I.

“There are things that women candidates can’t do,” political commentator, former ACLU attorney, and current director of Colby College’s Center of Public Affairs Alison Beyea told oysterman Graham Platner, then the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate in Maine, on her podcast Politics Between Us, only six weeks ago. “[Maine Governor] Janet [Mills] can’t drop the F-bomb. [Former Senate candidate] Betsy Sweet ran on many of the platforms you are running on now, and people called her a witch. There is a difference in how women are perceived.”

At the time (the last week of May, an eternity ago), Platner was a political juggernaut, who, despite his outsider status, had dominated the Democratic primary so thoroughly that his opponent, the incumbent governor of the state, had suspended her campaign a month earlier. Some establishment Democrats still had concerns, not just about his lack of experience or fierce opposition to many of the party’s mainstream policy positions, but also about his character and fitness. Platner had given them plenty of fodder for these concerns, including his vividly offensive Reddit posts, the massive tattoo of a Nazi skull symbol on his chest, the unusually high turnover on his campaign staff, and the week this podcast aired, the revelation that he had sent sexually explicit texts and images to women besides his wife as recently as last summer. But for the most part, Maine Democrat voters were not deterred. To many commentators, Platner’s checkered past (and present?) was actually part of the winning formula. Democrats need to run “real people” in order to win, Platner’s strategist extraordinaire, the 27 year-old Beacon High School graduate Morris Katz told NPR’s Morning Edition last November, “and real people who haven’t thought they were going to run for office have lived imperfect lives.” “The era of smoothgroin politicians is coming to an end,” the Intercept’s Ken Klippenstein wrote on his personal substack, affixing an image of Ryan Gosling as a Ken doll. On Twitter, commentator Matt Stollar went a step further, declaring that Platner’s success augured “a rejection of HR lady politics” (he later took down this tweet and wrote a long post about why, but stood by much of the underlying substance.) Democrats had lost their connection to “real people” by becoming too uptight, too woke, and possibly too feminine, the argument went. If we wanted to win, we needed an uncouth, unvarnished, man-of-the-people who spoke common sense, not college-campus identity-politics buzzwords.

Beyea’s question to Platner on whether he benefited from an unfair gender double-standard got right to the heart of this argument, and Platner responded enthusiastically, and ironically, with a surprisingly heavy helping of college-campus identity politics-buzzwords.

“I agree,” he told Beyea. “There’s this ironic thing where I’m a cisgendered white male running for office, while simultaneously believing we need less [sic] cisgendered white males in political office. I recognize that I am privileged in many ways… Betsy literally ran on pretty much everything I talk about. Everything. They went after her, called her a witch because that’s what this society does. And then I get to do it and people are like, this sounds reasonable. That’s insane to me. But it’s also a reality. I recognize my privilege but I also think there’s a responsibility to use it in some way.”

This was a brilliant answer, and it played extremely well with the podcast hosts, and beyond. Writing in New York Magazine, feminist writer Rebecca Traister, a Maine resident, admitted that it was precisely this answer, and others like it, that made Platner so endearing to her and to thousands of her fellow liberal women in the state. “He comes off as an apple-cheeked kid who might remind white resistance moms of their very good boys” she wrote.

It’s a brilliant answer for two reasons. First, by “acknowledging his privilege” (a staple of Woke 1.0 “HR politics,”), Platner turns the issue of gender representation on its head. We need to run more white men like me, Platner implicitly argues, because we can win races that women can’t, and saying that is actually just recognizing disparities and being a good ally. Second, by placing 100% of the blame for Betsy Sweet’s 2020 campaign woes on her gender, he conveniently ignores any other possible factors. Without going too far down the rabbit hole on this, to the extent that Sweet was labeled a witch, it was not just because of her politics and her gender. Sweet’s prior career as a psychic medium who advertised the ability to “receive messages from loved ones who have passed,” her advocacy for and practice of alternative medicine, and her close friendship with Marianne Williamson all likely played some role too.

And there are ways to distinguish Platner’s campaign from Sweet’s besides gender. Most obviously, Platner spends a lot more time talking about Israel, and a lot less time talking about climate change than Sweet did. But this would be an awkward difference to point out to someone like Beyea, a GenX liberal white woman who, unlike the vast majority of Maine Democrats, likely had no objection to Sweet’s politics and points of emphasis. It’s much more convenient for everyone involved to chalk it entirely up to a misogynistic (Democratic) primary electorate.

