In her first three State of the State speeches, New York governor Kathy Hochul made a point of honoring tradition. Her predecessor, Andrew Cuomo, had moved the constitutionally mandated annual message from the Capitol’s historic Assembly chamber to a cavernous convention hall in Albany’s brutalist-modern Empire State Plaza, which allowed for a bigger audience, not to mention a supercharged speaker system and giant video screens. A few months after succeeding Cuomo in the summer of 2021, citing her “deep reverence for our State’s remarkable past,” Hochul returned the annual speech to the Capitol, “its original and rightful setting.”
So much for reverence: Hochul chose to deliver her latest annual message Tuesday in a 982-seat theater nestled within the Empire State Plaza structure known as The Egg. While a typical Cuomo State of the State program would evoke the run-up to a nominee’s acceptance speech at a political convention, the style of Hochul’s annual message reboot was lifted from the more performative playbooks of New York City’s last few mayors, whose State of the City presentations have been delivered in settings like the Apollo Theater, the site of Eric Adams’s speech last week.
Hochul’s theatrically staged State of the State speech program could be seen as a political distress signal—an overproduced exercise in shameless self-promotion for a governor struggling with negative poll ratings, desperate for more positive attention two-plus years after winning election by a surprisingly close margin.
To generate an atmosphere of celebration, the speech was preceded by a 47-minute program that included live performances by a high school marching band, a black Baptist gospel choir, a middle-aged interracial dance troupe best known for appearances at New York Liberty WNBA games, and a Tony-award-winning Broadway singer. The program also featured a poetry recital by a young woman identified as Buffalo’s laureate, along with separate invocations by a rabbi, a minister, and a Muslim imam; presentation of the colors by a state police honor guard; and the pledge of allegiance led by a local Eagle Scout. Two slickly produced (and, by all appearances, taxpayer-funded) videos also played on giant screens flanking the stage—both less than subtly promoting the governor’s policy agenda and her personal story. The first, involving a series of archetypal New Yorkers selected for their geographic, racial, and ethnic diversity, ended with a Long Island rabbi saying, “Thank you, Governor Hochul.”
The second video wrapped up with a virtual introduction of the 66-year-old governor herself, who walked onstage to the strains of Christina Aguilera’s “Fighter,” wearing a suit of dollar-bill green.
What followed was a nearly hour-long speech summarizing a dozen or so of the 200-odd proposals spread across her 36,000-word, 137-page State of the State policy booklet. This was not an innovation: Albany governors have been supplementing their annual speeches with increasingly thick “books” for decades now. (The record still belongs to Governor Cuomo’s 2019 State of the State volume, which used 71,222 words to describe 177 proposals backed by 126 source note citations.)
Hochul previewed most of her headline initiatives in public appearances during the days and weeks leading up the speech, including a dubiously premised $3 billion “inflation refund” giveback that would send checks for either $300 (for singles) or $500 (for couples) to all New York taxpayers with incomes below $300,000; an increase in the state child tax credit, rising to as much as $1,000, from the current peak of $330; and a promise of state-funded free breakfast and lunch for all New York State public school students. She had also spotlighted her proposal to “expand” involuntary commitment of the mentally ill—without releasing crucial details. “We cannot allow our subway to be a rolling homeless shelter,” she said. She promised to work with Mayor Adams to “surge law enforcement” in subways, and to provide state financing to “put an officer on every single train, overnight” over the next six months.
She also offered two late-breaking proposals. First, a cut in personal income taxes for brackets below $323,000; unlike the rebate handout, this would be a recurring tax cut, with a total price tag of $1 billion. The second—and potentially more ominous financially—was a gubernatorial promise to “put our state on a pathway to universal [free] childcare.” Under the legislation that advocates favor, this would cost $5 billion.
More financial specifics will be revealed when Hochul presents her executive budget next Tuesday, which will also reveal her latest estimate of state reserves. These were most recently pegged at $22 billion—a nest egg she seems determined to squander, rather than using it for less politically appealing purposes (such as paying down debt) that would yield long-term dividends. Even with all this spending, her State of the State rollout won’t satisfy many of her fellow Democrats in the legislature, who want much more devoted to practically everything—especially education and health care, which already account for more than half the budget.
In the normal Albany cycle, politicians use odd years to plant seeds of expectation among special interest groups for costly legislation they’ll be willing to pass in the even-numbered election years. Hochul’s move to start that process a year early reflects her political worries as well as the political calendar: she faces a possible Democratic primary challenge in June 2026. She’s clearly hoping that the combination of cash giveaways, free school meals, and other program expansions in her budget will produce noticeable benefits to voters by the second half of this year, boosting her poll numbers sufficiently to make potential opponents perhaps think twice.
In contrast with her previous annual messages, Hochul’s 2025 State of the State extravaganza smacked of trying too hard, a reflection of political insecurity if not outright anxiety. But while most of what she offered ranged from dubious to questionable, it’s probably too early to conclude that her free-lunch messaging won’t work.
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