Senator Susan Collins desperately needed to change the subject. As she stepped around cow manure at the annual Fryeburg Fair, a reporter was asking her about President Trump’s musing that he might campaign in Maine during the closing weeks of the election—an invitation that Collins, trying once again to save her seat, almost certainly had not extended to a man with an approval rating of 32 percent in the state. A campaign staffer tried to cut off the questioning, but the nearly 74-year-old Collins has not won five Senate elections through luck alone, and she quickly found a way out of the tricky Trump talk. “I do have some important news today,” she declared to the assembled scribblers.
Collins went on to announce that she had persuaded the Trump administration to speed up the release of $38 million in home heating assistance for Maine. Nevermind that her office had already publicized the news earlier that day, or that none of the journalists with Collins reported for local publications. This was either Collins at her senatorial savviest, or a stodgy politician reaching for a tattered playbook.
As temperatures plunge, the cost of heating oil is as potent a political issue in Maine as the price of gas is everywhere else. Collins has built her reelection campaign on the idea that she alone, as the chair of the Senate’s powerful appropriations committee and the lone Republican elected to Congress in all of New England, can deliver for Maine. She has boasted of bringing home billions for her sparsely populated state over the years. At a debate this month, Collins crowed that she had secured an exemption for road salt—another crucial supply during Maine’s perennial winter freeze—from the tariffs that Trump has slapped on Canadian goods. (“We can’t eat road salt,” her Democratic opponent, Troy Jackson, retorted.)
This strategy has worked for Collins before. In 2020, she defied polls forecasting her defeat and won reelection by nearly nine points over a well-funded Democratic opponent even as Joe Biden carried Maine that year by a similar margin. The contours of that campaign were largely the same as the one Collins is currently waging: Democrats tried to tie her to an unpopular Trump, denounced her claims to be independent, and assailed her vote to confirm Justice Brett Kavanaugh as a potential death knell for Roe v. Wade. Collins prevailed by leaning on her bipartisan record and the federal aid she had secured for her state.
Six years later, Democrats have reason to believe that a message that fell short in 2020 will resonate more deeply now. Both Collins and Trump have lower approval ratings in the state than they did then, and the decisive vote Collins gave to Kavanaugh proved consequential when he sided with a majority on the Supreme Court in overturning Roe. (Collins, who supports abortion rights, has said she relied on Kavanaugh’s statements that he considered the 1973 ruling to be settled legal precedent. Earlier this year, however, she told reporters that she did not regret her vote.) Democrats have added ammunition against Collins following a ProPublica report that, in late 2024, the FBI was on the verge of launching a bribery investigation into federal contracts she had helped land for her campaign donors (one of whom had pleaded guilty to making illegal contributions). The probe ended after Trump took office and the Department of Justice slashed its public-corruption units. Collins has denied wrongdoing.
On paper, Maine should be the easiest state for Democrats to flip during a year in which, polls suggest, voters are intent on punishing the GOP. It is the only state that Kamala Harris carried in 2024—she won by seven points—where a Republican incumbent senator is on the ballot. Yet Democrats have not been able to put Collins away. Polls show a close race; Jackson is leading narrowly in some surveys, and Collins is ahead in others. She is faring no worse—and in some cases better—than Republican incumbents running in more conservative states such as Ohio, Alaska, and Kansas.
Collins is benefiting, too, from a Democratic campaign that has at times verged on the shambolic. Party leaders initially tried to recruit Governor Janet Mills to challenge Collins, despite the fact that Mills would have been, if elected, a 79-year-old Senate freshman. Mills entered the race but withdrew when polls showed her getting crushed in the primary by Graham Platner, the progressive oyster farmer. Platner shot quickly to national stardom, surviving the revelation that he had a tattoo resembling an infamous Nazi emblem, but he was forced to withdraw following allegations of sexual assault (which he denied).
Democrats then nominated Jackson, another Bernie Sanders acolyte who had finished third in the party primary for governor earlier this year. Jackson and Collins hail from the same rural county in northern Maine, and he still sounds like he grew up a few miles from the Canadian border. Jackson followed his father into logging before entering politics; he’s served in the state legislature for most of the past two decades, rising to become the leader of the Maine Senate. He lacks both Platner’s strengths and weaknesses—less obviously flawed but also less polished and charismatic. “Troy does not have the energy or the engagement that Graham did,” Wendy Frayer, a 53-year-old social worker from Auburn, Maine, told me at a Jackson rally. “He probably lost some votes.”