It is not an exaggeration to say that Platner, and some of the other Fight Agency candidates like John Fetterman and Dan Osborn, are the logical conclusion of this kind of argument, which holds that Democrats keep losing because we run too many buttoned-up women as candidates. If we swap them out for charismatic, uncouth, burly dudes with deep voices, the aesthetics of a manual laborer, and an intense aversion to suits, we should be able to win without having to do the uncomfortable, difficult work of changing our policy positions at all.

If this argument held up, it would pose a thorny dilemma for liberal feminists. Must we give up on the worthy ambition of increasing representation in elected office in order to secure victories in key swing districts and protect fundamental rights for women that are under attack? Must we rely on gross men, including even some with checkered personal backgrounds and possibly even misconduct allegations, to win elections and enshrine reproductive freedom?

It’s a tough one. But it’s moot, because it turns out that the argument does not hold up. In fact, though absolutely no one in Democratic politics right now seems to believe it, women candidates do just fine. If anything, they’re probably even a little better than men on average. And we should nominate them for competitive primaries much more often than we do.

II.

In 2022, political science professors Suzanne Schwarz and Alexander Coppock published a meta-analysis of the substantial academic literature on the effect of candidate gender in electoral politics. First, they reviewed one study that compared the performance of ideologically similar men and women in US House of Representatives races from 1980 to 2012, finding that the genders had “virtually identical” win rates. Another study attempted to reproduce this finding in 2016, an election cycle in American politics that featured historic amounts of misogynistic vitriol due to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. Despite this, Democratic women actually outperformed men in both primary and general election races.

Women candidates’s track record of success violates the established narrative, but it doesn’t get us all the way there. The past is not necessarily predictive, and correlation (women candidates do better in House races than men) does not necessarily imply causation (holding everything else equal, if you swap out a man for a woman in a competitive election, you’ll win more votes). Schwarz and Coppock highlight one possible confounder, that the women on the ballot, who have managed to clear the additional hurdles that the patriarchy places in their way to even get that far (“it’s literally impossible to be a woman,” one contemporary scholar argues), may be, on average, higher-quality candidates than the men who did not have to face the same adversity. If that’s true, then women performing similarly to men, or even only slightly better, would imply an electorate that is biased against women candidates, who have to work harder and be better than comparable men to achieve the same results.

It’s worth pausing for a moment and noting that if this is the case, if women succeed because the ones that run are able to overcome a sexist electorate with superior skills, we should absolutely run more of them, especially the women who have demonstrated these skills with a track record of winning tough elections. But Schwarz and Coppock don’t stop there. Instead, they look for actual evidence of the direct, causal impact, controlling for all possible variables besides gender.

And they find it, in something called a “candidate choice survey experiment,” a type of “conjoint analysis” where survey respondents are presented with a series of hypothetical candidates, compared side-by-side, with randomly varying attributes. With enough responses and random variations of otherwise-similar candidates, surveyors can isolate the impact of each attribute. This has significant advantages over simply polling people about whether they’d prefer to vote for a man or woman candidate. You can test for multiple things at once (these have also been used to isolate the impact size of party endorsements, candidate experience, race and pretty much every other candidate attribute), and crucially, respondents do not know what they are being tested on. Even on an anonymous poll, respondents might feel embarrassed to admit that they have gendered biases, and lie about their preferences, if they know that that is what they are being tested on. In a conjoint analysis with multiple variables, respondents feel no shame, because they have no idea what they are being assessed on.

It turns out over the past few decades, political science academics have conducted no fewer than 67 such candidate choice survey experiments assessing the impact of candidate gender on voters, including 35 on the impact on American voters specifically. As a society, we’ve decided to devote an incredible amount of time and resources to obsessive nerds who spend years rigorously answering and then re-answering the same questions over and over, inching ever closer to something approximating objective truth. Academia rules.

