On January 25, four days after demonstrators flooded the streets of Washington, D.C., to protest the presidential inauguration of Donald Trump, Jose Peralta, a Democratic state senator from Queens, New York, defected from his party. He became the eighth Democratic member of what is known as the Independent Democratic Conference (IDC), a breakaway faction that caucuses with Republicans in the New York Senate, effectively giving the GOP a majority in a chamber that voters have all but decided should be in Democratic control. Days later, Peralta faced a town hall full of angry constituents and protesters who chanted, “Traitor! Traitor!”

They are mad as hell, and with good reason. At a time when New York should be leading the progressive charge against a Republican-controlled federal government, it is members of the Democratic Party who are holding the state back. And to the everlasting frustration of the party, the state’s Democratic governor, the aloof and enigmatic Andrew Cuomo, appears more than happy to live with this arrangement—all while telegraphing his presidential ambitions.

In Cuomo’s seven years in office, he has pitched himself as a Clinton-style liberal who can cut through the Gordian knot of partisan dysfunction to deliver meaningful results for middle-class families. He delivers budgets on time. He notches progressive victories. He is like a modern-day LBJ, a wizard in the legislative dark arts of arm-twisting and favor-bestowing. His critics say he prefers this hive of cloakroom activity to actually helping Democrats get elected, which Cuomo’s office has consistently denied. But Cuomo himself sees upsides in the bizarre legislative pact that has fractured his own party. “We’ve had a unified Democratic government in Albany,” Cuomo told reporters just last week. “It’s not a hypothetical. We’ve had it. It wasn’t extraordinarily successful. So I work with the Assembly and Senate that I’ve been given and I do the best I can.”

His critics say he prefers this hive of cloakroom activity to actually helping Democrats get elected, which Cuomo’s office has consistently denied.

That may have been true in the past, but we are living in exceptional times. The situation in Albany would be weird in any political environment, but it’s highly problematic in the Trump era, when proposed federal immigration and health care policies have made millions of New York’s residents vulnerable. A Democratic majority in the Senate could protect these people, which is what a unified Democratic government in California is doing. “New York is following where so many other states, namely California, are leading,” Brad Hoylman, a state senator from Manhattan, told the New Republic. “It’s a shame. And it’s because we have an illegitimate control of the state Senate.”

Single-payer health care, progressive housing policies, changes to campaign finance and redistricting laws that have suppressed the vote—these are all issues a Democratic state government could tackle. (The New York Assembly is already controlled by the Democrats.) And when progressive legislation does make it through—like Cuomo’s much-ballyhooed but underwhelming free college proposal—it is often watered down. “What I’ve seen over and over again are half-victories, or sometimes quarter-victories, that are called full victories, on issues up and down and across the board,” state Senator Gustavo Rivera, who represents the Bronx, told the New Republic. “This namby-pamby, half-a-loaf type of craziness does not compute. It does not help our people, it does not help our state, it leaves us open to attacks.”