We want to make sure you saw these two pieces that ran over the weekend. The first, from Joe Burns in the National Review, explains why the unpopular Kathy Hochul is in for a rough 2025. The second, from Fareed Zakaria for the Washington Post, compares Kathy Hochul’s New York to Florida to demonstrate why the left is flailing:

Kathy Hochul’s Highly Uncertain Future

By Joe Burns

The National Review

The unpopular New York governor faces stiff political headwinds this year, as fellow Democrats appear to be gearing up for a 2026 primary challenge.

Kathy Hochul enters the second half of her first elected term as governor of New York with historically low poll numbers and an electorate that appears to have taken a sharp turn to the right. The year ahead presents the state’s chief executive with an almost unimaginable number of political challenges.

Keep reading at NationalReview.com

The Crisis of Democracy is Really a Crisis for the Left

Why is the left flailing? Look at New York vs. Florida

By Fareed Zakaria

The Washington Post

Countries with more than half of the world’s population went to the polls last year. And the basic message they sent to their governments was one of dissatisfaction and anger with the status quo. Their frustration seemed to be particularly focused on the side that has traditionally been identified with big government, the left.

Almost everywhere you look, the left is in ruins. Of the 27 countries of the European Union, only a handful have left-of-center parties leading government coalitions. The primary left-of-center party in the European Parliament now has just 136 seats in a 720-seat chamber. Even in countries that have been able to stem the rise of right-wing populism, such as Poland, it is the center-right that is thriving, not the left. And in the United States, of course, the breadth of Donald Trump’s victory - nearly 90 percent of U.S. counties moved right - suggests that it is very much part of this trend.

The crisis of democratic government then, is actually a crisis of progressive government. People seem to feel that they have been taxed, regulated, bossed around and intimidated by left-of-center politicians for decades - but the results are bad and have been getting worse.

New York, where I live, and Florida, where I often visit, provide an interesting contrast.

They have comparable populations - New York with about 20 million people, Florida with 23 million. But New York state’s budget is more than double that of Florida ($239 billion vs. roughly $116 billion). New York City, which is a little more than three times the size of Miami-Dade County, has a budget of more than $100 billion, which is nearly 10 times that of Miami-Dade. New York City’s spending grew from 2012 to 2019 by 40 percent, four times the rate of inflation. Does any New Yorker feel that they got 40 percent better services during that time?

What do New Yorkers get for these vast sums, generated by the highest tax rates in the country? (If you are well off in New York City, you pay nearly as much in income taxes as in London, Paris or Berlin - without free higher education or health care.) New York’s poverty rate is higher than Florida’s. New York has a slightly lower rate of homeownership and a much higher rate of homelessness. Despite spending more than twice as much on education per student, New York has educational outcomes - graduation rates, eighth-grade test scores - that are roughly the same as Florida’s.

It’s easy to comfort oneself by thinking that these sky-high tax rates and growing government revenues are providing some crucial ingredients of progressive government. But they are often simply the toll of waste and mismanagement. The first phase of the Second Avenue subway line construction, at $2.5 billion per mile, was eight to 12 times more expensive than a sampling of similar projects in places such as Italy, Sweden, Paris and Berlin. A large chunk of state and city tax revenues goes to fund pensions. In Illinois, more than 8 percent of the budget goes toward pensions. In New York City, nearly 22 percent of the budget funds pensions and benefits for government workers. Promising government workers generous pensions has been an easy way to buy the support of a crucial voting bloc while ensuring that the costs don’t show up in the budgets until years later.

The United States’ big cities are incubators of growth, vitality and energy. That’s why the spotlight is placed on them and their governance. And what people have seen recently is liberalism run amok. For years, theft was rampant in California’s cities because of a weak shoplifting law. New York City’s homeless - some of whom are drug addicts or mentally ill - are left to frighten and harass the public on the streets and in the subways. The man charged this week with attempted murder after allegedly pushing a man in front of a subway train had prior arrests.

The ultimate test, of course, is how people are voting with their feet. For years, New York has been losing people to states such as Florida. This same story can be told with minor variations about California and Texas. Basically, big red states are growing at the expense of big blue states, which will translate politically into more Republican representation in Congress and more electoral votes.

There is now an interesting effort by people such as Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to combine cultural conservatism and economic nationalism with the radical reform of government. That could be an appealing ideology for many voters who are frustrated by a government in which nothing seems to work that well.

On the other side, if Democrats do not learn some hard lessons from the poor governance in many blue cities and states, they will be seen as defending cultural elites, woke ideology and bloated, inefficient government. That might be a formula for permanent minority status.

From WashingtonPost.com