Kathy Hochul’s Improbable Turnaround

O n many mornings , as New York City is waking up, a diminutive grandmother from Buffalo puts on sneakers and a baseball cap and takes a 45-minute walk with her husband around the streets near their apartment on Manhattan’s East Side.

Her security detail keeps its distance, and hardly anyone seems to recognize Kathy Hochul on these strolls, even though she has been the governor of New York for the past five years.

Not many big-state governors enjoy such anonymity, but the spotlight has been slow to find the 68-year-old Hochul.

Andrew Cuomo excluded her from his inner circle during her years as his deputy.

Since succeeding him in 2021, she has operated in the shadow of much larger political personalities, be they fellow Democrats eyeing the White House or the polarizing Queens men—President Trump and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani—who generate far more headlines.

What attention Hochul attracted in her first years as governor was largely negative.

She won her own full term in 2022 by six points, a relatively narrow margin for New York that Nancy Pelosi blamed for costing Democrats control of the House. (The party lost five winnable congressional races in New York that year.) By late 2024, Hochul’s approval rating had dropped below 40 percent, and the Democrats who were plotting primary challenges included her own handpicked lieutenant governor, Antonio Delgado.

But the past two years have yielded an impressive turnaround.

Hochul has drawn praise for forging productive relationships with both Trump and Mamdani.

She easily dispatched opponents on her left (Delgado quit his campaign for governor in February) and her right (Representative Elise Stefanik’s bid lasted just more than a month).

Hochul appears on track to secure another four-year term as New York’s governor, and if she remains something less than an A-list political celebrity, she has earned the respect of a party that all but dismissed her not long ago.

“Kathy Hochul is the comeback governor of America,” Representative Ritchie Torres, a Bronx Democrat who was once one of Hochul’s harshest critics, told me.

As recently as late 2024, Torres used words such as erratic , chaotic , and embarrassing to describe her performance; he warned—and this was not meant as a compliment—that she could be the Democrats’ “new Biden.” But he has learned not to underestimate her.

“You do so at your own peril,” Torres said.