Whether Jackson can reassemble, and possibly expand, Platner’s coalition is a key question in the closing weeks. But when I spoke with both Democrats and Republicans in Maine recently, they each argued that the race will turn less on voters’ views about Jackson than on their opinions of Collins. “Troy Jackson is a nonfactor,” one Democrat who’s not working on the campaign told me after being granted anonymity to speak bluntly about the party’s candidate. “The question is: Will the trends catch up with her this year?”
Collins is, at this point in her career, a pretty sporadic campaigner. She does not regularly hold large rallies or town halls, and during a six-day stretch in mid-October that I spent in Maine, her staff notified reporters of only a single public appearance aside from a televised debate with Jackson. (The rivals held four debates over two weeks, so voters have gotten to hear plenty from both candidates.)
The Fryeburg Fair, however, is always a fun stop for Collins, as well as an ideal place for her campaign to demonstrate that her connection to Maine’s voters remains strong. The annual festival is the state’s biggest, drawing upwards of 20,000 people a day and transforming a small town near the New Hampshire border into “Maine’s second-largest city,” according to a fair official who served as Collins’s guide for the day. Fryeburg sits in a rural county that voted overwhelmingly for Collins in 2020, and during a two-hour stroll through the fairgrounds, people flocked to her. “Please win,” one man told Collins as he introduced her to his family. (She offered campaign stickers to the kids.) “I’m doing my best,” the senator replied with a smile. Collins gamely posed for photos with all who sought them, including a pair of teenage boys wearing shirts that read I ❤️ Boobies, which they had purchased from a nearby T-shirt vendor. (One of them did remove his hat for the photo out of respect.) Collins also tolerated the reporters who were trailing her, although as she made her way through a fragrant, high-traffic stretch near the livestock barn, she chided one of them: “Don’t make me walk in shit.”
I was struck by how many people not only recognized Collins but seemed to be familiar with her accomplishments—an indication of both her standing and the imprint of millions of dollars that she and her allies are spending on TV ads. Multiple Collins supporters brought up, unprompted, the record-setting 10,000th consecutive Senate vote without an absence that she cast in June. “Character is huge, and Susan Collins has a great character record,” Chet Charette, the deputy fire chief in Fryeburg, told me. Charette is backing Collins even though he wants to see term limits for members of Congress, which she opposes. (During her first campaign, in 1996, Collins pledged to serve only two terms in the Senate.) “She’s a lot more cognizant than a lot of them are,” Charette said.
By virtue of her lonely position in the middle of a polarized political climate, Collins must also rely on votes from people whom she frequently disappoints. Outside the Portland TV studio that hosted one of her debates, a boisterous crowd of Collins supporters cheered her arrival. When I asked Marc Fournier, a 55-year-old from nearby Westbrook, why he was backing Collins, he began with a disclaimer: “Susan Collins is not my favorite person.” He explained that he was displeased Collins had opposed some key Trump priorities. “She’s giving votes away,” Fournier complained. But he added: “Just because I disagree with her doesn’t mean I’m not going to vote for her.”
As Collins was concluding her visit to the Fryeburg Fair, a man who gave his name as Jim greeted her with a notably less friendly message. He told Collins he had supported her for years, but she had lost his vote when she backed Kavanaugh and helped Trump “stack” the Supreme Court. “You don’t stand up when it’s important,” Jim said. “I do,” Collins protested.
A key explanation for Collins’s political resilience is that in deep-blue New England, plenty of Democratic voters pride themselves on rewarding GOP moderation. In 2024, Vermonters elected Phil Scott, a Republican, to a fifth term as governor by a 50-point margin even as they backed Kamala Harris for president and Sanders’s return to the Senate. New Hampshire has elected Republican governors for the past decade.
