New York has never had a Black woman as lieutenant governor. Adrienne Adams just won the job.

New York has had a lieutenant governor for generations. It has never had a Black woman in the job until now. Adrienne Adams, of Southeast Queens, won it Tuesday on Gov. Kathy Hochul’s ticket, and she will be sworn in on New Year’s Day.

The Hochul-Adams ticket beat Republican Bruce Blakeman, the Nassau County executive, by roughly 20 points in the count the Associated Press reported. It is also the first time New York has elected two women to its top two offices. Adams will replace Lt. Gov. Antonio Delgado, who ran against Hochul this year.

Adams already holds one first. She was the first Black speaker of the New York City Council, serving from January 2022 through the end of 2025, after she was first elected to the Council in 2017 from a district in Southeast Queens. Her own bid for mayor last year did not succeed. Hochul has described her running mate as someone “raised by two union workers.”

The job is smaller than the title suggests. The lieutenant governor presides over the state Senate, casts tie-breaking votes there and is next in line if a governor leaves office. Whether it matters depends on who holds it and what the governor lets them do. For Black New Yorkers, and for Black women in particular, it is a seat in the governor’s inner circle that no one like them has held before.

Hochul used her victory speech to answer the president directly. New Yorkers, she said, acted as if Donald Trump was on the ballot: “Well Mr. President, you got your wish.” Adams ran on the same ground. During the campaign she said “there’s too much on the line for us to let Donald Trump raise costs, rip away child care, and wage war on New York families.”

That is a worthy platform, and the test is what follows it. Child care and the cost of living fall hardest on Black households in Queens, Brooklyn and the Bronx, and Adams knows those neighborhoods from the inside. A first is worth celebrating on the night. The measure of this one will be whether the second-highest office in the state is used to move money and policy toward the people who elected her, starting with the budget Hochul sends to Albany this winter.

Hochul and Adams take their oaths Jan. 1.