NEW YORK — It’s an open question whether the biggest looming political headache for Gov. Kathy Hochul (D-NY) is a strong Republican challenger or a Democratic primary rival.
Either way, the governor is in a New York state of (political) bind.
Hochul, heading into her 2026 reelection bid, could face a Democratic primary rival who would stand a respectable chance of an upset — in the form of Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-NY).
Even if a Democratic gubernatorial primary challenge came up short, it would still likely expose Hochul’s political vulnerabilities, which the eventual Republican nominee could then politically exploit in the November 2026 general election. For example, Rep. Mike Lawler (R-NY), a House colleague of Torres, is eyeing a gubernatorial bid.
The 2026 New York gubernatorial race figures to be a continuation of the treacherous political waters Hochul has faced since she assumed the state government’s top job in 2021. By that point, Hochul had been New York’s lieutenant governor for 6 1/2 years.
As the understudy to then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo, a fellow Democrat, Hochul was largely frozen out of policy deliberations and other decisions. Instead, Hochul used her largely ceremonial role to travel the state and boost her recognition through ribbon-cutting events and lots of political glad-handling.
Effectively being out of the loop in Cuomo’s administration turned out to be a political benefit. He resigned amid allegations of sexual harassment, giving Hochul plausible deniability about knowing the gubernatorial misdoing and skullduggery.
Hochul won a gubernatorial term in 2022. However, it was by a much narrower margin than expected in solidly blue New York, with impacts that hampered Democratic performance up and down the ballot.
This was to the point that a one-time political ally during Hochul’s brief House career, former Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), argued that in 2022, Democrats had lost five key races and the chamber’s majority due to the incumbent’s weak campaign. Voters in seemingly deep-blue New York only gave Hochul a 53%-47% win due to discontent about crime, pulling down the whole Democratic ticket.
“That is an issue that had to be dealt with early on, not 10 days before the election,” Pelosi told the New York Times in January 2023. “The governor didn’t realize soon enough where the trouble was.”
Republicans kept making political gains in New York, a state of just under 20 million people (according to July 1, 2024, Census figures), the nation’s fourth most populous. New York remains comfortably Democratic, but it had the biggest GOP swing in the nation during the 2024 presidential election.
President Donald Trump, a Queens native who long held court at Trump Tower, housing his penthouse and eponymous company, before decamping to Florida, won 43.31% of New York’s vote last year. That showing against Democratic rival Kamala Harris, then-vice president, was a notable rise from Trump’s 36.75% of the vote in 2016, when he won his first, nonconsecutive term. And 37.74% of the vote in the 2020 election, when Trump lost the White House to former President Joe Biden, ushering in what turned out to be a four-year sojourn in the political wilderness.
Trump’s 2024 New York performance was the best of any Republican candidate since 1988, when former President George H.W. Bush lost by just 4.1 points. Trump’s relative New York electoral success followed a trend of Democratic states becoming less deep-blue indigo and at least a light shade of purpose, including California, Illinois, Massachusetts, and New Jersey.
GOP inroads in New York were deep enough that the northern Queens and eastern Bronx 14th Congressional District, a seat held by firebrand leftist Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), swung 24 points to the right in the presidential election. Trump still would have lost the constituency but by a much narrower margin than four years prior.
Multiple political headaches
Hochul, 66, has frequently dominated headlines in early 2025, though not necessarily in ways she would have chosen. That’s partly due to her strategy of leading opposition to the second, nonconsecutive Trump administration while also working with it on some key matters.
Trump and Hochul met in the Oval Office on Feb. 21 to discuss a controversial Manhattan toll program known as congestion pricing. Hochul is trying to save the toll program as Trump moves to rescind federal approval through the Department of Transportation. Shortly before the White House meeting, New York transit officials filed a legal challenge to Trump’s action in a bid to keep the $9 tolls in place.
Congestion pricing opponents cheered the program’s potential demise while Trump referred to himself as a “king” when reversing federal approval. The program is meant to raise a billion dollars that will be leveraged for $15 billion in bonds to shore up the region’s troubled mass transit infrastructure.
Hochul, who delayed implementation of the tolls last June over concerns the program would hurt battleground House Democratic candidates, backed its implementation after the November election. The program went into effect on Jan. 5, and Hochul fiercely pushed back against efforts to end it.
Hochul is also grappling with the saga of federal corruption allegations against New York City Mayor Eric Adams, the Democratic incumbent. The Trump Justice Department pressed to end his corruption case while the mayor cooperated with the administration’s immigration goals.
Hochul, as governor, has the power to remove Adams from office but has declined to do so. That position has drawn fierce criticism — from state lawmakers in New York and left-wing activists, who argue it would strike a blow against Trump administration malfeasance.
“The last thing the people of New York want is for our city to turn into an annex of the Trump administration, yet that’s exactly what is happening,” Democratic state Sen. Mike Gianaris said in a Feb. 14 X post.
