Letitia James Drops Out of N.Y. Governor’s Race

Letitia James, the attorney general of New York, announced on Thursday that she was ending her campaign for governor and running instead for re-election, a surprising move that upended the high-profile governor’s race and further solidified Gov. Kathy Hochul’s standing.

Ms. James had just entered the race in late October, on the heels of her office’s devastating report on sexual harassment claims against former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, which led to his resignation. She was immediately treated as a top contender, buoyed by her record and her historic bid to become the first Black female governor in the country.

But recent opinion polls had shown Ms. James trailing Ms. Hochul, the state’s first female governor, by double digits among Democratic primary voters. She was believed to be significantly behind the governor in fund-raising, according to many party strategists and donors, and had struggled to secure high-profile endorsements from the politicians and labor unions who typically help crown winners in New York, despite her years in city and state politics.

“I have come to the conclusion that I must continue my work as attorney general,” Ms. James, a Democrat, wrote in a statement, barely six weeks after entering the race. She said that she wanted to “finish the job” on several “important investigations and cases” under her purview.

The announcement came on the day that it became known that Ms. James’s office intended to subpoena former President Donald J. Trump to testify in a civil fraud investigation.

Ms. James, whose office is also participating in the criminal investigation being run by the Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., is seeking to question Mr. Trump under oath on Jan. 7 as part of her separate civil inquiry into his business practices. She also continues to litigate a closely watched case against the National Rifle Association, as well as lawsuits involving Facebook, Google, Amazon and the New York Police Department, and she is investigating a seven-figure deal on a book that Mr. Cuomo penned as governor.

New York bars candidates from running for two statewide offices at once, so Ms. James would have had to give up a relatively secure job as attorney general to continue to pursue the governorship.

Her allies argued that Ms. James genuinely relishes her current position. Ultimately, it appears that she did not want to give that up for the rigors of a different campaign she was far from certain to win, against an incumbent governor with whom she did not have overwhelming disagreements.

“Tish James loves what she’s doing, she’s a very passionate person, she has a lot of respect for Gov. Hochul,” said Alan Rubin, a lobbyist in New York City who backed Ms. James’s candidacy. “It wasn’t, clearly you could say, ‘I’m definitely in because I don’t agree with this person’s policies, I don’t like them.’”

Ms. Hochul, who was elevated from lieutenant governor after Mr. Cuomo’s resignation, was already the early favorite in the race. But Ms. James’s exit further smoothed her path, as a number of Democrats who had either stayed on the sidelines or backed Ms. James — Mr. Rubin among them — signaled that they now intended to support the governor.

“Kathy has accomplished more in four months than many of her predecessors in an entire term,” said Assemblywoman Rodneyse Bichotte Hermelyn, the chairwoman of the Democratic Party in vote-rich Brooklyn.

She added that Ms. Hochul was “the best choice to lead our state forward through the recovery, and she will have the support of Brooklyn behind her as she continues to blaze a path as our first female governor.”

While Ms. Hochul still faces spirited challenges from her right and left, including a possible run by Mayor Bill de Blasio, she signaled on Thursday that she was already focused on November’s general election. Representative Lee Zeldin, a Long Island Republican, is considered the leading Republican candidate.

In recent weeks, some supporters and would-be supporters of Ms. James had grown increasingly skeptical of the trajectory of her campaign as Ms. Hochul continued to outpace her in public polling and to fund-raise aggressively.

One elected official who had initial conversations with the James team about an endorsement noticed that follow-up from her team seemed to taper off over the last week. The endorsement never came together.

And a state senator said that colleagues in Albany, even some who share her ideological outlook, had been hesitant to endorse Ms. James, given Ms. Hochul’s leverage during the state’s annual legislative season and the once-in-a-decade redistricting process.

Ms. James held deliberations with around a half-dozen of her closest advisers on Wednesday and made the decision to drop out that day, according to several people with direct knowledge of the conversations, granted anonymity to discuss the internal developments. Her first call announcing her decision on Thursday was to Ms. Hochul, two of those people said.

Ms. Hochul later said that she would support Ms. James’s re-election campaign and looked forward to “having her on the ticket as we head into the November election together.”

The move took others within Ms. James’s campaign by surprise. In roughly the last week, offers had been extended for several senior-level jobs, and more campaign events were being readied, according to someone with direct knowledge of the activities who was granted anonymity to discuss the private plans.

A number of Ms. James’s allies strongly dispute the idea that she exited the race out of concerns around money, endorsements or early-stage polls, pointing to her track record of winning challenging races in the past.

“Tish would have won the majority of trade union endorsements, I’m convinced of that,” said John Samuelsen, the international president of the Transport Workers Union, which had endorsed Ms. James. “But with Tish out of the way, the path for Kathy Hochul to win is much clearer.”

Ms. James also faced significant competition for her New York City base: Jumaane D. Williams, the New York City public advocate and another Brooklynite, threatened to cut into parts of the coalition she was hoping to build, and Mr. de Blasio could have siphoned off some of the Brooklyn-rooted voters she had been counting on. Brooklyn represents the single largest voting bloc in most Democratic statewide primaries.

Many prominent left-wing leaders believed the progressive left would choose between Ms. James and Mr. Williams; her exit from the race may help Mr. Williams shore up new endorsements.

Mr. Williams lost the race for lieutenant governor to Ms. Hochul in 2018 by 6.6 percentage points, though a race against an incumbent governor is likely to be a far steeper climb.

Representative Thomas Suozzi of Long Island, in the meantime, is seeking to cut into Ms. Hochul’s standing in the suburbs.

Ms. James’s exit from the race is a striking coda to a fall campaign shaped by a frenzy of political activity. In the weeks leading up to her much-anticipated announcement, she traveled the state, addressed Democratic groups and mulled her options in public and private — even as Mr. Cuomo made clear he would seek to undermine her if she ran. Her allies, in the meantime, compared her national fund-raising potential to that of Stacey Abrams, who is running again for governor of Georgia, and she made several prominent political hires.

But even during that period, there were signs of indecision.

“It was a very long process to get to the point where it was something she believed she truly wanted to do,” Mr. Rubin said. “It was not an easy decision.”

Her announcement, when it finally came, struck many political observers as disjointed — shortly after she released a video, it was overshadowed by a news conference involving legal issues around Mr. Cuomo, and then by the 2021 municipal elections.

She made a splash at a major political conference in Puerto Rico, began a search for a running mate and headed to California to fund-raise — but in recent weeks, Ms. James kept a relatively modest public campaign schedule, as Politico noted on Wednesday. And some potential rivals and their allies had quietly questioned whether she would really follow through with a run.

In the race for attorney general, Mr. James’s announcement quickly began to clear the field that had grown as she ran for governor. State Senator Shelley Mayer of Westchester dropped out immediately and endorsed her. State Senator Michael Gianaris, a left-leaning Democrat from Queens who had been mulling a run, said he, too, would back the incumbent.

Other candidates — including the Fordham Law professor Zephyr Teachout, the former federal prosecutor Daniel S. Goldman, and Eric Gonzalez, the Brooklyn district attorney — had yet to comment.

Luis Ferré-Sadurní contributed reporting.