Photo: Julia Demaree Nikhinson/AP

Just over four years ago, Andrew Cuomo resigned from office. Driven from the governorship over a cascading number of sexual-harassment allegations, he entered the political wilderness only to reemerge this year, when he decided to run for mayor. In the meantime, his little-known lieutenant, Kathy Hochul, became governor. A quiet political force in her own right — she has raised tens of millions of dollars and helped to resurrect a once-moribund statewide Democratic Party — Hochul has suffered her fair share of criticism, from moderates who resented her attempts to build more housing in the suburbs to progressives who chafed over her aggressive push to weaken criminal-justice-reform laws. Still, she has endured, and her approval ratings have remained respectable.

On the policy and public-infrastructure front, Hochul has notched tangible successes, from funding an expansion of the Second Avenue Subway to kicking off the design and construction process for the Interborough Express, a rail line that will connect far-flung neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Queens. She has beaten back Trump to safeguard congestion pricing and thrilled Democrats of late with her promise to follow California in the redistricting wars. Next year, she’ll battle for reelection again with her toughest opponent expected to be Elise Stefanik, the prominent Republican congresswoman who is close to Donald Trump.

In a recent conversation with New York, Hochul reflected on her four years in power, the Trump threat, her relationship with Zohran Mamdani, and how her deployment of the National Guard was different than Trump’s.

**How are you preparing for Trump’s budget cuts? How is New York going to withstand them?**On July 4, he declared war on the rest of the nation. And as a result, we’ve already been having to find a way to make up for $750 million cuts this year. We saw this coming — this was not a surprise. Donald Trump was telegraphing that he was going to not care about hurting everyday Americans. And as a state where half our children are on Medicaid and one-third of New Yorkers are on Medicaid, that he went right to the heart of something we treasure, which is giving people the dignity of health care …

We’re going back to our agencies right now, aggressively talking about it — some programs that might have to be new programs, that we might have to put on hold a little while, but also focusing on how to squeeze every penny we can. But then, heading into next year, I’ve talked to the [legislative] leaders; I had another meeting with the leaders a couple days ago. There’s not a sense that we can’t do this in the next session, and that’s what we plan to do. But these are going to be massive cuts, so we’re working with all the stakeholders, the health-care workers and the hospitals, and the people who represent these individuals who are going to find out they don’t have health insurance. And how does the State of New York manage that when these cuts are going to be so painful? That’s one dynamic.

**And there’s the other dynamic, which is not a cut per se, but going to war with Canada.**I’m up to different parts of the state. Northern communities that rely on tourism and cross-border visitors and engagement — they’re actually being crushed.

**You’ve said, unlike Zohran Mamdani, you don’t want to raise corporate taxes. Are any tax hikes on the table to fill shortfalls?**I’ve not said “We’re not looking for some shared sacrifice from people who can afford it.” I’ve also said there are different forms [revenue raisers can take]. But I also think we’re going to have to be talking to everyone affected and finding out how we can work together to make sure that we can afford this. That’s what we’re working on: some freezes and some areas where I can get support from our agencies to do more with less.

Tax increases, I’m concerned, will have a negative effect on our ability to keep businesses here that I need to. But I’ll also say I have to have serious, hard conversations with our leaders, and we already started them, about how we make up the shortfall, because it’s going to be difficult.

**Trump has dispatched the National Guard to Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., already, and he’s threatening to do the same in New York. You deployed the National Guard last year to the subway system to combat crime. What’s the difference between Trump’s threatened deployments and your own?**I’m the commander-in-chief of the National Guard in New York State. And I made a decision at a time when crime on the subways was ever increasing. Nothing was changing that dynamic. And there was enormous fear from people who were wanting to go back to work in person and people letting their kids go back on the subway to go to school. I needed to stop that fear factor. I took an aggressive position, and I will tell you, after deploying National Guard in there who do not have a military role to play — they are not allowed to arrest anybody, and they’re basically a deterrent — their presence alone, within days, calmed down the fear and anxiety of going into the subways. I heard this from countless people, and people called me or told me on the street how grateful they were, and I didn’t want there to be an abuse or an overreach. They don’t arrest people. I limited their powers dramatically.

Donald Trump should not be involved in local policing matters. And I will say this: If you’re seriously contemplating this, it is an enormous insult to the highly dedicated men and women of the NYPD … He’s spitting in the face of our law enforcement to say they can’t do their job. These are people who don’t deserve that — to be undermined by a military presence. And Washington, D.C., I lived there for ten years and another two when I went to Congress. My children lived down in that area. My daughter took her 6-week-old baby to the Museum of Natural History, and she said, “Mom, it’s insane. It’s a militarized zone. They are standing there, hundreds of them walking up and down the Mall with nothing to do.” Those are not the areas of high crime. If they really want to be helpful, coordinate with the mayor. Say “Do you need some extra help?” Well, let’s look at the high-crime areas.

**You’ve vowed to have New York redraw its congressional lines to counteract Texas. Unlike California, though, the soonest there’d be new Democrat-friendly House seats is 2028?**I truly wish I had the same authority that my friend Gavin Newsom has. I would be out there already by now, because this is a fight that we cannot avoid. History will judge us, otherwise, as a state that did not step up to the fight when our democracy demanded it. And that is not hyperbole. That is what I really feel is happening here.

You know, the way [the Texas Republicans] are absolutely cheating and throwing out the rule book, it’s just shocking what they’re doing. I’m not saying when they go low, I’m going to go lower, although I’m tempted. I’ll just say this: I will go as low as they go, because I’m not going to sit on the sidelines of this game. It’s just not possible for me.

We’re going to do it. It’s going to be in the 2025–2026 session. We’re going to do it in the first days of the ’26 session. And then the other voting reforms, because that’s customarily when they get done — the first couple weeks of the session. We’ll look at that. I’d like to look at mail-in voting, how to make sure we protect that in New York against whatever Trump does on mail-in voting. I’ve had a look at other areas to protect what we’ve already done, which is to have some of the best voting-rights laws in the country. They can’t touch those.

Democrats have always been the good-government people, right? We like rules that take money out of politics and take undue influence from the political people, but those days are over. But I don’t want to believe they’re permanently over. When there’s new leadership in Washington and we get Democrats in Congress supporting what they’ve already introduced, which is a national standard for redistricting and having independent commissions in every state, we can get back to that. I’m not giving up on that model of good government. I’m truly not. I just know that these times call for drastic measures.

**Do you have any plans to endorse Zohran Mamdani in the general election? Can anything get you to that point?**I can tell you this: I’ve had a number of conversations with him, a number of meetings. There are still some areas of disagreement, but he understands them and why it’s important for me to know that he’s addressing them, whether it’s related to the Jewish community and the business community. But we also have very strong areas of alignment. Affordability is not something that we just started embracing. It’s something I’ve been focused on way before the mayor’s race.

I announced universal child care in my State of the State address last January. I think where we can find alignment is a timetable to get it to happen. We can’t do a $7 billion child-care program in year one. How about over a longer runway, let’s do things in a smart way? Whoever the mayor of New York City is, I will work with them as long as they’re going to stand up to Donald Trump.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

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