While New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo faces investigations over his coronavirus response and allegations of sexual harassment, Lt. Gov. Kathy Hochul waits in the wings in case he falls.
Cuomo said on Wednesday that he will not resign, but he’s still facing significant pressure to do so from Democrats on both the state and national stage. If Cuomo goes, Hochul is next in line. Her ascent wouldn’t be the first time she has benefited from another party member’s blunders.
Hochul, 62, hails from Buffalo and stepped into national politics almost by accident. In 2011, Christopher Lee, the Republican congressman representing the Rust Belt city, abruptly resigned when the gossip website Gawker revealed his extramarital exploits. Lee, who had a young son, posed as a divorced lobbyist and sent shirtless pictures of himself to a woman on Craigslist’s “Women Seeking Men” online forum.
When Lee resigned, Hochul won what had long been a Republican-held seat in a special election. The four-way race was tight to the end, and Hochul played up her past opposition to former Gov. Eliot Spitzer, a fellow Democrat, who was forced out of his position by a prostitution scandal, to score points with Buffalo residents.
But Hochul’s time in Congress was short-lived. Republican Chris Collins in 2012 beat her in a close race, which Collins framed as a referendum on former President Barack Obama’s first term. Collins, the first sitting congressman to endorse former President Donald Trump, was a House member until 2019, when he resigned because of an insider trading scandal. Trump pardoned Collins in a rush of late-term clemency orders.
Cuomo, in 2014, added Hochul to his ticket for a second term, hoping to gain support with the more conservative areas of upstate New York. Hochul, although a Democrat, consistently during her term ran to the right of her party. Notably, she had been critical of Cuomo’s gun control pushes and had earned an endorsement from the National Rifle Association in her race against Collins.
Cuomo’s decision made Hochul the first woman on the state’s Democratic ticket in more than two decades. If she replaces Cuomo now, she will become the first female governor of the state and the first from Buffalo since Grover Cleveland.
“Obviously, she’s a woman, and she brings that perspective to a ticket,” Cuomo said when he picked Hochul, emphasizing that he believed her selection would help him win with not just right-leaning voters but women in general. The duo won in 2014 and again in 2018.
Hochul’s duties are most ceremonial, and the role of lieutenant governor in New York was mostly overlooked until the Spitzer scandal in 2008. After the governor’s resignation, David Paterson was elevated from obscurity to fill the role.
Hochul now faces a similar possibility, and she’s remained mostly out of the limelight while Cuomo suffers his public agony. Hochul released a statement on Saturday saying that she supports an investigation and thinks that “everyone deserves to have their voice heard and taken seriously” in regard to sexual harassment allegations against Cuomo.
Hochul was a champion in the #MeToo movement within the Cuomo administration, headlining his 2015 “Enough Is Enough” campaign targeting sexual assault on college campuses. Hochul also was candid about sexual harassment in 2017, telling Buffalo’s local NPR station, “We’re not putting up with this anymore.”
