Incumbent Andrew Cuomo seemed like a shoo-in until the Moreland Commission scandal broke. Now Zephyr Teachout, challenging Cuomo from the left, might have a ghost of a chance at the nomination.
Interesting. If he can’t even get re-elected as governor, he’s not going to have a chance for President.
I’m not aware of more recent polls, and the Salon article didn’t appear to include any. If nobody’s heard of her, “ghost of a chance” is a big overstatement. I’d heard of her but didn’t know she was a woman, so I guess I’m a little ahead of the curve.
Wait, I hadn’t noticed that the primary was so soon. Yeah, if people are only just now starting to talk about her, three weeks out, this in nothing.
She has a “ghost of a chance” to get in the double digits, maybe, but no, she’s a non-entity when it comes to any shot. What’s interesting is that the person who might have a shot is Tim Wu for Lieutenant Governor. I don’t think he’ll win; I think Hochul will be able to get the nomination, but Wu has a shot.
It is an interesting competition.
I’m on her emailing list. (I am on many candidates’ emailing lists, so there’s that.) I am not much enamored with Cuomo. And I am the sort of generally liberal Democrat who would be most likely to support her. And my wife, who REALLY dislikes Cuomo, may wind up voting for her.
But she just doesn’t seem to be a particularly compelling candidate for any number of reasons, among them her lack of any significant experience. (I also don’t get her reverence for Mario, who always struck me as more of a grandstander than a doer where True Liberalism was concerned.) And Andy Cuomo remains quite powerful if not exactly beloved. He has certainly been quite strong on the social issues, from a liberal point of view, and my impression is that those will matter more than the economic issues for most solid Democratic voters in NY.
Anyway. I doubt I will vote for her and I would be very surprised if she garners twenty percent of the vote. We shall see!
The governor and lieutenant governor are elected separately?
They’re elected separately in the primary, together in the general.
OK, that’s a little less chaotic, then, but it seems like you could still get some situations where the Guv and Looie can’t stand each other. Must make for some interesting politics.
Something like that happened in 1982, where Mario’s choice for Lt. Gov, Carl McCall, was beaten in the primary by Al DelBello, the mayor of Yonkers, who Cuomo didn’t like. He didn’t give him anything to do, and DelBello, bored, resigned a few years later.
That was the situation in Benson. The lieutenant governor was not to be trusted.
I want to say that it was Adlai Stevenson (the youngest) in Illinois a couple of decades ago who got saddled with running with a LaRouchie as his lieutenant governor. He essentially folded the campaign tent if memory serves.
It’s worse in some states, where the Governor and Lieutenant Governor can be from separate parties. There was an incident in California in the 1970s. Jerry Brown, the governor, was a Democrat, and Mike Curb, his Lieutenant Governor, was a Republican. Brown was running for President in 1980, so he was out of the state a lot, and one time when he was gone, and Curb was serving as acting governor, Curb appointed a candidate to the California Court of Appeals after Brown had spent a bunch of time vetting somebody else. This led to a lawsuit, where Curb’s actions were withheld. So, Governor-Lieutenant Governor relationships aren’t always great.
This is how it was in Ohio until the 70s. In 1974, both incumbents were from separate parties and both lost their re-election bids, leading to a bizarre incident where the lame duck lieutenant governor (then the president of the Senate) slept in the Statehouse to block any legislation from being sent to the lame duck governor for his signature. (IIRC, the president pro tempore could sign a bill if the lieutenant governor wasn’t in the building, or if it had been so many days. But so many days would have put it into the new governor’s term, so the lieutenant governor camped out to keep it from being signed.)
Teachout did not come anywhere close to winning, but she did do better than might’ve been expected. Cuomo didn’t get the national launch he wanted because of the Moreland scandal and general dissatisfaction from the left. He won about 62% to 35%.
I’m hardly the only one who thinks Cuomo is a Presidential candidate mostly in his own mind.
IMHO, he’s the Democratic version of guys on the GOP side like Tim Pawlenty or Mitch Daniels. The press keeps puffing them up, but outside their own state, nobody really gives a hoot about them.
Also, unless Hillary surprises us all and decides not to run, he can forget about 2016 and probably 2020. I don’t see him looking any better a cycle or two down the road than he does now.
He has been effective. A gets things done type of governor. First on time budgets for NY State in decades, marriage equality, property tax caps, etc. All while working with a Republican or pseudo-Republican majority in the state Senate.
He’s not a thrilling orator, but not a total putz either. If he could talk like his dad, he’d be a contender, but your conclusion about him may be correct.
Pissing off the left isn’t an entirely bad thing. Pissing off people who care about clean government is not good, but not fatal politically as has been proven over and over again.
At this point in the cycle, I like him more than I liked Obama in mid 2006. Hillary looks inevitable, but who knows. Odd things happen.
It’s weird, because I should like Cuomo…I agree with most of his positions on the issues, but I just find him so incredibly offputting and obnoxious, I have trouble supporting him.