Assistant To The Regional Manager

Why You Should Care About Hochul's Pick for LG, a Completely Irrelevant Position

Antonio Delgado, our state’s current Lieutenant Governor, who is currently engaged in a slow-motion mutiny of epic proportions.

“I was so nothing,” Mike Birbiglia complained about being a new father of a newborn baby in his 2019 Netflix special The New One. “I was this pudgy, milkless vice-president of the family. Huge title, no power. Also oversees Congress. My whole job was to be around and have no opinions.”

Call up current New York State Lieutenant Governor Antonio Delgado and you may hear a similar complaint. His job is just to be around (and not even necessarily around Governor Hochul, who kicked him out of his offices in the state Capitol and had not spoken to him “in months” as of last summer) and have no opinions. And he’s sick of it.

Running mate is a tough job no matter what. The structural incentives are awful. The boss has all the power, both because that’s what the law says and because everyone likes them more than you. Maybe they just beat you in a primary, and if so, they probably still remember all the rude things you said about them on the campaign trail. During the general election, all will be forgiven, and their team will gush about you, what a natural leader you are, how good of a fit you are going to be “on the team,” what a privilege it is to get to work with someone with so much talent, leadership experience, and political sway over a demographic that they poll poorly with (they probably won’t say this last part out loud).

But as soon as you come into office, they will immediately pivot, because you are now a popular, charismatic elected official, and therefore a huge threat. They will give you the worst, least sexy assignments (“root causes of migration”), keep you far away from anything important, and will relentlessly leak anonymous quotes about how badly you are doing, how they keep trying to give you opportunities and you keep screwing up, and how utterly unprepared you’d be to take over for them. Your best move is to grin and bear it, wait your turn for your boss to be term-limited, and in the meantime, try not to be too open about your private, all-consuming wish for their untimely demise. But it’s a hard road, and not everyone has the patience for it.

Governor Hochul tapped Delgado in April of 2022 after her first Lt. Governor, the Harlem-based former State Senator Brian Benjamin, was indicted for allegedly awarding a grant to a local nonprofit in exchange for straw donations to his campaign (charges were dropped last year after the key witness died). At the time, Delgado was a rising star in the state Democratic Party. A former Rhodes Scholar, Harvard Law graduate, successful corporate lawyer, and amateur “socially conscious” rapper under the name “AD the Voice”, Delgado in 2018 successfully wrested the purple 19th Congressional District (which at the time combined the swanky Hudson Valley counties Columbia and Dutchess with the more rural Otsego and Delaware further west) from two-term incumbent Republican John Faso. As a Congressman, Delgado kept a low profile and maintained one of the most moderate voting records in the Democratic caucus. But still, he was a handsome, charismatic Rhodes Scholar holding down a swing district in upstate New York and raising almost $10 million a cycle. He seemed in good position for a run for Senate if a seat ever opened up.

Nearly four years later, Delgado is screwed. Austin C Jefferson of City and State Magazine gave a great account last year of how his relationship with Hochul deteriorated so badly, and points to two core problems. First, Delgado imagined that his job description would be more than just “be around,” telling reporters that he “envisioned himself as a federal liaison with a specific focus on economic development.” By contrast, Hochul, who had spent seven long years toiling away as LG herself while her boss tormented and ignored her, believed that Delgado should suffer a similar fate, the way a frat bro believes the new pledges should be hazed just as he was. And second, Delgado imagined that he would be allowed to have opinions, and that he would be allowed to express them, even when they differed from Hochul’s: Delgado refused to show support for Hector Lasalle (a conservative judge who Hochul nominated for the state’s highest court in 2022), he publicly called for Biden to drop out of the race after the June 2024 debate (Hochul remained silent until the end), and he urged Eric Adams to resign in February of 2025 (Hochul decided not to remove him from office even after her hand-picked deputy mayors all quit.)

It does not matter that Delgado happened to go three-for-three on accuracy here. The Lieutenant Governor is not allowed to disagree with the Governor. Delgado announced that he would not support Hochul’s re-election in February of 2025, and in return, she stripped him of his office and staff. Four months later, he announced his bid to run against her, and has aggressively courted the left ever since, trying to build a coalition that can outflank her in this summer’s Democratic primary.