Yet that tendency among some Democrats in the region to vote for the “good Republican” extends less and less to federal officeholders in the Trump era, and the force of political gravity that Collins must overcome is stronger this year than ever before. When it was my turn for a question in Fryeburg, I asked Collins what she would say to Mainers who are unhappy with the direction of the country and who might use this election to vote for change. “Well, first of all, I contest the premise of your question,” Collins replied, pointing to her “enormously favorable” reception among the fairgoers. At that moment, a man started loudly heckling her. “You can’t eat road salt, can ya?!” he shouted. “There are always a few exceptions,” Collins observed with a tight smile, before going on with a lengthy defense of her record delivering for Maine. She did not seem especially concerned that her critics have grown significantly in number over the years or that, in a few weeks’ time, they could marshal the votes to end her long career.
Nancy Lacore found out she was fired as the chief of the Navy Reserve almost a year to the day after she got the job. On a Friday morning in August 2025, Admiral James Kilby, then the acting chief of naval operations, called Lacore to his office in the Pentagon. She went alone, and when she asked how Kilby was doing, his reply—“Not good”—told her all she needed to know. By the time Kilby delivered the news, he had tears in his eyes, Lacore says. He told her that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had directed him to relieve her of command effective immediately. No reason was given. “I kind of fell forward a little bit on the table,” Lacore told me. “It just knocked the wind out of me for a second.”
Lacore is among the dozens of military leaders that Hegseth has sacked or ousted over the past year and a half, many of them women and people of color. She’s since taken a different path: Lacore recounted her story to me after a campaign event outside Charleston, South Carolina, where she is asking voters to send her back to Washington—this time as a member of Congress. When Lacore left the Pentagon on that summer Friday, she never returned, her 35-year military career effectively over. (The Pentagon declined to comment.) By January, she had launched a bid as a Democrat for the House in South Carolina’s Low Country.
South Carolina’s First District is a reach for Democrats, but it is one of more than a dozen races across the country where the party is testing how deep into GOP territory it can advance in November. President Trump carried the district by 13 points in 2024. Democrats flipped the seat in 2018, during their blue midterm wave in Trump’s first term. But Republicans won it back two years later and then redrew the district’s lines to cement their advantage. Now the unpopularity of both Trump and the outgoing incumbent, Representative Nancy Mace, has put the seat in play again for Democrats. (Mace ran for governor—she lost badly in the primary—instead of for reelection to the House.)
Democrats see Lacore’s long military record, moderate policy positions, and steady demeanor as an ideal fit for a constituency that is more country-club Republican than MAGA, and which seems to have grown exhausted by the headline-grabbing Mace. Indeed, most of the political operatives I spoke with said Lacore would probably be in an even better position if Mace were her opponent; instead, she is facing Jenny Costa Honeycutt, a Republican Charleston County council member who is distancing herself from Mace by pledging to steer clear of “clickbait politics.”
Lacore is a former Republican who left the party during Trump’s first presidential run. Like many other Democratic candidates this year, she has placed affordability at the center of her platform. She talks about her experience as a mother of six kids as much as her decades in the Navy, and the challenges she faced juggling a large family in which both she and her husband were service members, and overseas deployments seem to resonate in a district with a large military presence. During a veterans’ forum I attended, Lacore’s call to end the Iran war drew hearty applause.
Although Lacore mentions her firing by Hegseth on the campaign trail, she’s not trying to portray herself as a “resistance” hero. (Such candidacies have not fared particularly well.) She pitches herself as a supporter of border security and law enforcement; one of her daughters, she notes, is a police officer. When I asked Lacore where she parted ways with the national Democratic Party, she took the opportunity to distance herself from the far left: “I am not a socialist,” she replied.
“They can’t really hang a lot of the woke stuff on her or try to make her out to be some sort of weirdo,” Ed Sutton, a Democratic state senator in the area, told me.
Without a long political record to scrutinize, Republicans have harped on Lacore’s thin ties to the district; she bought a home in the Charleston area only last year, having planned to retire there at the end of her four-year term as Navy Reserve chief (which Hegseth cut short). During a debate last Wednesday, Honeycutt took every opportunity to remind viewers that Lacore had been, until recently, an out-of-towner.
Lacore’s Democratic-primary opponents pursued the same line of attack, but the appeal of that critique with so many transplants and retirees populating the stretch from Charleston to Hilton Head Island is questionable. The local population has grown so rapidly in recent years that concerns about overdevelopment have become a potent political issue. Lacore has criticized Honeycutt for her work representing developers in the area. “There are more people in my town now who are not from here than there are people who are natives,” Will Haynie, the mayor of Mount Pleasant, a Charleston suburb, told me. Many newcomers to the area are, like Lacore, military service members. “That is not a disqualifier,” he said.
