ALBANY – Gov. Kathy Hochul is filling the upper echelons of her re-election team with alumni of campaigns in battleground states and other recent high-stakes political fights – a signal she may be expecting a tough race even in deep-blue New York.
The governor has taken former staffers from high-profile statewide races in battlegrounds such as Michigan, Georgia and Wisconsin, as well as some advisers from her gubernatorial run atop the ticket in 2022.
Hochul’s campaign manager, Preston Elliott, ran Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s 2022 re-election campaign and had a recent stint at the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, or DSCC, the Democrats’ campaign arm managing independent spending in Senate races.
Elliott’s deputy, as reported by POLITICO Friday, will be Lexie Kelly, previously finance director on Minnesota Sen. Tammy Baldwin’s campaign.
Hochul’s comms team is headed by Sarafina Chitika, who worked on Georgia Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock’s (D-Ga.) campaign before Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential bid.
Ryan Radulovacki, just off incoming New Jersey Gov.-elect Mikie Sherrill’s race, will be the Hochul campaign’s press secretary.
“Democrats have made New York one of the most unaffordable states in America, and everyone knows that,” said Bill O’Reilly, a GOP consultant told The Post. “It’s an axiom. No wonder the governor is beginning to freak out about the race.”
Jack O’Donnell, a Democratic consultant whose raised money for Hochul, said, “You can see from this battle-tested team that she’s ready for a fight, and I suspect when her campaign files their fundraising numbers next month, you will see she’s quite well-prepared for the fight, too.”
Hochul’s campaign is retaining some older hands from her rocky 2022 bid, too, including Stacey Lynch, a progressive ex-New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio aide who left her position in Hochul’s government office as chief of staff to join her campaign this summer as a senior adviser.
The gov is also keeping on Abigail Erwin, the architect of her highly effective fundraising apparatus, as a senior adviser, according to POLITICO.
North Country Rep. Elise Stefanik, Hochul’s main GOP foe at this point, said the governor’s record means more than her staff picks.
“The Worst Governor in America Kathy Hochul is clearly in campaign free fall as New Yorkers know she has driven our state off a cliff as the most unaffordable state in the nation and the most unsafe,” Stefanik wrote in a statement to The Post.
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