ALBANY, New York — Democratic infighting over taxing the rich is giving New York’s beleaguered Republican Party an opening.
The question remains whether they can capitalize on it.
Bruce Blakeman’s longshot gubernatorial campaign is warning voters in mailers that New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani wants to raise the Big Apple’s property taxes. A fundraising appeal from the Republican blasted Gov. Kathy Hochul’s proposed surcharge on luxury second homes as a “comrade tax.” And New York House Republicans running in competitive races are warning that even moderate Democrats want to boost tax rates on rich people.
New York’s tax hike fight is playing out against the backdrop of a pitched populist era that has engulfed both political parties across the country. Democrats, attempting to leverage voters’ affordability concerns, are pursuing measures designed to further fill the government’s coffers. But the tax push has created fissures among Democrats, with the moderate Hochul opposing calls from Mamdani and other left-leaning advocates to broadly raise income and corporate income taxes.
It’s also provided a way for Republicans to again cast their political foes as tax-happy spenders.
And while polls have shown support for raising taxes on top earners, some Democrats warn voters will only stand for so much before a backlash kicks in.
“Like anything else, there’s a limit to how much you can keep doing things,” former Democratic Gov. David Paterson said.
That backlash may already be underway. New York City’s business elite, including hedge fund titan Ken Griffin, are threatening to yank their investments from the Big Apple. And a Siena College poll this month found 72 percent of voters believe the state’s fiscal condition is fair or poor.
Still, Republicans are hurtling toward what is shaping up to be a tough midterm election. President Donald Trump’s popularity has dropped as gas prices have spiked following the start of the Iran war. Blakeman’s bid against Hochul has struggled to gain traction, with voter surveys showing him consistently trailing by double digits. And Democrats’ outlook in crucial House districts, including suburban seats on Long Island and the Hudson Valley, have brightened in recent weeks as the party considers expanding its map throughout the state.
Several swing House seats in New York stand to determine control of the closely divided chamber and the course of Trump’s final two years in office. Many of those seats are in suburban communities where issues like property taxes are especially resonant with cost sensitive voters. And while Democrats plan to hit Republicans hard over affordability, the tax talk threatens to drown out their pocketbook message.
“For most Republicans it’s, I told ya so. We didn’t know exactly what it was going to look like, but it’s here,” said GOP strategist Dave Catalfamo. “All the folks in the political class knew Hochul would have to deal with it.”
Yet Republicans are also urging the top of their ticket to take a more forceful posture on taxes, fearing that the low-visibility Blakeman has not been aggressive enough.
“For Bruce Blakeman and others to capitalize on it, he’s got to have more urgency in his campaign — it’s pretty simple,” Catalfamo said.
Blakeman has already started to seize on the tax narrative. His campaign has blasted out fundraising emails decrying New York’s tax climate. A mailer sent to voters this month pledged the candidate “will protect you from the Hochul-Mamdani tax hikes.”
“New York state’s budget is already twice that of Florida and another tax will only increase the number of businesses and people leaving the state, taking valuable jobs with them,” Blakeman said. “When I become governor I will do everything to help with economic development and job creation and make New York more affordable by putting more money in peoples’ pockets, and not the state government’s.”
The Hochul campaign has scoffed at Blakeman’s effort to cast himself as a tax cutter, pointing to property tax hikes he’s backed as a Nassau County official. Blakeman himself acknowledged to The New York Post that backing those increases was “a mistake.”
“Bruce Blakeman’s own constituents are facing sky-high property taxes right now because Blakeman himself jacked them up twice, and his record is clear: Whether it’s tax hikes on families or backing Trump’s tariffs making everything more expensive, New Yorkers pay more with Blakeman," Hochul campaign spokesperson Ryan Radulovacki said.
New Yorkers pay some of the highest taxes in the country. The fiscally conservative Tax Foundation in its annual rankings found New York dead last out of 50 states when it comes to economic competitiveness. The state’s personal income tax is the third highest in the country behind only California and Hawaii. New York homeowners also pay among the highest property taxes in the country — especially in wealthy suburban enclaves.
Business groups have long decried the state’s tax climate and the potential that it will slay the golden goose, namely the financial services sector on Wall Street and a handful of extremely wealthy people. Nearly half of the state’s income tax revenue comes from less than 1 percent of the state’s residents.
That precarious dynamic has fueled concerns among fiscal hawks that even a small shift in the tax base — people moving to states like Florida and Texas, say — would upend the state’s economy.
“New Yorkers shoulder the highest burden of combined taxation of any state in the country, and we lead the nation in outmigration because of it,” said Marc Molinaro, a former Trump administration official now running for a state Assembly seat. “There’s not a New Yorker who doesn’t think that this state government is going to reduce actual cost.”
Republicans, though, must show voters they’re offering an alternative path, he added.
“We all have to send the message,” Molinaro said. “We have to explain at the grocery store aisle, at the farm, at the coffee shop that it’s this state that’s responsible for the costs.”
Hochul, a Democrat seeking a second full term, has acknowledged the tax woes. She’s opposed raising personal and corporate income taxes in the state budget — rebuffing pleas from left-leaning advocates and Mamdani, a Democratic socialist. The governor has also embraced ending taxes on tipped wages — a Trump-aligned policy enacted at the federal level.
Yet she has also been caught in the undertow of a populist pushback on the left.
Mamdani’s surprise election victory hinged on his platform of addressing New Yorkers’ surging costs, pledging free bus service and child care. To pay for that expensive agenda, he proposed hiking taxes on the city’s wealthy residents — a measure that needed approval from Albany.
Hochul has been unwilling to grant it.
Instead, the governor proposed a series of solutions meant to satisfy Mamdani’s agenda and keep the tax-hike talk at bay. In January, she agreed to a significant expansion of no-cost child care using existing state funds.
Last month, Hochul announced her support for an annual surcharge on non-primary second residences in New York City worth $5 million and higher. Known as a pied-à-terre tax, the measure is meant to thread a needle: Few New York voters would be affected and it would still generate cash to help close New York City’s $5.4 billion budget gap.
Nevertheless, the tax led to friction with the business community. The powerful Real Estate Board of New York has opposed the surcharge and argued it would hurt investment in the city. Griffin — whose $238 million Manhattan penthouse was used as the backdrop for a Mamdani video touting the tax — threatened to yank support for planned construction in the city.
Hochul has not embraced proposals from other Democrats to expand the pied-à-terre tax outside of the city. She also met with Griffin earlier this month — a sit-down she said was scheduled before her tax proposal.
Private-sector lobbying groups have proposed carve outs for the tax so it wouldn’t affect people who have donated heavily to New York charities or created a significant number of jobs — a change that would apply to Griffin.
“I’m guessing he pays an awful lot in taxes to New York state already,” said Business Council of New York State President Heather Mulligan. “And if we kick him in the teeth and he moves somewhere else, we’re going to lose 100 percent of that.”
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