Haynie, a Republican, endorsed Lacore early in her campaign. He had backed Mace when she first ran for the seat, in 2020, but he’s become disenchanted with the Trump administration and told me he was looking for a Democrat who would fight for the area’s needs and help restore the balance of power between Congress and the presidency. “I was looking for a Democrat that I could trust, a Democrat who’s a proven leader, and a Democrat who I think would be very independent,” Haynie said. “I didn’t just do this as a political stunt.”
During her veterans’ event, Lacore leveled nearly as much criticism at Mace as at Honeycutt, saying the district had long been “ignored” by Mace. Voters there spoke of their representative with open disgust and noted approvingly that Lacore struck them as everything Mace was not. “The longer she was involved in politics, the crazier she got,” Gary Gould, a 73-year-old retired consultant, told me of Mace. Lacore, by contrast, “dripped character and credibility,” he said. “It seems like she knows her way around Washington without being tainted by being a politician.”
Honeycutt’s campaign did not make her available for an interview. Mace, however, responded to an inquiry almost immediately. She defended her popularity in the area, noting that she had brought hundreds of millions of dollars to the district and won her most recent race, in 2024, easily—her margin of 16 points outperformed Trump. (That election, however, came before she launched a high-profile crusade against the first openly transgender person elected to the House, Representative Sarah McBride; before she allegedly berated airport security officers; and before the publication of stories in which colleagues and associates described her as “unstable” and “unhinged.”) Mace took issue with both Lacore’s and Honeycutt’s messaging about her. “If somebody wants to call me clickbait politics,” Mace told me, or say that she’s “ignoring the district, I’d hate to see what they think their definition of serving it is, and I would hate to see how they would navigate attacks by the establishment on their record.”
Mace has raised concerns about the GOP’s standing in South Carolina’s Senate race, in which nervous Republican groups have begun spending on behalf of Senator Darline Graham—sister of the late Lindsey Graham. But Mace is supporting Honeycutt and believes she’ll defeat Lacore. “I think she’ll win handily,” Mace said. “She has been in the community a very long time.”
Lacore’s other liability could be some lingering resentment from a contentious primary. She won with the help of significant outside spending from Democratic groups such as the Bench, which has backed some of the party’s most prominent recruits, including James Talarico in Texas, Josh Turek in Iowa, and Adam Hamilton in Kansas. Lacore’s top rival in the primary, Mac Deford, has yet to endorse her candidacy, and when I spoke with him at a gathering of Democrats in Charleston, he told me he had not yet seen her campaign aggressively enough among people “who traditionally do not vote for Democrats.” (A Lacore spokesperson responded: “I would invite Mac to come to the many events we’re doing in every corner of the district where a bipartisan coalition of voters is showing their support.”)
Lacore has significantly outraised Honeycutt, and the Democrats’ main House super PAC has reserved ad money for a late push on her behalf. Republicans remain confident that they’ll retain the seat, though their allies are spending as if it might be at risk. A spokesperson for the GOP’s House campaign committee told me Democrats are wasting money on a “solidly Republican” seat. (The Cook Political Report today moved the race in the Democrats’ direction, changing its forecast from “likely Republican” to “lean Republican.”)
Democrats last week circulated a poll showing Lacore narrowly ahead of Honeycutt, but they aren’t quite predicting victory, either. “Anybody who tells you it’s not a tough district doesn’t know what they’re talking about,” John Moffett, a Charleston-based Democratic strategist, told me. But, he said, “if there’s a candidate that can win this race right now, it’s Nancy Lacore.” Judging from the polling nationwide, the ingredients are in place for a blue wave. In South Carolina, both parties are wondering if it will be big enough to carry Lacore to Congress.
On 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. Mamdani, who as a state legislator said that Hochul had “failed our constituents across the state,” has had a similar conversion. “She’s done incredibly well,” he told me in an interview.
Some Cuomo loyalists chalk up Hochul’s recent success to luck as much as skill. Democrats nationwide are poised to have a much better election next month than they did in 2022. And as people close to the governor readily acknowledge, having Trump on one side and Mamdani, a democratic socialist, on the other opens up a wide lane for a moderate to govern.
