Gov. Kathy Hochul has made her choice with nine days left in the race, and it is Mayor Zohran Mamdani. The two Democrats shared a stage Sunday at a Crown Heights, Brooklyn, event aimed at turning out the vote, taking turns going after President Trump and Republican gubernatorial nominee Bruce Blakeman, the New York Post reported.
It was not a one-off. The pair first campaigned side by side Friday in Brooklyn’s McCarren Park, have endorsed each other and have appeared together at a string of press conferences. Mamdani even cut a pro-Hochul campaign ad this month.
At Medgar Evers College, the democratic socialist mayor touted his partnership with the governor and credited her with helping invest $1.2 billion in universal child care, a program he warned Blakeman would undo.
“We are living in the most expensive city in the United States of America,” Mamdani told the crowd. “We are trying to bring costs down for New Yorkers…and we have a Republican candidate who is to say if he’s to win he will cancel universal childcare.”
He then went for the laugh line. “If this was a Bruce Blakeman rally, they’d be like, ‘Get this kid out of here. We don’t want childcare for him,’” Mamdani said.
Hochul, who is billed as the moderate in this partnership, took the stage to chants of “four more years” and called Blakeman “next level crazy.” She spent much of her time on Trump, accusing the president of attacking election integrity and blaming him for rising gas prices.
“He’s trying to undermine our elections right now so people don’t have the confidence that their vote is protected,” Hochul said.
She quoted Blakeman as promising to bring “Trump-style leadership to Albany,” and brushed off the charge that her campaign is nothing but an anti-Trump crusade. “People say, ‘oh you’re just running against Donald Trump,’ Yeah, I do that in my spare time,” she said.
Her closing line: “We are not surrendering to a king. We never have and we never will.”
So the sitting governor of New York, asking voters for a second four-year term on Nov. 3, is now campaigning shoulder to shoulder with a self-described socialist whose first year in City Hall has been defined by tax-the-rich schemes and budget fights. Hochul is not running away from that record. She is standing next to it.
That hands Blakeman, the Nassau County executive, his closing argument. He has called Hochul Mamdani’s “puppet” and hammered her over the state’s sanctuary policy for migrants. A joint rally with the mayor does little to rebut him.
The open question is whether it pays off for Hochul. As the Post noted, nobody yet knows whether Mamdani’s Democratic Socialists of America comrades will show up for her at the polls. If they do not, Hochul will have tied herself to a socialist mayor and gotten nothing for it.
Source: nypost.com