It would have been a difficult task no matter what, but Delgado has suffered awful timing. Hochul has become significantly more popular, including with the left of the party, since Trump became President, and now has a tenuous alliance with New York City’s new left-wing mayor, an alliance that absolutely no one on the left wants to mess up by supporting a no-hope primary challenge. Delgado’s sole elected endorsement, Brooklyn State Senator Jabari Brisport, was punished immediately for it. In a hilarious act of pettiness, Hochul’s team insisted that Brisport leave a press conference on a new piece of legislation last week so that they would not accidentally give him positive publicity. No one else on the left wants to stick their neck out and receive this kind of backlash from the Governor’s office. Nor should they, for a guy like Delgado who has no progressive credentials whatsoever, and was very recently one of the most conservative Democrats in Congress.

Hilariously, Delgado has spent almost an entire year (and has another one to go) in limbo, with no office, staff, official responsibilities, or contact with his boss, actively running against her, and yet still, on paper, the Lieutenant Governor of the state, and next in line in an emergency. He’s there because Hochul legally cannot fire him: unlike the Vice President, LGs are elected on a separate ballot line in New York, which gives their aimless grazing around in their pasture an “electoral mandate.” In the eyes of the State Constitution, voters care deeply about who holds this ceremonial role, they’ve expressed their preference, and the Governor of New York could not undermine their will and fire their LG any more than they could fire the Governor of Hawaii or the President of France.

In practice, the New York State Constitution can be amended pretty easily, and Hochul could probably figure out a way to remove Delgado if she cared. The fact that she has not done so is a good encapsulation of how insignificant this role truly is. She would not tolerate having an unambiguous enemy, actively trying to undermine her at every turn, if he occupied a role that contained any power or significance whatsoever.

II.

So it’s not entirely surprising that she seems to be struggling to fill this role. NY1’s Bernadette Hogan reported last week that Queens Borough President Donovan Richards and Bronx State Senator Jamaal Bailey both turned down offers from Hochul. She has to name someone by the end of this week, so that they can receive the official party endorsement alongside her at the State Democratic Party Convention in Syracuse this Friday.

Based on her past selections, and on current reporting, Hochul’s team seems to care about “balancing the ticket” demographically, if not ideologically. Specifically, she wants to pair herself, a moderate white woman from Buffalo, with a moderate Black or Hispanic guy from the city. There’s absolutely no electoral reason to do this. Maybe among this vast state’s eight million voters, there exists a swing voter who is ambivalent about Hochul, but who likes her LG pick (on purely identitarian grounds?) enough to sway them in the Governor’s race (which, again, is a separate election; there’s nothing stopping this hypothetical voter from voting for the LG and not Hochul). There cannot possibly be enough such people to justify such rigid selection criteria. She could pick anyone and it would have the same effect on her race: none.

Nevertheless, there is consensus among Hogan, the City and State’s Rebecca Lewis, and the rest of the Albany press corps that there are three remaining contenders, and they are all men of color from Brooklyn: current Brooklyn Assemblymember Brian Cunningham, current Secretary of State and former Brooklyn Assemblymember Walter Mosley, and Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez.

While the others play it coy, Cunningham has actively sought the position. A relatively low-profile two-term Assemblymember, Cunningham would likely not be on Hochul’s radar, except that he is practicing a brazen, Travis Kelce-esque speak-your-overambitious-dreams-into-existence strategy, recently telling NY1 (unprompted) that “if the governor asked [about LG], obviously, I think an opportunity to serve the state is something I would always say yes to.” He later told Rebecca Lewis that he believed himself to be “still in the mix.” There’s something equal parts pathetic, hilarious, and awesome about wanting such a lame job so openly. Sadly, this weekend, Cunningham told the Capitol Pressroom’s David Lombardo that he had not yet even been vetted by Hochul’s team, a sign that they are not taking his overtures too seriously.