The studies all had slightly different methodologies and survey populations, but they yielded remarkably consistent results: voters prefer women candidates by about two percentage points. In other words, swapping an otherwise identical woman candidate in for a man leads to a two-percentage point increase in voter approval. The impact size is even a little larger if you only look at the American studies, and larger still for the American studies post-2014. It’s not completely unanimous. There are three American post-2014 studies that find a negative impact for women, two that find virtually no impact either way, and two more with wide enough confidence intervals that it could go either way. There are also, however, five studies that find the positive impact of gender to be far larger, with women candidates gaining more than five percentage points over equivalent men. The rest all land in between.

Democrats, especially college-educated liberal white GenX women, famously like to broadcast their belief that “women’s rights are human rights” and that “science is real.” The idea that voters prefer women candidates to men in modern American society is so counterintuitive that it might be hard to take my word for it just because I cited a bunch of pointy-headed ivory tower nerd scientists that did complicated experiments. But it is the scientific consensus, and it is just as real as climate change, coronavirus vaccine efficacy, or any other scientific consensus that liberals feel more comfortable with.

And if that consensus isn’t enough, simply look at the track record of women candidates in the 2024 election cycle. According to Lakshya Jain’s Candidate Wins Above Replacement model, the most valuable candidate in the entire cycle, the one whose candidate quality outperformed the fundamentals of the race by the highest decisive margin, was a woman, Michigan-08’s Representative Kristen McDonald Rivet. Of the fourteen congressional races that were decided by candidate quality, where the fundamentals implied that the other party’s candidate should have won, five of these overperformers were women: Rivet, Washington’s Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, Ohio’s Marcy Kaptur, New York’s Laura Gillen, and Michigan’s Elissa Slotkin. Less than 30% of 2024 congressional general election candidates were women, so women were overrepresented among the most valuable candidates of the cycle. Which is a long way of saying that the women that ran for Congress, on average, slightly outperformed comparable men, just as the surveys suggested they would.

III.

When Beyea and Platner say that “there are things that women candidates can’t do,” and that Platner’s gender automatically made him a more electable candidate, it is not hard to understand where they are coming from. Hillary Clinton’s shocking loss to Donald Trump in 2016 remains a singular, era-defining trauma for the Democratic Party, one that we have still not recovered from a decade later. In the wake of that loss, Democrats fumbled around desperately for some sort of explanation that could identify the election as a freak anomaly, and absolve Clinton and the party establishment of any responsibility, lurching from “Russian Interference,” to “Cambridge Analytica” to James Comey and the “But Her Emails” meme. But by far the most comforting narrative was one that Clinton herself had supplied in a speech two months before Election Day: “You know, just to be generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables: racist, sexist, xenophobic, homophobic, Islamaphobic.” Clinton went on to say that the rest were motivated by economic factors, were “desperate for change,” and Democrats needed to figure out a way to reach them, but everyone ignored that part. The notion that the majority of American voters were simply too bigoted, and specifically too sexist, to ever consider electing a woman president, was much more palatable for the grieving liberal Clinton supporter.

In the Democratic primary for the 2020 presidential election, this idea haunted the campaign of women candidates like Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, and Amy Klobuchar with a vengeance. Klobuchar in particular tried valiantly to convince primary voters that she was electable, and made progress with data nerds like the New York Times’s David Leonhardt, who highlighted her exceptional electoral record of winning statewide elections in the relatively purple Minnesota by more than twenty points in both 2012 and 2018. The problem was, no one else believed her. She finished below 5% in both South Carolina and Nevada, dropped out soon after, and endorsed Joe Biden, whom Democrats could more easily envision winning over bigoted swing voters, despite his considerably worse electoral track record.

This illustrates a key aspect of the Platner saga: electoral overperformers do not always look the way Democrats imagine they might. While Platner did a good job of convincing college-educated liberals that he was someone who might be aesthetically appealing to Maine’s “working class” he did not actually demonstrate any strength with that group, trailing among non-college voters by more than 20 points in a recent New York Times survey well before the rape allegations came out. Candidates like Klobuchar (and Elissa Slotkin, and Marie Gluesenkamp Perez), who actually do overperform with non-college swing voters, often seem kind of boring and vanilla to urban liberals like me. And they probably do not do as well on podcasts with Colby professors, or in the kind of media that reaches young left-wing professionals in Brooklyn. It is probably not a coincidence that I often find Klobuchar, Slotkin, and MGP aesthetically unmoving, and that I have significant political disagreements with all of them.

