NY-GOV: Hochul officially shifts into campaign mode
Gov. Kathy Hochul is running for reelection, and she wants to make sure you know that she’s tough, she swears and she’s got President Donald Trump squarely in her crosshairs.
Without even a Republican challenger officially declared to run against her, Hochul released her first campaign ad on Monday ahead of her reelection next year. It struck a decidedly different tone from her first race, when former President Joe Biden was in office and Democrats controlled the House. This time around, Hochul leaned heavily into her increasingly vocal opposition to the Trump administration and her growing national presence as a resistance governor.
Hochul highlighted two of her favorite attributes: being a mom, and being from Buffalo. “She’s not just our governor,” the narrator says in the ad. “She’s also a mom from Buffalo, and it doesn’t get much tougher than that.” It segued into a montage of Hochul’s greatest hits since adopting her Trump-fighting “Rambo” rhetoric, from calling the arrest of New York City Comptroller Brad Lander at immigration court “bullshit,” to her invitation to Trump border czar Tom Homan to attempt to arrest her over New York’s immigrant protections, to discussing retaliatory redistricting in the state. “We’re New Yorkers, we fight back,” the governor said in one clip featured from a Fox News interview.
The ad’s tone and style evoked those seen from populist insurgent Democrats in red states in recent years. But Hochul is an incumbent, and the opponent is not another candidate in the race but Trump himself. “This is the kind of ad you do when you want people to know you aren’t Zohran Mamdani, but you are going to fight just as hard,” said Democratic consultant Ryan Adams. “It is a solid ad for her audience – it paints the Republicans as chaotic and weak, bending to Trump’s crazy whim, and her being the champion of sanity and strength. Now she has to follow through.”
https://www.cityandstateny.com/politics/2025/08/hochul-officially-shifts-campaign-mode/407661/?oref=csny-category-lander-top-story