The path to Democratic victory
At a coffee shop in Lower Manhattan on the day before President Trump was impeached, Lt. Gov. Kathy Hochul sipped tea and reflected on the summer of 1974, when Congress prepared to impeach Richard Nixon.
“I was a young teenager watching the Watergate hearings. I watched every minute, gavel to gavel. I was a complete nerd; that’s how I spent my summer,” she told me. “I was mesmerized. And I wanted to be part of that, I wanted to work in that white building that they all walked out of. Because they were protecting our country.”
Nixon resigned. Hochul got her youthful wish, becoming a staffer to Sen. Pat Moynihan and eventually winning elections to become Erie County clerk, a member of Congress and now lieutenant governor to Andrew Cuomo.
One hopes that tomorrow’s leaders are watching and learning from the drama playing out in Washington today. Democratic politicians and investigators, flawed and imperfect like the rest of us, have been trying mightily to counter and contain President
Trump’s shocking efforts to openly invite foreign powers to go after his political opponents.
Republican defenders of Trump have made the fateful decision to endorse his actions no matter what, even in the face of polls consistently showing that nearly half the country would like to see the president removed from office.
Next year is sure to be a bruising battle for control of the White House, Congress and statehouses from coast to coast. Trump’s upcoming trial in the Senate will be swiftly followed by the first presidential primaries and caucuses in February and a string of downballot races.
Hochul, the newly-named chair of the Democratic Lieutenant Governors Association, has been raising money for Democratic candidates and pressing national Dems to adopt some of
New York’s programs as they run for office next year.
“The failures in Washington have forced the states to assume leadership roles. Whether it’s on climate change, or the governor [Cuomo] forming a climate coalition with other states when Trump took us out of the Paris Agreement; what we’ve done for paid family leave, what we’re trying to do for child care; the minimum wage increase; a lot of our jail reform issues; our Child Victims Act. A lot of the things we’ve done here, they don’t have in other states.”
New York-style programs that provide direct help to middle-class voters, she says, is the key to re-connecting with disillusioned Democratic voters, many of whom stayed home or voted for Trump in 2016.
“We are in a position to say: These are Democratic values. We know how to bring back the men and women who feel like the party’s abandoned them in those Midwestern swing states, because that’s pretty much what Upstate New York is like. And there are a lot more affinities, sometimes, between a Milwaukee and a Buffalo than Buffalo and New York City.”
Hochul’s political mission won’t get nearly as much attention as the race for president, but control of statehouses will be a crucial fight in 2020. State officials are the ones who will redraw district maps in every state after next year’s Census count — and creatively drawn lines can create congressional seats that are tilted toward one party or the other.
The Dems are off to a decent start. When the Democratic Lieutenant Governors Association was created in August of 2018, it had only 14 members; a year later, after the 2018 midterms and a few special elections, that number has jumped to 24.
Hochul is looking to flip more seats, and has her eye on North Carolina, which currently has a Democratic governor and a Republican liutenant governor. (18 states allow the posts to be split between the parties.)
When the dust settles after the 2020 elections, she predicts, “our grandkids will say this wasn’t a bad time in our country’s history. This is a time when we regained our soul.”
Louis is political anchor of NY1 News.