Adrienne Adams will be the first Black woman to serve as lieutenant governor of New York. She and Gov. Kathy Hochul won on Nov. 3 with 59.20% of the vote to Republican Bruce Blakeman’s 39.58%, and they take office in January.
It is not the first barrier Adams has broken. From January 2022 through the end of 2025 she was the first Black speaker in the history of the New York City Council. She lives in Southeast Queens, was first elected to the Council in 2017, and did community organizing work before that.
Her road to Albany ran through a loss. Adams finished fourth in the 2025 Democratic primary for mayor of New York City. Hochul chose her as a running mate in February, saying: “Raised by two union workers, Adrienne knows what it means to work hard.”
The pair are also the first all-woman ticket New York has elected to run its executive branch, a headline that can crowd out a plainer one: for the first time, the person next in line to the governor’s office is a Black woman.
Adams did not spend election night on the history. “Someone is sitting at the kitchen table, deciding which bill could wait,” she said. “They need more than a historic night. They need us to deliver.”
That is the right test, and the office makes it hard. A lieutenant governor in New York has few powers of her own, so her influence depends on what Hochul lets her do and on what she is willing to push for. In the campaign she promised to stop Donald Trump from raising costs and ripping away child care. Black New Yorkers, who pay those costs first, should expect her to use every inch of the office to make good on it.
The first measure of that comes with the budget the new administration writes after it is sworn in.
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