Gov. Kathy Hochul is awful. Here is why you should vote for her.
Jumaane Williams’ loss in the New York Democratic primary proved once again the unwillingness of the party to nominate a progressive candidate. While centrists like Gov. Hochul are less intimidating to unaligned voters, they also have no promises of material changes for the working class. This is why so many voters call Democratic candidates lesser evils rather than strong policy-makers. Hochul’s campaign, as well as many other Democratic candidates in local races, is clinging on to the label as the protector of legalized abortion in New York; that is, Hochul is defending her position based on preservation rather than actualized change.
Unfortunately, this makes her the candidate worthy of the vote. While Hochul herself can not do much to end homelessness or institute lasting social safety nets for the disillusioned upstate working class, she can at least prevent the current bastions of social progress from being erased by Republican challenger Lee Zeldin. New York is incredibly blue, but recent polling from Siena College and Quinnipiac University show Hochul’s lead narrowing against Zeldin. Zeldin has suggested repealing abortion rights, COVID-19 vaccine mandates and bail reform. The last item is an especially controversial one; the misunderstood legislation is the heaviest knife wielded by the Zeldin campaign, working off of a tired cliché of violent crime being a per0vasive issue due to the lifting of cash bail on nonviolent charges.
This defense of Hochul is in no way a proud defense. Hochul has cultivated an image of a brighter New York in the shadow of the previous governor’s sticky hands, but her policies have ranged from the minimum of social liberalism to the extent of capitalist shamelessness. She supports President Biden’s blocking of Venezuelan asylum-seekers from seeking refuge in America. In May of this year, she spent $850 million of taxpayer money on a new Buffalo Bills stadium, the largest ever taxpayer contribution to an NFL facility. The Times Union paper in Albany reported on Digital Gadgets, a COVID-19 antigen test vendor and donor to the Hochul campaign, received a significantly higher payout for producing COVID-19 tests than other companies.
It may seem hypocritical for an editorial to defend Hochul as a candidate while also spending most words on her flaws, but one should consider what the act of voting means in an age of politicians being less and less representative of the people in their domain. Voting should instead be seen as a strategy for voters to either preserve the policy they cherish or enact reforms to policy they do not. This redefinition of voting from honesty-based to strategy-based is credible to the global phenomenon of two party systems including a centrist-led left party against an increasingly radical right.
High school modules on elections have disillusioned teenagers from voting by framing the act of voting as a honest choice, even if that is far from the case. This is even the case on campus: Vote Oswego, the campus’s awkward attempt at getting voter engagement, calls their mission a “commitment to having [Oswego’s] students voices heard in all elections.” (Note, it is probably not the best idea on a campus with a sizable population of students who live far from campus to have the absentee ballot dropbox be a small, indistinct metal box in a secluded corner of Mahar Hall.)
Hochul’s campaign, however, is a prime example of why this idea of voting as a voice does not match with the reality for voters today. Vote for Hochul, but not proudly.
Image via Sora Shimazaki via Pexels
