BROOKLYN — New York’s lieutenant governor is wedged into a meeting room with garish rainforest wallpaper in a WeWork in Brooklyn, behind a table that is barely tall enough for his former college basketball player frame.
In the last year, Antonio Delgado has gone from somewhat reluctant number two to a pariah not on speaking terms with his boss. He’s been stripped of his staff, his office — even his government cell phone — all on the explicit orders of Gov. Kathy Hochul. And he’s furious.
“A political decision was made to frustrate official work,” Delgado says about Hochul’s actions after he announced in February that he wouldn’t be running for reelection alongside her. “People’s lives were fundamentally affected … it’s really problematic.”
So, he’s finally taken the last step that even passive followers of New York politics saw coming for months: Formally challenging his boss in the Democratic primary set to take place in June next year. He did so officially on June 2, in the heat of the Democratic primary for New York City mayor — the same one that ended with blaring national headlines about an out-of-nowhere socialist victor who reshaped the electorate thanks to a message focused on affordability, generational change and a crackling digital strategy.
And now, Delgado is trying to climb that same hill, attempting to shock a political establishment that is certain Hochul has reelection all but locked up. Delgado, who broke from Hochul last summer when he called for former President Joe Biden to drop out quickly after his disastrous debate, has been one of the loudest Democrats insisting on a need for generational change in the party.
But beyond that, his politics don’t share many obvious similarities with Zohran Mamdani. Delgado, 48, comes from the centrist wing of the party — a former congressperson and member of the bipartisan Problem Solvers’ Caucus from a purple upstate New York seat. In style, he’s also clearly more comfortable writing for The New York Times about Democrats’ failures than explaining his position on TikTok. He’s measured and deliberate in his thinking and his public speaking.
Despite that background, Delgado is now running largely to Hochul’s left. But policy ideas such as a willingness to raise taxes on the wealthy and a wish to spend more on addressing housing affordability are largely secondary to his youthful exuberance. Delgado is banking on the idea that finding new blood will be the singular animating issue for Democrats across the country. He’s framed his race against Hochul as a moral imperative — admitting that he’s willing to potentially light his political future on fire in order to challenge a sclerotic Democratic establishment. And in this way, he’s insisting that the race is about a lot more than New York. Rather, it’s about the kind of party that Democratic voters want, and just how desperately they want to move on from the Biden era.
“As we just saw in the mayor’s race, the people are more inclined to take their cues from themselves and their communities and the folks on the ground than they are with the political elite or establishment class,” Delgado told me after Mamdani’s victory. “And there may have been a time where those voices matter more, but I think we’ve reached a point where they matter less.”
Delgado is waging a war for the soul of the Democratic Party while attempting to settle a score. But winning an election is not always so simple as loudly proclaiming you’re different. Voters responded to Mamdani’s message of change because of just how clear a departure he represented — politically and personally — from Andrew Cuomo and the Democratic establishment. Will the same people decide a “transformational vision for New York” applies to a lieutenant governor previously from the moderate wing of the party with a bone to pick?
Stepping out of a black SUV with a grin at a launch event in a church parking lot in Flatbush, Brooklyn, Delgado has little trouble looking the part of the platonic ideal of the modern Democratic politician seeking a new version of the party. He’s a former Rhodes Scholar born and raised in upstate New York, with a story about how his family fought its way into the middle class, demanding the best out of him at every turn. He’s 48 years old to Hochul’s 66, and he looks even younger than that. He knows how to fire up a crowd, with an applause line that also serves as the thesis of his quixotic campaign.
“Since I made my decision to run for governor and challenge Kathy Hochul, I’ve heard some question my loyalty,” said Delgado to a gathered crowd of about 50 at Salem Missionary Baptist Church. “But I have to ask: Loyalty to who? Because loyalty to the broken system is what has got us in this mess in the first place … If we spend all our time worrying about protecting the party, the question remains, well, who the hell is protecting the people?”
Behind Delgado stood campaign volunteers and rally attendees brought by local political clubs, some of whom had little idea of who he was. One rally attendee and Flatbush resident handed a sign by a campaign volunteer told POLITICO Magazine that she was unaware of Delgado before the day began, but that New York needed “something different.” They held up signs that said “BOLD CHANGE” in an orange and blue font with a color gradation reminiscent of Mamdani’s campaign literature (and some other consistent underdogs, the New York Knicks and Mets). As his supporters got tired and their arms started to lower during his speech, campaign staffers cajoled them from behind the small crowd to lift them back up.
Delgado is coming into the fight with obvious energy and excitement, but thus far it hasn’t translated into a groundswell of support or the kind of viral hits that the Mamdani camp routinely produces. He doesn’t yet look entirely comfortable on video; a July direct-to-camera explanation of a Times op-ed he wrote racked up a mere 3,000 views on X, or about 0.05 percent of the 6 million impressions Mamdani got on a slickly produced missive about his appearance with the Wu-Tang Clan at Madison Square Garden. It’s a reminder that Delgado might be the aggressor in his race, thumbing his nose at the Democratic establishment, but he still got his political education from those same people he’s now fighting against.
In 2020, Delgado was awarded the Jefferson-Hamilton Award for Bipartisanship by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce alongside other moderate representatives like Josh Gottheimer (D-N.J.) and former Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.) and senators including Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Joe Manchin (D-W.V.). He opposed court packing in the midst of a hard-fought campaign in 2020, separating him from more liberal members of the New York delegation. He was a successful, moderate Democrat from a purple district.
