Inside the split between Kathy Hochul and Antonio Delgado

Gov. Kathy Hochul and her deputy, Lt. Gov. Antonio Delgado, haven’t been playing off the same sheet music for a while now. It took a failed presidential run and an embattled mayor to make the off-key production coming out of the executive chamber painfully obvious to the rest of New York, but that doesn’t mean that political machinations in Washington, D.C., or New York City are to blame for the dissonance. Instead, a slowly building realization that the two upstate Democrats weren’t on the same team killed any hope for his future in the administration and any optimism she held toward gaining a new ally.

Delgado announced he wouldn’t seek reelection as lieutenant governor in February after his and Hochul’s latest public disagreement. Hochul pointed out the obvious during the fallout of his announcement: He clearly didn’t want the job of being her lieutenant governor anymore. What’s less clear is if he knew what he was getting into and, more importantly, if he ever had any intention of being a team player. More opaque still is whether Hochul inherited Cuomo’s style of leadership: Do what I want or else.

Since Delgado said the quiet part out loud and torched his relationship with Hochul, it hasn’t been obvious what his next move will be. In the parts of upstate New York where his name recognition and base of support are strongest, every winnable congressional seat is currently occupied by either an ally or a friend. Unless he holds a secret affinity for town council politics – or even more shockingly, the state Legislature – there isn’t anything down the food chain that makes sense either. He could always challenge Hochul herself, but doing so carries significant political risk.

Ripped at the seams

The cracks in their relationship began to show more than two years ago during Hochul’s failed push to get Hector LaSalle confirmed as chief judge of the state Court of Appeals. Progressive organizers and members of the state Senate revolted when Hochul nominated LaSalle to the position, arguing that his judicial record was too conservative to lead New York’s top court.

Naturally, members of her administration came out in support of LaSalle, and it was expected that Delgado would do the same. But according to a former member of the executive chamber, Delgado did not express any interest or willingness to do so. He was conspicuously absent when Hochul convened top Latino officials in New York to stump for LaSalle’s nomination, even though Delgado himself has Afro-Latino heritage. The governor burned an immense amount of political capital trying to force through LaSalle’s nomination, even threatening to sue the state Senate after the Judiciary Committee voted not to advance his nomination to the full Senate. In the end, though, the nomination failed.

While some former members of the executive chamber accused Delgado of failing to be a team player, others pointed out that Delgado was never consulted about his stance on LaSalle’s nomination beforehand. It was simply assumed that he would support it in public and push for it in the state Senate because it was what Hochul wanted. When he didn’t, the way Hochul and her team dealt with Delgado grew noticeably colder, according to people familiar with the situation.

Jessie Andrews, Delgado’s former chief of staff, said Hochul’s approach to the LaSalle nomination revealed her inability to use Delgado properly. “The LaSalle nomination was emblematic of Governor Hochul’s approach to decision-making. There was no process; no substantive case; no plan to get her hastily chosen nominee confirmed; and she didn’t even engage Lt. Gov. Delgado until her disastrous public rollout was underway,” Andrews said. “If she wanted a lieutenant who was just going to blindly follow without a clear rationale or plan, that’s not Antonio Delgado.”

The Biden saga only made things worse. Before June 2024, many political observers and members of the media had dismissed allegations that former President Joe Biden’s mental fitness was lacking to run a competitive campaign against President Donald Trump as cherry-picked conservative talking points. Then Biden delivered a halting, listless debate performance that left the nation shocked. Almost immediately, calls for him to resign, or at least bow out of the race, began to trickle in as fundraisers started to panic. Hochul stuck with Biden until the bitter end, but other major players in New York politics thought differently – including Delgado, who went public with his concerns about Biden in July. Although he gave Hochul a heads-up before calling for Biden to leave the ticket, she was still “furious” over his decision to publicly undermine her.

The move had no real effect on state government or even its politics, but it was a blatant sign that Hochul and Delgado weren’t on the same page. Former members of the executive chamber recalled that most collaboration stopped between the governor’s and lieutenant governor’s offices after Delgado called for Biden to leave the Democratic Party ticket. There were no more regular check-ins and joint planning sessions, and the lieutenant governor’s office began to send out a separate schedule to reporters that didn’t bear the executive chamber’s letterhead and layout. But those close to Hochul contend that the relationship between the governor and Delgado had soured even before last summer; a current member of the executive chamber said that Delgado had been skipping weekly meetings with the governor long before Biden became an issue.

