When Hochul says she'll announce her 2026 running mate

And Bruce Blakeman hits the airwaves ... in Florida?

Good afternoon — It’s Thursday and Hard Candy Day.

In today’s CapCon:

• The state Senate doesn’t publish how members vote on nominees from the governor. Could that change?

• We won’t have to wait long for Gov. Kathy Hochul to announce her 2026 running mate, she said Thursday.

• The state Public Service Commission ordered Con Edison to develop an energy reliability plan with “non-emitting solutions.”

• Behavioral health advocates have a plan they say would save New York “hundreds of millions” in Medicaid spending.

• Bruce Blakeman has placed his first television ad buy in New York … and Florida?

• DOCCS has published a proposed heat mitigation plan for state prisons and opened it for public comment.

Names in today’s CapCon: Kathy Hochul, Liz Krueger, Mike Murphy, Rory Christian, Con Edison, New York State Council for Community Behavioral Healthcare, Eric Gonzalez, Walter Mosley, Brian Cunningham, Bruce Blakeman, Donald J. Trump, Elise Stefanik

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💌 RSVP NOW: State Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins will join me at the Hearst Media Center in Colonie for an in-person interview at our Capitol Confidential Pro launch party on Jan. 6 in Albany. Reserve your spot here.

🔎 The state Senate doesn’t publish its votes on Hochul’s nominees. Should that change?

If you’ve been around Albany for more than a few years, you’ll know that the state Senate’s process for confirming the governor’s nominees is a well-oiled machine.

That’s because it has to be. Those nominees typically don’t reach the state Senate until the final two weeks of the legislative session, when members are already busy negotiating final changes to bills before they leave for the year.

The result is a system in which the state Senate is forced to shepherd through dozens of nominees — sometimes more than 100 — in just a few days.

Only a select few of those nominees are asked to appear before a committee in the state Senate before their nomination heads to the floor. The rest are cleared without appearing in person.

It’s rare for a nominee to be rejected by the state Senate. The last time that happened was in 2023, when members voted down Gov. Kathy Hochul’s nominee for chief judge: Hector LaSalle.

Those confirmations are rarely unanimous. It’s not uncommon for a member of the Senate to vote against a nominee that’s confirmed by a majority of the chamber.

But if you want to know how each member voted on any given nominee, you won’t find that tally online as you would with most other votes taken in the chamber.

You would have to instead either know the clerk of the state Senate and how to contact them or file a formal request under the Freedom of Information Law.

The other option is to watch the Senate vote on the confirmation but that’s not always transparent. While they hold roll call votes on high-profile nominees, they don’t when they consider a batch of nominees at once — called a “slate.”

All of that was the inspiration for a new report released Thursday by Reinvent Albany, a good government group. And it could have an impact.

I wrote about the details of the report in a story published this morning in the Times Union. (Free link)

Check out that story for Senate Finance Chair Liz Krueger’s thoughts on the confirmation process. But I also received this statement from Mike Murphy, spokesman for the Senate majority conference.