Hochul’s allies, however, are more likely to attribute her turnaround to a canny and dogged politician understanding the power of her office. Without much fanfare, they point out, she has delivered the kind of affordability agenda—centered around expanded child care, housing, and energy production—that Democrats say the party needs to win back the voters they’ve lost. Impatient and quietly competitive, Hochul drove her staff to speed up the announcement of a one-year moratorium on the construction of large AI data centers so that she could be the nation’s first governor to make such a move. She also overhauled the state party’s campaign apparatus, and in 2024, Democrats won back four of the congressional seats they had lost two years earlier.
In conversation, Hochul sometimes speaks so softly that she can be hard to hear. But in a series of interviews this summer, she was eager to tout her success as the product of a deliberate strategy to ratchet down what she described as an ego-driven culture of confrontation in New York politics—one that pitted Democrats against one another as well as against Trump. “I didn’t need to go to war,” Hochul told me. She could, she said, generate more media coverage by first creating conflict and then beating down her opponents. But she’s chosen a different approach. “I win, but I don’t have to destroy people in the process,” she said. “Not always.”
Nonetheless, Hochul said she has taken careful note of the many former critics who have returned to her fold: “There’s a long line of people asking for forgiveness.”
Adam Pape for The Atlantic
Governor Kathy Hochul visits the Mamá Tingó Childcare and Learning Center in Manhattan.
Hochul is the first woman to serve as the governor of New York, and as such, she is also the first mother to lead the state (and, she often adds, the first grandmother). She calls herself the “mom governor,” and when I asked her, over breakfast at a Manhattan diner, what had prepared her to deal with prideful men such as Trump and Cuomo, she turned not to any professional or political experience but to child-rearing. “I’ve raised toddlers. I’ve raised teenagers,” Hochul said. “So many times when things are swirling around, I’ve had to be the eye of the hurricane, be that calm voice.”
Comparing Trump to a child has become something of a cliché, but as much as any Democrat during the president’s second term, Hochul has figured out a way to work with him without capitulating to his demands. (It probably helps that unlike many leaders in her party, she is not looking to take his job in two years.) Hochul has persuaded Trump to reverse course at times, such as when he agreed to restore $187 million in cuts to counterterrorism funding for New York. She also claims credit for Trump not federalizing the state’s National Guard or surging ICE into New York City following deployments into other urban centers. During a White House meeting of governors in February, Trump told the assembled state leaders that he would not ramp up immigration enforcement in New York unless Hochul requested it.
Hochul told me her conversations with Trump are sometimes cordial and sometimes combative. She tries to appeal to his vanity and business interests, warning him that the “chaos” of major ICE raids would hurt not only his own bottom line but those of his many wealthy friends in New York. “I’ve used that many times,” Hochul said. “We just angle the argument based on a shared interest, and it works—most times.” Last year she pitched Trump on taking over the redevelopment of Penn Station, the nation’s busiest transit hub and an eyesore that Hochul referred to as “a hellhole.” Hochul correctly surmised that the longtime developer would take her up on the offer, and the move relieved her of responsibility for a project that had bedeviled her predecessors. (Characteristically, Trump officials have made it known that the president wants his name stamped on the complex, a proposal that Hochul has yet to publicly veto.)
The president has leveled public attacks on Hochul as he campaigns for her Republican opponent, Bruce Blakeman, a county executive on Long Island. Trump has called her “stupid” and a “Dumocrat,” criticizing her most recently for opposing his tariffs on Canada and for refusing to go along with his renaming of Lake Ontario as “Lake America.”
In private, however, the president’s tone is often different. He’ll tell Hochul, according to an aide privy to their calls, “You’re so mean to me, but I like you anyways.” They’ll sometimes talk politics as well. Hochul happened to have a call with Trump on the day last December when Stefanik quit the governor’s race. Stefanik, a top Trump surrogate in Congress, had wanted the president’s endorsement in a primary against Blakeman, but Trump had stayed neutral. Hochul told me she had asked the president why he hadn’t backed Stefanik, given how strong an ally she had been. Trump hemmed and hawed, she said, praising Stefanik while also noting his long friendship with Blakeman. Hochul, not letting him dodge the question, pressed again. Finally, Trump said of Blakeman: “He looks the part.”
