Political Whisperer
By Robert Hornak
Labor Day is here, marking the official end of summer and beginning of the end of the campaign season. This is the perfect time to look back at what has happened and what’s to come.
ALBANY
Democrats, who hold all the power in state government, passed a $269 billion budget for the coming fiscal year. This set off alarm bells with all the fiscal watchdogs as this budget is a 10.9% increase over the year before. This is five times the average 2.2% pre-covid annual increase, reflecting the high tax and spend agenda of the Democratic Socialists.
Hochul, however, has been resisting big tax increases on the wealthy, the objective of many Democrats in the state legislature. While Hochul has traditionally been a moderate, she has been very generous with the DSA’s agenda, even agreeing to temporarily fund a very small childcare program for Mamdani, and giving him his pied-a-terre tax that will raise approximately $400 million annually.
Ed Koch used to say that the people weren’t safe when Albany was in session. The 2026 session is now over, but with the campaign promises being made these days it appears the people have no time to feel secure.
NEW YORK CITY
Mamdani had a rough summer. His roll out of the pied-a-terre tax was totally botched, resulting in lawsuits from people who should not have been targeted. He’s had a few appointments pulled for controversial social media posts and has been accused of stacking every board and commission with anti-Jewish members, including NYC’s antisemitism task force.
Meanwhile, Mamdani has also failed to bring the cost of living down, seeing an all-time high in Manhattan rents and NYC’s high expense contributing to New York coming in fourth nationally in the state with the highest income needed to live comfortably. That’s not an award either Mamdani or Hochul want to hang on their wall.
Mamdani is also having big problems with his government-owned supermarket plan. Each store is millions of dollars over budget and appears to move slower than a city bus through midtown (another promise that hasn’t seen any success).
Where a full service supermarket can be built out and opened in just a few months, these stores are on the multi-year program. And the outrage from the local store owners who risk going out of business isn’t making these look like such a wonderful benefit when many of the shoppers will be using unemployment benefits AND still need to show ID and prove city residency to shop.
Overall, not much success for Mamdani to show this year.
RACE FOR GOVERNOR
While Hochul is showing great resistance to much of what the socialists want, it’s unlikely that it’s because she’s nervous about reelection this year. In the one poll this summer by Siena, Hochul has a relatively comfortable 10 point lead over Bruce Blakeman, 49-39. That’s almost the same as the same poll in the summer of 2022 where she held a 53-39 lead over Lee Zeldin.
The dynamics were very different in 2022, with the Biden open borders plan just setting in and midtown Manhattan streets being taken over by criminal illegal aliens and the Roosevelt Hotel being used as their base of operations. Now, four years later ICE has deported thousands of criminal aliens from city streets, causing violent crime in most categories to plummet. Crime is not the motivating issue for most New Yorkers now and wasn’t for enough voters in 2022.
The big issue now is affordability and cost of living. Blakeman has not yet put out an affordability plan that resonates with voters. Blakeman needs to get the voters attention if he wants to get traction and it needs to be on the issues they care about. Whether he does or not will in large part determine whether this is a real race come November or just another sleeper election for New York and what happens down ballot, in particular with critical House races.
Just like in Game of Thrones, winter is coming and will be here in no time.
Robert Hornak is a veteran political consultant who has previously worked for the NYC office of the Republican Assembly Leader and served as Executive Director of the Queens Republican Party. He can be reached at rahornak@gmail.com and @roberthornak on X.