Democrats are wildly dissatisfied with the party’s leadership, according to public polling. Democratic voters believe the party has thus far responded poorly to Trump’s attacks and are all for replacing the people at the top. As a result, a growing number of young challengers without much name recognition have announced they are primarying older members of the party, many of whom are under 30, but not all of whom are distinctly progressive.
Delgado himself is now running a very different race than his successful congressional campaigns — and looking to build relationships with the kind of New York City progressives who were once a drag on his appeal upstate.
After Mamdani won the New York City Democratic primary, Delgado didn’t hesitate to endorse him, something Hochul did only on Sunday. And Delgado, seeing an opportunity to rebuild a Mamdani-esque coalition in his statewide race, has taken every opportunity to mention Mamdani since the primary, at one point posting on X, “Zohran cannot deliver bold change alone. He needs a Governor who’s ready and willing to work with him. Gov. Hochul refuses to tax the ultra-wealthy or big corporations to achieve affordability for all. If you want change in NYC, we need change in Albany.”
The love affair has so far moved in only one direction. Mamdani, who was loudly anti-Hochul as an assemblymember, has attempted to play nice with the governor since his victory, betting that she’ll be the one he has to deal with long term. Political pros in the state generally agree. One Democratic strategist who was granted anonymity to speak candidly about the race compared Delgado to Icarus, flying too close to the sun, and said that “[Delgado] is so smart, but he’s slightly arrogant … Zohran is a generational politician. If Delgado wants to be that type of politician, it’s going to take a lot of work.”
Delgado is not used to losing. He defeated six other Democratic hopefuls in a primary before winning a congressional seat in 2018 in a district that President Donald Trump had won by six points two years earlier. He was courted by Hochul to join her ticket in 2022 after Andrew Cuomo’s resignation, and in doing so left behind a promising career in Congress.
Their relationship, though, soured almost immediately, dating to Hochul’s nomination of Hector LaSalle in 2023 to become the chief judge of the New York Court of Appeals, the state’s highest court. LaSalle, a moderate, faced opposition from multiple segments of the Democratic Party, and his nomination was ultimately voted down. At the time, Delgado kept quiet on LaSalle — who many in the party worried was too conservative and would be unwilling to allow New York to more aggressively gerrymander its congressional maps — but he now says the nomination particularly stung because Hochul had promised he’d be deeply involved in policy and personnel, but was left in the dark about the decision.
Their squabble finally broke into public last year, when Delgado insisted, contra his boss, that Biden should step down, and followed that up by calling for Mayor Eric Adams to resign amidst corruption allegations just months later (Hochul said at the time “the will of the voters and the supremacy and sanctity of democratic elections preclude me” from removing Adams).
Delgado is not the first deputy in an administration to feel cut out, reduced to a purely ceremonial role. The ineffectuality of the number two in an administration is so widely understood that it became the premise of the HBO show Veep, in which the vice president asks her secretary almost every episode “did the president call?” to which she receives a curt “no.”
Multiple New York-based political operatives familiar with the Delgado/Hochul relationship told POLITICO Magazine that they had little understanding why, from a career advancement perspective, Delgado took the job of lieutenant governor in the first place. But Delgado himself, who is ambitious and competitive, happily admits that he doesn’t always do the most politically expedient thing. “When you are inside the political machinery in a one-party state, the focus becomes positioning. People might want to play a longer game,” he says. “So to challenge somebody, to say ‘we can do that better, this is not enough,’ can put you in a precarious position relative to the other actors.”
Hochul and her allies have a different read. They’ve responded by insisting that Delgado is the one who is obsessed with political positioning and that he’s done little for his constituents during his time as lieutenant governor.
As the campaign has ratcheted up, despite his high-minded temperament Delgado is now starting to get in the muck with his boss. A fellow Democrat told POLITICO earlier this year that Delgado is painting Hochul as a weak top-of-ticket candidate who could hurt down-ballot prospects. A memo from Delgado campaign manager Will Stockton states that Delgado “will be a stronger general election candidate than Kathy Hochul.” When I asked him if he thought Hochul could lose to a Republican challenger in the general election (Elise Stefanik is the most hotly rumored challenger), for once he didn’t think or choose his words carefully: “Yes.”
“The people want more,” he continued. “They don’t just want ‘look how bad Trump is.’ … If that’s all it was, we wouldn’t be in this position, that would have been enough in 2024. We have to offer more. We have to demonstrate that we’re willing to do things differently.”
But what does “more” really mean for Delgado? In recent weeks, he has run even further to Hochul’s left, insisting that she is misusing state funds amid Trump’s ICE raids in the state. Yet he’s also showing up at places like a Crain’s Power Breakfast, a ritzy affair sponsored by NYC business leaders full of Cuomo allies that took place at the New York Athletic Club, a private social club on one of the most sought-after streets in Manhattan, with views of Central Park.
That blend — generational change in the body of a Democrat more acceptable to the center of the party — doesn’t yet appear to have broken through.
“[Hochul’s] political prospects look about as good as they ever have,” said Sam Raskin, a senior vice president at Slingshot Strategies, a political consulting firm that works largely with Democrats in New York. “Delgado needs to make a really compelling case to win, and Hochul needs to have some serious missteps.”
Hochul is running the kind of campaign designed to bury her challenger the old-fashioned way. She has more money, better name recognition, and the state and national party behind her. In recent months, she’s cut his legs out from under him by appealing to segments of the left through getting aggressive on redistricting and standing up to Trump. Unlike Mamdani, Delgado doesn’t have the luxury of running against a disgraced governor who was recently driven out of office by that same establishment.
Instead, his campaign is about proof of discontent — proof that no matter the challenges he faces, they can’t be any worse than being a member of the Democratic establishment in the second Trump era.
