Photo: Roy Rochlin/Getty Images for (BAM) Brooklyn
Lieutenant Governor Antonio Delgado’s abrupt announcement that he will challenge Governor Kathy Hochul in next year’s Democratic primary defies all the usual rules of political timing and calculation. Normally, politicians wait for a relatively quiet news cycle to announce their campaigns in order to gain maximum public attention. Instead, Delgado is asking us to think about the 2026 primary when most of the state’s donors, strategists, party leaders, and voters are focused on hotly contested races for mayor happening less than three weeks from now in Buffalo, Syracuse, Rochester — and the main event here in New York City.
By trying to displace the same governor he ran with on a ticket, Delgado is planning a rare, exceedingly difficult maneuver that has been attempted only twice in the past half-century and never with success. “Antonio, you are a talented guy, with a great future. Based upon my experience this may not be the most well-thought out idea!” Representative Tom Suozzi, the veteran Long Island pol who made two unsuccessful runs for governor, wrote on X.
But Delgado says the situation facing New Yorkers is too dire for normal politics.
“The status quo is broken. It’s just broken. People are hurting a lot. One in four folks right now in New York and New York City cannot afford basic needs. Where’s the vision for that?” he told me. “Where’s the decision-making around that to make sure we have a clear path forward? I’m not seeing it, and I haven’t seen it since I’ve been lieutenant governor. I wanted to be a part of the decision-making process. Unfortunately, I didn’t see a decision-making process.”
Delgado’s lament is a familiar one. The state Constitution assigns New York lieutenant governors little formal power and only two official duties: stepping up if the governor dies or resigns, and ceremonially presiding over the state senate. In practice, lieutenants have only as much staff, office space and input as the governor allows. Most end up criss-crossing the state every week, cutting ribbons, chairing committees and giving speeches promoting the governor’s policies, often in remote reaches of the state.
While the position is well-compensated – Delgado’s salary of $210,000 makes him the highest-paid lieutenant governor in America – more than one occupant of the office has simply quit, complaining that they got tired of being ignored, or sent out to promote policies in which they had no input.
“It’s easy to get suckered into pretending you’re important. I wasn’t about to pretend,” explained Alfred del Bello, who in 1984 quit as Mario Cuomo’s lieutenant after only two years. Another lieutenant, Betsy McCaughey, went months without ever speaking to Gov. George Pataki. In 2014, Bob Duffy, a former mayor and police chief, cited the grind as a reason not to run for re-election as Andrew Cuomo’s lieutenant. “While the consistent travel is vitally important to this position, the thousands of miles per week in the car have resulted in the residual effects of constant back and leg pain,” he wrote to Cuomo in a 2014 letter explaining his withdrawal from the ticket.
Hochul stepped in as Duffy’s successor and hit the road, logging thousands of miles over the next seven years. Delgado, a Rhodes Scholar who resigned from an upstate congressional seat to take the job, told me he’s traveled 60,000 miles and attended more than 1,000 events, but never intended to simply be a cheerleader and grew tired of learning about administration positions by reading news reports. After some public spats with Hochul – Delgado independently called for President Biden to step aside and for Mayor Eric Adams to resign, positions contrary to the governor’s – he has become a full-blown critic who says Democrats in general need a fresh approach to politics and policy.
“You can’t tax credit your way out of housing. That is a model that we have tried over and over again, and every single time public funds get leveraged by the private sector and ultimately leave the community behind,” Delgado said. “Who’s gonna say, let’s figure out a new way to overhaul this system? Let’s figure out how to build state capacity and invest, maybe in something like a statewide rental assistance program? Seven out of 10 people right now in New York are eligible for federal rental assistance. And yet, right now, the governor proposes a $50 million pilot program – a pilot program in the middle of a housing crisis! We need bolder, more aggressive, transformational leadership, and simply just tinkering around the edges, simply managing the status quo is not going to get us there.”
Delgado’s upstart campaign is a reminder that he first entered politics in 2018 as a maverick, unseating a Republican incumbent to represent a sprawling, conservative upstate rural district. “My district was 90% white, the eighth most rural congressional seat in the country, and Trump had won it by seven points just two years prior,” he told me. “People want folks who give a damn about them, who show up, who listen, who care, and who hold themselves and the system accountable. It shouldn’t just be about holding on to power. Power is not self-legitimating. If anything, it could be self-corrupting.”
That street organizer’s attitude – hold the system accountable – is a reminder that 2018 was a year that saw the arrival of a lot of young, left-leaning political disruptors. Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in the Bronx and Max Rose in Staten Island beat incumbents, as did four first-time progressive state senate candidates – Julia Salazar and Zellnor Myrie in Brooklyn, Jessica Ramos in Queens and Alessandra Biaggi in the Bronx – whose victories flipped control of the chamber to the Democrats. This new generation has seen the value of throwing out traditional political playbooks, which is why two members of the Class of 2018, Myrie and Ramos, are making long-shot runs for mayor and Delgado is taking on his own governor.
“I think what we were doing back in 2018, the vast majority of us who ran were outside of the machinery of politics,” Delgado said. “I certainly voted, but I wasn’t somebody who made my way through any type of gatekeeper or power centers or hierarchy or seniority or just pure partisan driven politics. And when you don’t make your way through that, you don’t owe anybody anything. You’re not beholden to any specific actors or leaders within the party; who you are beholden to are the people. And that has always been my outlook through this process.”
If Delgado is right, New York is ready for another spate of political activism comparable to the upheavals of 2018. We shall see.