Thanks to one mayor’s adoration of flight upgrades, the public would soon catch on to just how bad things had gotten.

For much of the past year, federal prosecutors’ corruption case against New York City Mayor Eric Adams dominated city politics but had a limited impact on state government. That changed in February, after the top federal prosecutor in New York City accused Adams of making a “quid pro quo” deal with the Trump administration to support Trump’s immigration policies in exchange for the federal charges against him being dropped. (Both Adams and the U.S. Department of Justice have denied the existence of a quid pro quo agreement, though the DOJ did order prosecutors to drop the charges.) Fearing the mayor of the country’s largest city was compromised, some politicians rushed to call for him to resign – and for Hochul to use her power under the state constitution to remove him from office if he refused to stop down. Hochul steadfastly refused to remove him or even call for him to resign, insisting that she did not want to second-guess the New Yorkers who had voted for him. In February, though, Delgado threw a wrench in the governor’s methodical approach to the situation by joining the calls for Adams to resign. It was effectively the last straw for Hochul.

The governor’s team released a fiery statement asserting that “Delgado does not now and has not ever spoken on behalf of this administration.” In turn, Delgado announced he would not seek reelection as lieutenant governor. In traditional Albany fashion, Hochul stripped him of his Second Floor office, staff, security detail and even his cellphone. All he has left now is a state Senate office, a single staffer and an intern.

The best intentions

Hochul was in a pinch in 2022. Brian Benjamin, her first lieutenant governor, had resigned amid a federal investigation into his campaign donations (the charges for which were later dropped) while running for New York City comptroller. Benjamin, though young, had years of experience in the state Senate under his belt and a clear directive to use his relationships in the state Legislature to help advance Hochul’s agenda – which he did successfully when Hochul pushed the Legislature to roll back certain portions of the bail reform law in 2022. When he left the administration, Hochul lost that and gained a very different kind of No. 2.

Four years after flipping the 19th Congressional District, a district that Trump had won in 2016, Delgado was planning to run for reelection when Hochul contacted him to sound him out as a replacement. According to sources familiar with the transition, there was an understanding that he would come on as a partner as the pair worked on delivering for New York. Delgado may not have had the Albany insider know-how of Benjamin, but he was a solid fundraiser with a record of getting legislation passed.

Both their expectations were mismatched with reality. Hochul was essentially looking for a version of herself – darting throughout the state, pushing policy and initiatives for the administration – just one that would get more respect than what former Gov. Andrew Cuomo had offered Hochul when she was lieutenant governor. But Delgado was seeking a true partnership. As a self-branded independent thinker with his own political cachet, he resented anything approaching a “‘you say jump,’ I ask ‘how high’” type of relationship. Shortly after he was appointed lieutenant governor in 2022, he told reporters that he envisioned himself as a federal liaison with a specific focus on economic development.

All that talk of a mutually beneficial partnership never yielded much of a real portfolio or modus operandi for Delgado to play with in support of the governor. He was able to create the Office of Service and Civic Engagement, and he also chaired the state Hate and Bias Prevention Unit, the Regional Economic Development Councils and New York’s Council on Community Justice. Not exactly name brand stuff.

Amelia Adams, who succeeded Andrews as Delgado’s chief of staff, said Hochul never gave much thought to who exactly Delgado was, both as an official and as a person. “Gov. Hochul sought out Antonio to run for LG because she needed someone who was an effective leader and communicator – and he has always been clear that he would maintain an independent voice,” Adams said. “The governor’s inability to utilize someone of Antonio’s background and skill set is telling.”

A source in the executive chamber countered that when Delgado was given opportunities, he didn’t step up to the plate, pointing to his eight-month delay in appointing an executive director of the Office of Service and Civic Engagement. The source said the executive chamber went out of its way to defend Delgado’s job performance and even identity, pushing back when critics questioned his Afro-Latino heritage.

