hochul, the 62-year-old lieutenant governor, will take the top job after Cuomo announced his resignation Tuesday, saying harassment allegations against him prevent him from governing. New York and national politicians -- including President Joe Biden -- called on Cuomo to depart after a report by Attorney General Letitia James found he had sexually harassed 11 women.
Hochul, who has served a long apprenticeship in Democratic state politics, will be interim executive until Cuomo’s current term finishes in December 2022. Messages seeking an interview Tuesday weren’t immediately returned.
Stepping into office post-scandal is a familiar role for Hochul, who in 2011 won a special election to the U.S. House after an extramarital affair felled her predecessor. But she also faces novel challenges: rising Covid cases, a sluggish economic recovery, budgetary crises and a state government battered by Cuomo’s tumultuous final year as governor.
Her allies say she’s ready. Since she entered politics four decades ago, Hochul has occupied town, county, state and federal offices. As lieutenant governor, she’s also traveled to every county in New York to court local officials.
“Service in elected office is like training on the job. Once you get elected, you learn how to do your job better the more you do it,” said State Assembly majority leader Crystal Peoples-Stokes, who represents Hochul’s hometown of Buffalo. “For someone who’s getting ready to be ushered into the position of governor, I think she comes more qualified than most.”
Hochul was largely absent from Cuomo’s starmaking pandemic press conferences last year. Now, she’ll have to carve out her own approach to managing the response as cases rise and pockets of New Yorkers remain unvaccinated.
Cuomo said last week that local governments need to decide whether to reimplement indoor mask mandates, which New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio has resisted. Hochul will have a hard time going further -- the state legislature stripped the governor of the ability to issue directives without its approval.
Cuomo also mandated vaccines or weekly testing for more than 70,000 public employees, including Metropolitan Transportation Authority and Port Authority workers. Still, the overall pace of vaccination has slowed dramatically, and rolling averages of hospitalizations and deaths are climbing once again. To reverse those trends, Hochul will have to work with a state Department of Health that hollowed out during Cuomo’s time in office.
Staffing Up
Denis Nash, a professor of epidemiology at the City University of New York and former city health official, said Hochul will have to change course from Cuomo, who often relied more on private advisers and hospital executives than state health officials.
“Cuomo, rather arrogantly I think, thought that he could do it on his own with a lot of subject matter experts cobbled together with a lack of transparency,” Nash said. “You need people at the state level who have the technical expertise, but also a clear understanding of how things work on the ground in counties and in the city.”