“So that’s why I’m running against Blakeman,” Hochul said as she recounted the call in her office. Then, in a bit of bravado, she added: “And that’s why he’ll be in Trump’s Cabinet next year.” (The Trump ally whom Hochul defeated in 2022, Lee Zeldin, is now his EPA administrator.) The White House did not respond to requests for comment.
By comparison, Hochul’s relationship with Mamdani has been easier to manage. From the start, their political priorities were largely aligned. After Mamdani won the Democratic nomination for mayor last year, Hochul endorsed his campaign against Cuomo, who was running on a third-party ballot line, at a time when neither of New York’s other two most powerful Democrats, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, were offering Mamdani their support. (Mamdani returned the favor by endorsing Hochul’s bid in February.)
Hochul also had a vested interest in the new mayor maintaining a drop in crime in New York City after voter concerns about public safety upended her 2022 campaign. Before endorsing Mamdani, she told me, she implored him to pledge that he would keep as police commissioner Jessica Tisch, the technocrat and billionaire heiress whom many in the business community had credited as a stabilizing force. Hochul hinted that she had made Tisch’s retention a condition of her support. “It was important to me,” she said. (Mamdani told me that the call factored into his decision, though he described her push for Tisch as “more of a recommendation.”) When Mamdani made his choice public several weeks later, he called Hochul to give her a heads-up. “I heard you on that,” he told the governor.
Adam Pape for The Atlantic
Hochul greets New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani before a press conference at Manhattan’s High Bridge Recreation Center.
After Mamdani won the mayoral election in November, Hochul gave him advice on dealing with Trump. Before the two met in the White House that month, she urged the mayor-elect to “find common interest” with the president. “Take the sights off of New York City,” Hochul told him, she recalled to me. “Don’t let us be in the bull’s-eye.” Mamdani ended up charming Trump to a degree that surprised nearly everyone, helping allay fears that the city was next on the administration’s list of targets.. “I absolutely took that advice,” the mayor said. “To me, it speaks to how she looks at this work as how best to deliver for people. And if you are working backwards from that as your intended outcome, it allows you to prepare for each and every meeting, no matter the level of agreement or disagreement with whomever you’re meeting with.”
Hochul and Mamdani, of course, do not agree on everything. She opposed his campaign push to raise taxes on millionaires and corporations to fund an expansion of social programs. More recently, she criticized the city’s rollout of a new levy on expensive second homes—the so-called pied-à-terre tax—and gently suggested that he keep his focus on the city rather than pick fights with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (whom Mamdani wants the federal government to arrest for war crimes). But on the whole, they have gotten along swimmingly. “She is sincere,” Mamdani said. “Whether I’m standing next to her at a press conference or whether I’m sitting across from her at a table, it’s the same kind of conversation.” He noted wryly that in politics, that often isn’t the case.
That Hochul spent even a day as governor is an accident of history. She was never a governing partner of Cuomo’s, much less his heir apparent. He tried multiple times to replace her on his ticket.
She fended off one attempt, in 2018, by marshaling calls of support for her candidacy from Democratic leaders in key upstate counties. In early 2021, Cuomo’s team sought to find a soft landing for Hochul in the Biden administration, but Cuomo was forced out of office over sexual-harassment claims before it could happen. Hochul told me she had stalled for time, suggesting roles—such as ambassador to Canada—that she knew she wouldn’t get. “I ran out the clock,” Hochul said. (Through a spokesperson, Cuomo declined an interview request, but his predecessor, former Governor David Paterson, told me that Cuomo had told him directly that he planned to replace Hochul during a 2022 campaign.)
Hochul’s success in keeping her job as lieutenant governor reflects a persistence, even a stubbornness, that has helped her climb up a rickety political ladder. She has rarely been the first choice of Democratic power brokers, but she’s shown a willingness to fight for herself, wearing down opponents. She’s also benefited repeatedly from the lack of discipline of male politicians. In early 2011, Hochul was serving as a county clerk in Buffalo when a married Republican House member in a nearby district, Representative Chris Lee, resigned amid revelations that he had sent a shirtless photo of himself to a woman he met on Craigslist. (The scandal was rather tame by today’s tawdrier standards.)