“Eric Adams is clearly compromised and can no longer be considered the legitimate leader or our city,” wrote Gianaris, representing a state Senate district primarily covering northwest Queens.
Democratic primary challenge?
These unfavorable political circumstances for Hochul would seem to set up a primary challenge from the left, the traditional path to denying incumbent officeholders renomination in Democratic primaries. However, the electoral equation would be different for Torres in the race. Since his 2020 election to the House, after seven years as a New York City Council member, Torres has positioned himself as one of the more centrist congressional Democrats.
Torres, 36, Afro-Latino and gay, is a prominent scourge of identity politics. Torres, who represents the central Bronx 15th Congressional District, at a Nov. 18 post-Election Day event in Manhattan, called identity politics, as practiced by much of the Democratic establishment, politically toxic.
“Donald Trump essentially built the kind of coalition that the socialists dream of building, uniting the White working class of rural America with the Black and Brown working class of urban America,” Torres said, two weeks after Trump won every swing state.
Torres also is a stalwart supporter of Israel, a position increasingly at odds with the Democratic base. A Gallup poll released Feb. 24 found that 83% of Republicans hold favorable views of Israel, while only 33% of Democrats feel the same — a record gap.
As for running for governor against Hochul in the Democratic primary and giving up his safe House seat, Torres hasn’t declared but has amped up criticism of her gubernatorial record.
In a late January letter to Hochul, Torres accused her of bungling oversight of New York’s early intervention program for toddlers with developmental disabilities such as autism and Down syndrome.
“New York has the single worst early intervention program in the nation, ranking 50 out of 50,” Torres said. “The time has come for you to end your dubious distinction of presiding over America’s worst early intervention program.”
About a week later, Torres, in a letter to New York’s utilities regulator, blasted Con Edison’s “outrageous” proposed rate hikes. He urged the panel to reject any increase above the rate of inflation.
“Governor Kathy Hochul’s Public Service Commission must reject any proposed rate hike that far exceeds the rate of inflation,” Torres wrote.
Torres also, in late February, endorsed Cuomo in New York City’s 2025 mayoral election. Cuomo has yet to enter the race but is expected to do so in the coming weeks. It’s a not-so-subtle dig at Hochul, considering the governor’s strained relations with her former boss, going back to her days as an outcast lieutenant governor.
An expected November 2026 Republican threat
About a 32-mile drive north and west from Torres’s constituency, Lawler is also making increasingly loud noises about a gubernatorial bid in lower Hudson Valley’s 17th Congressional District.
He, too, has blasted Hochul over looming utility rate hikes. He’s also criticized the governor’s Manhattan congestion price plan.
Lawler is a proven vote-getter in a swing district. After all, he won what was arguably the biggest symbolic victory for House Republicans in a disappointing 2022 midterm: He defeated the sitting Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee chairman, then-Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney (D-NY). Two years later, Lawler easily won reelection, while voters in his district narrowly preferred Harris over Trump, 49.91% to 49.35%.
And while Hochul is known for at-time awkward and stiff campaign appearances, Lawler has a natural showman’s flair going back years. In 2005, as a high school senior, Lawler flew from New York to California to attend parts of the late singer Michael Jackson’s criminal trial. The pop star was charged with molesting a 13-year-old boy at his Neverland Ranch. The case ended in acquittal. Jackson died four years later.
That same year, Lawler graduated as valedictorian from Manhattan College, located in the Bronx (now known as Manhattan University). He worked his way up through state Republican politics, was elected to the state Assembly, and then, two years later, won his first congressional race.
Once in Congress, Lawler became a cable television fixture and wasn’t afraid to stand out from the crowd of often-staid, blow-dried politicians. This past July, while in Milwaukee for the Republican National Convention, Lawler joined Rep. Kat Cammack (R-FL) in paying tribute to Wisconsin’s most famous pair of fictional women, Laverne & Shirley, with a rendition — dance moves and all — of their signature song lyric, “Schlemiel! Schlimazel! Hasenpfeffer Incorporated!”
Hochul, to be sure, shouldn’t be underestimated politically. While New York has shifted right considerably, Democrats’ still-superior voter registration numbers mean Republicans in statewide races start as underdogs. That’s something Lawler will no doubt assess as he considers a gubernatorial bid.
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As for trying to nab the Democratic nomination from Hochul, Torres would start with considerably less name recognition than the incumbent. Moreover, she’s won a series of tough races, starting with Buffalo-area local posts for Hamburg Town Board and then Erie County clerk before an open House seat victory in a 2011 special election.
Whatever controversies swirl around her currently, incumbency has its perks. Though, with a pair of House members from both parties considering trying to take her job, Hochul will have to play defense from the right and the center — if not quite the center-left.
