The New York State Senate voted down Governor Kathy Hochul’s conservative nominee for chief judge last Wednesday. On the same day, that body also took major steps toward enacting New York City Democratic Socialists of America’s (NYC-DSA) environmental agenda. Throughout the week, Democratic legislators in Albany also signaled strong resistance to rolling back progressive criminal justice reforms and confidence that “good cause” eviction legislation, forbidding landlords from arbitrarily refusing to renew tenants’ leases, would pass.

Socialists’ agenda isn’t quite sailing through the New York State Legislature. But as part of a broader progressive coalition, leftists are wielding significant power in the state and putting the governor of a solidly blue state on notice that she needs to work with them — marking a major political shift in New York with promising implications for gains for the working class in the coming budget process.

Hochul, New York’s centrist Democratic governor, defeated a Republican challenger in November, but the 8 percentage point margin was alarmingly tight considering that her opponent was a right-wing nut and New York is usually considered safely liberal. Worse, and of greater national interest, New York was the only state in which the predicted congressional “red wave” materialized, and the state’s chaotic politics are now the reason the Republicans have a House majority. With momentum on the right, mainstream Democrats have a choice. They can tack to the left, keeping their coalition and base together and possibly expanding it. Or they can tack to the right, peeling off some conservative voters and dispensing with the progressive forces that have proven a force to be reckoned with.