It’s clear that the governor never made effective use of Delgado as a liaison to the state Legislature, the way that Hochul did with Benjamin. While the lieutenant governor is only technically in charge of the chamber, former members of the executive chamber said he wasn’t empowered to throw his weight around to push proposals through – which is probably the best use of a lieutenant governor short of saving the state’s chief executive a drive to the North Country in the winter. Though even that didn’t always go off without a hitch, either.

In 2023, a water main break in Watertown occurred while Hochul was on her way back from Israel following her father’s death. That is exactly the situation where a lieutenant governor is supposed to step up and appear on the scene to represent the governor. But a current member of the Hochul administration said Delgado was reluctant to leave New York City to fill in for Hochul and reassure the community. The person said Delgado arrived late to the North Country, had to be briefed on the issues on the walk from an elevator to the press conference and made no secret of wanting to get in and out quickly, even though it still wasn’t clear when the problem would be resolved.

A source close to Delgado offered a slightly different interpretation of what happened. They said the real issue was a lack of organization from Hochul’s staff, who didn’t hammer out a plan beyond asking him to show up in Watertown. The source said Delgado was first told to head to Hochul’s Manhattan office before being redirected to Newburgh to catch a plane upstate and was never briefed on the issue before he got to Watertown.

Whether the blame should fall on Delgado’s lack of interest or the Hochul team’s lack of organization, both sides realized that Delgado wasn’t always an effective surrogate for the governor. Eventually, the Hochul administration realized it was not actually necessary to put Delgado in temporary control of the state when she was out of its borders.

Well, now what?

For Hochul, the real missed opportunity as Delgado runs out the clock on his tenure may be political help in the Hudson Valley, where Delgado is well-liked but she is relatively unpopular. When they ran together in 2022 (though he has stressed he was elected independently), some of their strongest upstate returns were in places Delgado used to represent in Congress, like Ulster County, which proved vital in a surprisingly close race.

But since then, the lack of an overall plan for his political impact on Team Hochul has resulted in an invisible role becoming nonexistent. And now she’ll have to find yet another new running mate. It remains to be seen whether she’ll stick with her proven track record of lieutenant governors: young, Black and ambitious.

As for Delgado, it’s still not clear how he’s going to spend the next year and a half, or what his political future holds. The lieutenant governor has a robust campaign operation, and he’s giving speeches that sound an awful lot like campaign speeches, but he has not yet said what he is running for. Delgado and his campaign apparatus have been adamant that all options are open. The only problem is those options range from less than ideal to political suicide. He could try to parlay his statewide footprint into a U.S. Senate run … in 2028, when Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez may take her shot at the upper chamber. He could also try to move downriver in the Hudson Valley and try to gazump the increasingly crowded Democratic field in the 17th Congressional District. He’d then have the pleasure of facing the best political operator among New York Republicans: Rep. Mike Lawler. As former Rep. Mondaire Jones can attest, there are better ways to spend the fall in Rockland County. Finding a county executive seat to run for, or god forbid, something in the state Legislature, would be a dramatic step down. A congressional run north of Lawler’s district is improbable, unless he decides he hates his friends like Rep. Pat Ryan or goes the Marc Molinaro route and takes his family out of Dutchess County in an attempt to convince the good people of Broome County that he’s one of them.

Many political observers expect him to take his own shot at the Executive Mansion and primary Hochul next year. But such a run would face long odds. If he ran, he would likely represent the progressive lane in a three-way race with Hochul and Rep. Ritchie Torres, who has been attacking Hochul from the right. But it’s hard to run to the left of an administration that you yourself were a part of, and he can never hope to match Hochul’s fundraising – which is so strong that it can overcome even her dismal approval numbers, for now at least. Delgado may just know things the rest of us don’t, but if his political calculus was off, he might have ended his political career in New York before hitting 50.

When City & State reached out to the lieutenant governor for comment, Delgado declined to say if he thought Hochul was doing a good job as governor and if she had promised him a more substantial role than what he received. He also declined to offer any advice to his possible successor.

A person close to Delgado pointed out that if he does decide to challenge Hochul, he’ll be able to demonstrate sufficient distance from the unpopular governor – particularly because the governor’s own team said publicly that he doesn’t speak for the administration. With rumors swirling that he’s eyeing the Executive Mansion as his top target, political realities be damned, he might be preparing to speak for his own administration.