Party leaders wanted Hochul to run for county executive, doubting she could win a special election in a red district just six months after Republicans had swept Democrats out of the House majority. But Hochul, with encouragement from her daughter, decided to run for Congress. Democrats brought her polling showing her that she’d be a shoo-in for the local race; they warned her that she’d receive no help from the national party if she ran for the House. Hochul wouldn’t budge. “That just pissed me off,” she told me. “At that point I’m like, I’m definitely doing it.”
Before long, she began pestering the chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, Steve Israel, with calls and emails to convince him that the race was worth the party’s investment. “Just relentless outreach,” he told me. Still, Israel was reluctant. “I did not want to start my chairmanship of the committee by sinking and wasting money on an absolutely futile race,” Israel said. Before committing support, he gave Hochul fundraising and polling targets that he believed would be impossible for her to meet. When she exceeded them, the DCCC gave her the money she requested, and Hochul ended up winning, a major upset that buoyed Democrats nationwide and, for a time, made her a darling of the party. Hochul would narrowly lose her seat the following year after redistricting gave her an even more conservative electorate, but her tenacity made a lasting impression on party leaders.
In need of a new running mate in 2014, Cuomo asked her to join his reelection bid. His first lieutenant governor had declined another term, citing the toll that hours-long drives through the state’s hinterlands had taken on his ailing back. (The No. 2 post, which does not come with a plane, is anything but glamorous.) Hochul provided Cuomo gender balance on the ticket and the chance to improve his performance in western New York, one of the few regions he had lost in his otherwise-dominant showing in the 2010 election. With Hochul aboard, Cuomo won Erie County—home of Buffalo—four years later. After that, her usefulness to him faded.
Hochul’s ascension to the governorship, in August 2021, was not exactly sudden; Cuomo had faced calls to resign for months, and he lingered in office (against Hochul’s wishes) for two weeks after announcing he would step down. But Hochul did not get off to a strong start. “She had a pretty tough transition,” Representative Joseph Morelle, an upstate Democrat and longtime friend of Hochul’s, told me.
Hochul’s first pick for lieutenant governor lasted just seven months until he resigned after being indicted on bribery charges. She battled with the Democrat-controlled legislature, which rejected her nominee for chief judge of the state’s highest court. Many voters came to believe she was out of her depth; Republicans began calling her the “worst governor in America”—a label they are still using in campaign ads.
Hochul’s first campaign for a full term was rocky too. Her aides now acknowledge that she was slow to respond to concerns about rising crime and the influx of migrants arriving in the state (some because they were bused in by Republican governors). Though she had traveled widely across New York as lieutenant governor, she remained unknown to many voters, some of whom still mispronounce her name as Hawk-ul.
Hochul is the first governor in more than a century from Buffalo, a city on the shores of Lake Erie that is culturally and geographically closer to Cleveland than it is to New York City, home to the bulk of the state’s Democratic voter base. She likes to project a steely image. When I asked about the opprobrium she received early in her tenure, which sometimes seemed to veer into disrespect, she recalled a saying that her mother used to repeat: “No one can make you feel bad without your permission, and I give it to no one.”
But her advisers told me that she can, in fact, be quite sensitive to criticism and slights. The finger-pointing by Pelosi stung particularly hard; years later, one aide prefaced a reference to the former speaker with a string of expletives.
Adam Pape for The Atlantic
Although Hochul has sought to avoid drawn-out public battles with fellow Democrats, she’s played her share of hardball politics behind the scenes. “People think that she is a pushover when she really is not,” a Brooklyn state senator, Roxanne Persaud, told me, attributing those perceptions in large part to assumptions that people have about women in power.
After Delgado moved to challenge her last year, Hochul took away his office space and reassigned almost all of his staff. Hochul allies told me that she had to demonstrate that she was not merely, as one of them put it, “the nice lady from Buffalo.” “You can sense when people become comfortable in their own political skin, and I think she exudes that now, which gives voters confidence,” the Reverend Al Sharpton told me. “I judge a lot of politicians based on, do they have enough self-confidence, enough spine, to say no? And she does.”
Hochul hasn’t won over all of her critics on the left. A few weeks ago, I was contacted by John Samuelsen, the international president of the Transport Workers Union of America, who had heard I was working on a story about Hochul. He was not a fan. “She’s absolutely clueless about fostering relationships,” Samuelsen said. He criticized her handling of a variety of labor disputes, including a strike by Long Island Rail Road workers in May, and he accused her of repeatedly going back on her word in negotiations. “She’s just completely untrustworthy, and kind of like a junkyard dog.”