Lombardo reports that Mosley is a much more likely choice. Hakeem Jeffries’s handpicked successor, Walter Mosley was first elected to represent the 57th Assembly District (Bed-Stuy) in 2012, when Jeffries left to run for Congress. He won three more terms easily, and as Jeffries established himself as the dominant force among the city’s Black outer borough Democrats, their alliance grew more valuable to Mosley. Then, in 2020, the NYC-DSA, having established itself as a formidable power in Astoria, flexed their muscle by riding the G-train into Bed-Stuy and busting up Jeffries’s machine. When the dust had settled, DSA-endorsed public school teacher Jabari Brisport had won the neighborhood’s State Senate seat, and DSA organizer and former nurse Phara Souffrant Forrest had beaten Mosley by nearly ten points. Humbled, Mosley founded a comms and lobbying firm and waited patiently for four years. Then, in 2024, Hochul appointed him to his current sinecure as Secretary of State, which is, Wikipedia tells me, responsible for administering state-issued professional licenses and managing the state’s athletic commission. It is the rare job in New York State politics from which Lieutenant Governor would be an unambiguous upgrade.

Mosley seems like a nice enough guy. He has never been federally indicted, which is a concerningly rare distinction among Brooklyn Democrats these days. But readers interested in advancing progressive policy goals should hope that Hochul chooses Gonzalez instead. It’s not because of Mosley’s politics, which are staunchly moderate, but no more than Hochul’s (and as previously mentioned, completely irrelevant, as he will be forbidden from expressing them.) Rather, progressives should be excited by the unique, generational opportunity that Gonzalez’s vacancy would present the city’s criminal legal reform movement.

Mayors get all the media attention, but when it comes to protecting and serving our city’s most vulnerable, at-risk populations, the District Attorneys wield power far more directly. While the mayor is busy negotiating budget minutiae with City Council and begging Albany to give him the authority to make tiny, incremental reforms, the city’s five DAs oversee an army of more than a hundred prosecutors, each empowered to decide, virtually unilaterally, the fate of the thousands of New Yorkers who are arrested every day. DA’s have tremendous sway over any legislation that involves crime, policing, and public health. And they have massive community outreach budgets, which can be used to launch a run for another elected office when their term is up.

Despite its deep-blue bent and its wealth of local justice advocacy organizations, New York City has never elected a truly progressive, reform-oriented prosecutor in the mold of Philadelphia’s Larry Krasner or Austin’s Jose Garza. Gonzalez and Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg have both branded themselves as reformers when it suits them (ie in the 2021 election but not in 2025), and have taken cautious steps towards deprioritizing certain drug offenses, expanding access to diversion programs for specific types of offenders, and creating Conviction Integrity Units to review the egregious mistakes of their predecessors and free some wrongly accused people. But they are also fierce law-and-order reactionaries when they want to be, seeking barbaric sentences (Gonzalez’s ADA’s are still authorized to seek life without parole), selectively cracking down on certain offenses (drug distribution, gun possession) that are ten times likelier to involve a Black defendant than a White one, and advocating for and then mercilessly exploiting loopholes in the state’s recent bail and discovery reforms to coerce defendants into unfavorable plea deals.

Of course, there’s no guarantee that Gonzalez’s successor would be more progressive than he is, and there’s a risk that they could be significantly worse. But the race comes at a good time for New York City’s criminal legal reform movement, which has suffered major narrative losses since its 2020-era heyday, due in large part to a spike in crime in 2021 and 2022. While this spike mirrored national trends, tough-on-crime conservatives successfully convinced a significant share of the electorate that the state’s reforms were responsible, and that progressives could not be trusted on crime. Zohran Mamdani, a longtime ally of the reform movement, was forced to virtually abandon his criminal justice agenda in the general election in order to focus on issues of greater perceived strength like housing affordability and universal childcare. Ending mass incarceration and fighting for racial justice have been firmly labelled political losers, even in Zohran’s NYC.

As the city’s violent crime rate falls to record lows, this election cycle would be a great time to fight back and rebuild support. In 2026, a savvy, strategic candidate could build on the DSA’s dominance in Brooklyn, message strategically to harness the party’s new burst of outrage about the carceral state’s high salience abuses (there has never been a better time to convince normie Democrats of the importance of due process rights), and win on a proudly pro-justice, anti-mass-incarceration platform. If they pull it off, it could send a strong signal to Mamdani and the rest of the city that criminal legal reform is politically viable here. And more importantly, it would substantively improve the lives of tens of thousands of at-risk Brooklynites who would be less likely to suffer the inhumane horrors of Rikers Island.

Kathy Hochul is no ally to the criminal legal reform movement. Let’s hope that she unwittingly assists it anyway, by selecting Eric Gonzalez to be her next Lieutenant Governor so that someone better can replace him. Please do not send her this blog.