Environmentalists Want Kathy Hochul to Lose Her Primary

Gov. Kathy Hochul is losing the green vote.

New York environmentalists are accusing the governor of “backsliding” on climate and energy policy. And they are campaigning against Hochul in her primary.

“I think she’s just surrendering across the board on climate stuff,” Alex Beauchamp, the northern region director for the environmental advocacy group Food and Water Watch, told NOTUS. “The climate movement at large, anything we’re thinking about now, I think the single-biggest barrier to change is Kathy Hochul.”

Hochul’s primary opponent, Lt. Gov. Antonio Delgado, has picked up endorsements from several major environmental advocacy groups this month and is positioning himself as the climate candidate.

He called Hochul’s decision last month to approve the Northeast Supply Enhancement pipeline a “moral failure and a dirty deal with Trump.”

Hochul holds a huge lead over Delgado, according to recent polls. Still, climate advocates across the state are pledging to hammer the governor on energy issues. If they make a dent, it could affect Hochul going into a general election, where she’s already getting heat from Republicans on energy prices.

Hochul has long positioned herself as a leader on combating climate change and ushering in the energy transition. She serves in the U.S. Climate Alliance’s leadership and was named one of the most influential global climate leaders last month.

But her decision to approve a natural gas pipeline backed by President Donald Trump, along with several other recent controversial moves on environmental policy — including a decision to delay a ban on gas hookups in new buildings across New York and a deal to keep a gas power plant open for at least five more years — have angered environmentalists.

Hochul is also arguing that the state should rethink the same cap-and-invest program she once championed because it is unrealistic to implement under the Trump administration.

Hochul has denied that the pipeline approval and other environmental decisions have been spurred by backroom deals with Trump. A spokesperson for Hochul did not respond to a request for comment.

“How is standing up to Trump building more gas pipelines? That’s what Trump wants. That’s not standing up to him, that’s holding his hand and walking down the road,” said Michael Richardson, a co-facilitator for the upstate New York working group at Third Act, one of the prominent environmental groups that endorsed Delgado.

Hochul has also suggested she wants to resist a court decision concerning the cap-and-invest program, where a state court decided last month that her administration’s delays in taking steps to enforce a landmark 2019 emissions-reduction law is unlawful. The governor doubled down on the delay and said the state will look into appealing the court’s order.

Beauchamp previewed some messaging strategy against Hochul: He said environmental advocates should highlight how her resistance to that legal decision mirrors Trump’s brand of unilateral decision-making, which has been deemed unlawful by courts on multiple occasions.

“In this environment, that is going to be politically powerful,” Beauchamp said. “She is trying to unilaterally make these decisions with kind of no regard for the law in a very similar way to what we’ve seen Donald Trump do across issue areas.”

Some of these advocates say they feel emboldened by New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani’s win for their campaign against Hochul. Mamdani saw similarly low poll numbers to Delgado about a year before his election, Richardson said.

“We need determined leadership, leadership that is saying to us very clearly what can be done, instead of taking on this defeatist attitude,” Richardson said.

The advocates’ calculus comes as Democratic politicians have spoken less and less about climate and the environment.

Hochul is among several Democratic state leaders that have moved away in recent months from progressive environmental policies. Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania this month pulled the state out of a regional emissions-reduction program, and state government officials in Arizona and Connecticut have lowered each state’s renewable energy targets.

Meanwhile, Hochul has honed in on messaging around affordability. Hochul cast New York’s pipeline approval decision as necessary to maintain “grid reliability and affordability” in the face of attacks on wind, solar and other renewable energy from Republicans in Washington.

Hochul’s rhetoric comes as Rep. Elise Stefanik, the Republican from New York vying for the governor’s seat, has made rising utility bills in the state a centerpiece of her attacks against Hochul.

Energy experts have highlighted how new renewable energy projects are increasingly cheaper than propping up fossil fuel infrastructure.

The host of recent environmental policy walkbacks in New York is “calling into question the degree to which New Yorkers can rely on Hochul not just for the decisions that are going to have an impact on climate, but climate as it relates to public health and also affordability,” said Kobi Naseck, the director of programs and advocacy for the environmental group NY Renews.

NY Renews is a nonprofit and is not involved in electoral politics, but Naseck said he predicts voters in New York will realize that Hochul is “missing the political will” to enact clean-energy solutions in the state ahead of next year’s elections.

Frustration is also building among state lawmakers. Democratic state Rep. Sarahana Shrestha is among the elected officials who have spoken out against a number of Hochul-led environmental policy decisions.

But she thinks the primary push environmentalists are making against the governor is just one part of the equation.

“Whether or not that translates into results at the ballot box probably should be measured not by who wins, necessarily, but maybe what was the margin, how many people showed up,” Shrestha said. “I find that people are very highly tuned in to fights around the issue of energy.”