I do not mean to turn this into a “we should run more moderates” blog, a topic that has already been debated to death, and on which the academic research is genuinely in dispute at the moment (political scientists Adam Bonica and Jake Grumbach provocatively argued that as of 2024, political moderates do not actually perform differently than far-left or far-right candidates in swing districts, in a paper that people like Lakshya Jain, Nate Silver, and my friend Hunter Wieman all vigorously dispute). This is a “we should run more women” blog, a proposition that is supported robustly by recent history and scientific consensus.

Let me put all of my cards on the table. In the run-up to the 2028 Democratic presidential primary, there will be fierce, vigorous debates about which potential nominees are most electable. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, in particular, will have to defend herself against electability concerns dozens of times a day. “We like her,” liberals will say (she polls extremely well across all parts of the Democratic coalition these days), “but do we really want to risk running a woman again? Wouldn’t we be much safer with a handsome man in a nice suit, like Gavin Newsom?”

Newsom, who is significantly less popular than AOC, with a dramatically worse electoral record and far more political vulnerabilities from all sides of the spectrum, will be seen as a “safe choice” by some, entirely because of his Y chromosome. When this argument inevitably surfaces, we should call it out for what it is: gender discrimination. We should remind its proponents of the saga of Graham Platner, and the perils of nominating flawed, scandal-ridden men who don’t even poll well with the working-class men they’re supposed to win over. And we should point to “the science,” which shows that women actually perform better than similar men in American elections, and that voters prefer women candidates over men by about two percentage points.

Micah Lasher, thank you so much for coming on the podcast.

Glad to be with you, at long last.

At long last. We’re speaking on Thursday morning, so it’s been just over 36 hours since the race was called for you. How have those last 36 hours been? Any particularly poignant or funny or memorable moments?

Well, this morning, I walked my daughter to school with my wife. A double parent drop-off is a rare event under normal circumstances, but it’s been quite a long time since we’ve been able to do that. And then my wife and I had breakfast, sat down at a cafe and had breakfast in the neighborhood, which was very nice. I don’t know if that’s poignant, but it’s been sorely missed, I’ll tell you that.

So let’s take a trip back to September, when Jerry announced that he was not running for re-election and this race started. What was your overarching theory of the race when you decided to join? What did you think that voters were looking for? And what was your theory of how you were going to win?

The theory of how I was going to win was record and endorsements, fundamentally. It was never about picking a lane. It was about a record that was focused on fighting Trump. I had focused all of my legislative energies because I felt that was what the moment called for, that was the value that I could add as a legislator to kind of fighting back against Trump. And so there was a feeling that was what voters were going to be looking for in a congressman at this moment, combined with support from the most trusted elected leaders and formerly elected leaders in the district from Jerry Nadler on kind of the, not the far left, but on the left to Mike Bloomberg on the center.

And that the combination of that would carry the day, with an understanding that we didn’t know what the field would end up looking like. And I certainly understood, I think, because I was his colleague, I knew from the jump that Alex would be the ultimate competition and would be a formidable and worthy adversary.

A lot was made out of Eric Bottcher’s candidacy in the fall. And when he dropped out in December, it seemed, everyone I talked to, and then I said this was a huge coup for you, that the fact that the West Side was now basically yours alone. There’s been reporting that you and Jerry and other people behind the scenes were somewhat involved in encouraging Erik to seek that as a State Senate instead of running for Congress. And you obviously enthusiastically endorsed him as soon as he did.

Now looking at the map and seeing how you did in Chelsea, do you stand by that strategy? Are you rethinking that at all? [Note: Lasher won Chelsea by only one percentage point, and lost Hell’s Kitchen by double digits.]

It’s a really good question. Obviously the race played out less west side versus full east side than people thought it would. And then I would say even we at that time thought it would. So the counterfactual in which Erik is still in the race is an interesting one.

I certainly think for a whole host of reasons, having a unified West Side, even though Alex and I basically split the 75th Assembly District, Tony Simone’s Assembly District, which is Erik’s base. So yes, I think directionally you’re right. It’s certainly not as straightforward a net political benefit as it might have seemed at the time. But I think in the end… Some of this also, what’s the experience of running a campaign, and the ability to just have a coalition throughout as much of the district as you can is just a much better way to run a campaign.

