The beginning of a New Year is always a time of thoughtful reflection that inherently comes along with all-day davening. Coincidentally, or perhaps by design, this year’s Rosh HaShanah lands on the same weekend as the 25th anniversary of September 11 and 50 days before New Yorkers vote for governor. If you want a new year that is actually new, start with the people who have been running this state into the ground.
Democrats have had a lock on Albany for eight years. They took the State Senate in 2018, kept the Assembly, and have treated the governor’s office as family property ever since. Andrew Cuomo ran the place like a private firm until the scandals forced him out. Kathy Hochul inherited the disaster in 2021 and has spent four years more concerned about placating the growing socialist threat in her ranks instead of fixing the state.
Look at what that record produced. New York still carries the highest combined tax burden in the country. Energy costs keep rising. Property taxes on Long Island are a second mortgage. The 2026 state budget came in at around $269 billion after months of delay. Hochul refused a broad income-tax hike and then still signed a luxury second-home tax aimed at New York City, plus billions in state aid to plug Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s budget hole.
Albany also wrote new limits on local cooperation with ICE: no 287(g) agreements, no civil immigration holds in local jails, and more paperwork before federal agents can work in schools, hospitals, and houses of worship. The practical effect is that the state made itself harder to police at the exact moment the federal government is trying to enforce immigration law. Meanwhile, Operation Rotten Apple removed over 2,100 illegals with criminal records from New York streets, and Democrats are claiming that their policies, not those of the Trump administration, are leading to a reduction in homicides.
Hochul’s campaign answer is always the same: She cut some middle-class rates, she sent rebate checks, and shootings are down from the pandemic peak. Those slogans and platitudes don’t hide the fact that people are voting with their feet. Businesses are expanding in Texas and Florida instead of here. George Pataki said it last week without the usual Albany hedging: Keep the tax-and-spend, soft-on-crime model and the exodus gets worse.
Hochul aligning herself with Mamdani is more frightening than her own incompetence. She not only signs checks to his radicalism, but she is happily photographed at the World Cup and other major events with Mamdani, suggesting that they are personally, not just politically, close. Mamdani’s “warmth of collectivism” model of governance means that his socialist policies can only work if someone else is paying the bill, and Hochul is happy to pay it.
Aside from fiscal radicalism, Mamdani is also egregiously accepting of radical Islamist terrorism. Last Friday, one week before the 25th anniversary of 9/11, Mamdani signed executive orders designating September 11 as a citywide Day of Remembrance and Service and updating emergency continuity plans. Then he handed the ceremonial pen to his chief counsel, Ramzi Kassem.
Kassem was civilian defense counsel for Ahmed al-Darbi, an al-Qaeda operative who pleaded guilty in the 2002 bombing of the French tanker MV Limburg, an attack planned as part of al-Qaeda’s campaign after 9/11. Al-Darbi’s sister was married to Khalid al-Mihdhar, one of the five hijackers on American Airlines Flight 77, the plane that hit the Pentagon. The mayor’s office said Kassem’s team helped draft the orders, as if that makes the handoff a clerical detail. It does not. You do not commemorate 2,977 murdered New Yorkers, Pentagon workers, and first responders by placing the pen in the hand of a lawyer whose career included defending the same terrorist network that carried out those attacks. “Tone deaf” doesn’t begin to describe it.
Mamdani is going to be in City Hall until 2029, but the checks could dry up if New Yorkers wise up. We have the opportunity to elect Bruce Blakeman as the next governor of New York. This will not be easy. Republicans have not won a statewide race here since Pataki in 2002. However, a Siena poll in August had Hochul only about 10 points up on Bruce Blakeman in a state where Democrats out-register Republicans two to one. Other surveys over the summer put the race inside single digits. That is during a time when Democrats normally outpoll Republicans.
As Nassau County Executive, Blakeman has actually run a government that has to keep taxes from eating the suburbs alive. He backed tax-freeze budgets. He stood with police when Albany’s instinct was to tie their hands. He has said, out loud, that New York will not remain a sanctuary state if he is governor.
The math is softer than it looks. Independents have been breaking against Hochul in the closer polls. The suburbs — Nassau, Suffolk, the Hudson Valley — are where statewide races are won or lost, and those voters have spent a decade watching their property-tax bills and their grocery bills move in only one direction. Blakeman is still introducing himself to half the state. That is a problem for his campaign. It is also an opening. The more people hear the contrast — freeze versus spend, cops versus process, enforcement versus sanctuary — the less this looks like a coronation.
Rosh HaShanah is a time when you can look back at your year and see what went wrong, what went right, and how we can change and fix things going forward. The same can be said about elections. Something has gone horribly wrong in New York for the past decade, and we have the opportunity for some real change going forward. Let’s hope it’s not squandered in favor of the status quo.
Moshe Hill is a political analyst and columnist. His work can be found at www.aHillwithaView.com and on X at @HillWithView.