She picked Mr. Benjamin, a Black former state senator from Harlem, as her operating mate in August in an effort to broaden her attraction amongst metropolis voters. She had occupied the place herself till former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo’s sudden resignation.
After Mr. Benjamin’s tenure resulted in his arrest, undermining the governor’s guarantees to scrub up corruption in Albany, she was decided to select a lieutenant governor with none purple flags. She requested Elizabeth Tremendous, the counsel to the governor, and Marty Mack, the appointments secretary, to supervise a staff of attorneys scrubbing candidates’ backgrounds.
“That was one thing we took very, very severely and I believe we obtained it proper,” Ms. Hochul mentioned on Tuesday.
Whereas she thought of a handful of officers who’re folks of coloration, it seems she didn’t constrain her choices to these hailing from the downstate area. The choice course of was stored remarkably beneath wraps, devoid of the leaks that outlined Ms. Hochul’s first, flawed seek for a second-in-command.
Along with Mr. Delgado, Ms. Hochul’s staff thought of Eric Gonzalez, the Brooklyn district legal professional, and Vincent Alvarez, the president of the New York Metropolis Central Labor Council, in addition to different Latino candidates, in line with two folks accustomed to the method.
A former Rhodes scholar and company lawyer, Mr. Delgado supplied appreciable political attributes. He has twice been elected in one of the aggressive swing districts within the nation. He has confronted a deluge of opposition analysis unfold by Republican opponents who tried to model him as a “big-city rapper.” He’s additionally a prolific fund-raiser, with practically $6 million in his Home marketing campaign account, which can be utilized for the lieutenant governor race.
“They obtained burned on choosing Brian Benjamin,” mentioned John Faso, a former Republican congressman who misplaced to Mr. Delgado in 2018. “Now they’ve obtained a man who went via a really aggressive race in 2018 and doesn’t have the bags that different candidates might need.”