During the 2024 election, Hochul infuriated progressives in New York City by abruptly pausing implementation of a long-planned toll on vehicles driving into Manhattan. The first-in-the-nation policy, known as congestion pricing, held the promise of simultaneously relieving traffic, improving air quality, and providing a much-needed infusion of money into the city’s century-old subway system. Most saw the move as a politically motivated sop to suburban voters in GOP-held seats around New York City, where Democrats feared a voter backlash if the policy went forward.
After the election, Hochul worked out a compromise by reviving the toll but at a lower rate. Then Trump handed her a gift: Before even taking office for a second time, he declared that his administration would block the state’s plan, and the issue wound up in the courts. For added effect, the White House posted an image of Trump wearing a crown beside the declaration LONG LIVE THE KING.
The president’s involvement turned a factional Democratic fight over taxes into a battle that unified the party and allowed Hochul to defend her state’s sovereignty against federal overreach. “New York hasn’t labored under a king in over 250 years, and we sure as hell are not going to start now,” the governor declared. Nearly two years later, the toll remains in effect—courts have consistently ruled in the state’s favor—and the issue is not a major flash point in the midterm campaigns. The episode exemplifies Hochul’s tenure as governor—a rocky start, some compromise, a little resilience, and more than a bit of luck.
Hochul is not a scintillating public speaker, or even an especially smooth one. At the events I attended, she had a tendency to garble her words, occasionally turning finely honed sound bites into mush. In May, her attempt to dunk on Trump’s claim that he was a huge New York Knicks fan ahead of the team’s NBA Finals run backfired. “I’d ask him to name the starting lineup from the 1993 championship team and see how he does,” Hochul said, mistaking the year of the team’s last NBA trophy by two decades. During a school event, Hochul awkwardly misidentified the state senator who represented the area even though the lawmaker was standing right behind her.
She’s better at retail politics. Hochul seems to actually enjoy the endless introductions, photo ops, and meet-and-greets that many politicians only tolerate as necessary tedium. The connections she makes also feel sincere. At a different school in a Republican-leaning area of Long Island, I watched as a local superintendent got choked up during a private meeting while he described his appreciation for her visit and the new pre-K center she was there to celebrate.
Hochul used to describe herself as “a Biden Democrat,” and much like the former president, she’ll often use her own upbringing as a reference point. Her parents started their marriage living in a trailer park near the Bethlehem Steel plant where her father worked, before moving to a small apartment. “It was a tough life,” she told the audience in the Bronx. “My parents, in one sense, had their dignity, their success defined by the home.” At the opening of the pre-K center, she recalled her struggles as a young mom in the workforce. “I could not find affordable, accessible child care at all,” she said.
In addition to the drop in crime and expansion of pre-K and child-care centers, Hochul is promoting a $25 billion plan to construct or maintain 100,000 affordable homes across the state. Not above an election-year giveaway, she announced that the state would begin sending eligible families $200 energy-rebate checks, aimed at offsetting rising prices. (Hochul also mailed out “inflation refund” checks in 2025.) Hochul’s executive order on data centers placed her on the leading edge of an issue that is consuming Washington. At events across the state, she links AI to a broader economic agenda that she says is aimed at protecting workers—particularly women—from the threat of job displacement.
Hochul is expected to win her next term more easily than she did her first. Exactly how much she’ll improve remains an open question; a Quinnipiac University poll showed her leading Blakeman by 19 points, but other surveys have found the gap to be much smaller, and her aides caution not to expect a landslide. The electorate is more polarized now, and besides, even after more than a decade in statewide office, Hochul is still introducing herself to some voters. She told me that when she’s not disguising herself in a baseball cap, more and more people take notice of her. As I watched her make the rounds at neighborhood festivals in Brooklyn and Harlem recently, plenty of people surrounded her for photos. Others showed little interest.
At the conclusion of a festival in the Canarsie section of Brooklyn, Hochul was walking back to her armored SUVs when a man on a nearby park bench recognized her and stood up to say hello. She walked over to greet him, and they had a pleasant exchange. As she was leaving, he asked the governor one more question: “What’s your name again?”
Login
