When Gov. Kathy Hochul first took office in 2021, she was a relative unknown. Few New Yorkers knew how to pronounce her name, let alone what Ms. Hochul, Andrew M. Cuomo’s seldom-seen lieutenant governor, stood for.
Since then, she has honed an executive style that is equal parts practical and protective. And while many elements inform her politics — her Buffalo roots, her Catholic faith, her business-friendly sensibility — perhaps none is more central than her role as a mother.
“Does anybody not know I’m a mom?” Ms. Hochul, a Democrat, joked at an appearance last week to celebrate her most attention-grabbing win in this year’s budget: a bell-to-bell ban on cellphones in schools. “I say it every single day: I’ve been a mom longer than I’ve been a governor.”
She built on this message in an op-ed published on Friday by Fox News, invoking her status as New York’s “first mom governor” to pledge her commitment to protecting children.
“We’re taking back our classrooms and giving kids their childhoods back,” she wrote.
The message, and her choice of a conservative news outlet to deliver it, was a striking example of how Ms. Hochul has embraced a kind of “family values” approach more in line with the Republican Party of the 1990s than with the Democratic Party of the 2020s.
Indeed, in crafting the cellphone regulations, the Hochul administration found itself looking to Republican-led states like Louisiana and Florida. Last year, when the governor embarked on a push to restrict social media companies, New York followed the lead of Utah, where the push to restrict children’s media led to the banning of books by Margaret Atwood, Rupi Kaur and Judy Blume.