And Erik and I had a very good relationship before the congressional campaign began. We were friends. We had a lot of mutual friends. There were people who were in a tough spot having to choose between us. There was just a lot that was really good about it. They had a council race down there. Carl was running for the council. There was just a lot that was better because we were able to be on a team.

So that was like a positive development for you. What were developments throughout the race that surprised you that made you rethink your strategy or your approach, if any? Were there any particular inflection points or moments where it felt like something took you by surprise?

It’s a good question. I don’t know that there were moments that really were themselves surprising. The amount of money that came in for Alex from the AI world and the crypto world, a topic that really I don’t think has been fully given its due by the press coverage of the race. I don’t know, so that wasn’t a single moment of surprise, but I think looking back, did I think that $20 million plus was going to come into the race for Alex and three of which to attack me?

Wait, 20, that’s the number?

Yeah.

I’ve seen ten for AI. Ten was pro-Alex and Ten was against Alex.

Check out, there’s a website, an AI money tracker. I can look it up… Transformer has an AI campaign finance tracker. and I don’t even know that this is fully updated, it has 19.26 million supporting and 8.15 million opposing Alex. And that does not include the 3 plus million from Nuestro PAC, which was set up to oppose me. So that I think in the end, and a lot of that money flooded in the final week.

That leads into my next question. I think a lot of voters, and I count myself among them, have a bitter taste from the way that money played a role in this race in general. It felt like it really had a corrosive effect on the way that the conversation and the discourse happened in a lot of different parts of this race. I’m sure you agree.

Certainly.

The way that I want to point this at you is, you’re a veteran campaign manager and strategist. You’ve run other people’s campaigns. Make the case for me that independent expenditures actually do matter a lot and that it was just not really viable for you to unilaterally disarm.

Because I think that would have been like a very powerful thing. You know, No PAC Jack was like a thing that he tried to get going. And I think No PAC Micah, especially paired with your advocacy for reform to Citizens United. And I think one of the most effective attacks on you was tying you to the Bloomberg spending.

I assume you didn’t really consider unilaterally disarming and just saying you’re not going to engage in this and you’re going to forswear any IE money. Why is that impossible? What is it that IE buys you that means that if the other side is doing it, you really can’t unilaterally disarm?

I will acknowledge that I can see a counterfactual in which what you lay out works. It would have been a very terrifying counterfactual, and I think my instinct is it wouldn’t have worked. But I don’t discount the possibility of what you’re saying.

And let’s agree, it was all awful. And by the way, if there’s no outside money in this race, I think I win by a bigger margin than I did. So I think that’s an important point, which is take this race on the merits, on the assets that each of us had, excluding outside expenditures. I think I win by more than four points.

But if you take Jack’s celebrity factor, which I do think probably would have faded no matter what, and then the combined media attention that Alex, to his credit, was able to generate from the money being spent against him. And then the name recognition that gets built up because of the money that’s spent for him. I think you’d have a significant basic recognition gap. And you saw it in those early polls. The early polls are showing Jack way ahead. Then Alex kind of keeps up with him because of the media attention he gets, the money being spent against him. And I’m only able to catch up in the early phases of the race because of the first burst of outside spending on my behalf.

I think in a world in which you’ve then got polls with Jack and Alex in the mid-20s and me 10 points back, you begin to have problems raising money, attracting political support. I think it becomes a real problem. And maybe in the end, you claw your way back through New York Times coverage.

Look how many fewer opportunities I had to go on TV. You know, I would get these text messages from people being like, “I saw Jack on Morning Joe this morning. You really should go on Morning Joe.” As though I didn’t want to go on Morning Joe! Nobody was interested in me. And so...

Not nobody!

Not nobody. That’s exactly right. And that’s why we’re doing this interview. The first interview after the race.

But just from a purely… let’s agree that it’s all awful and corrosive. I do think, as I said during the debates, there was a big difference about the money that came in for me from Mike Bloomberg and the reasons for it, and the money that came in both against and for Alex, which I think had some pretty cynical motives attached to it. But it’s all corrosive. But I think I would have had at least a materially worse chance of winning in a world in which I unilaterally disarmed and there’s $20 million plus being spent for Alex and to attack me.

And I would observe, by the way, one more thing, which is none of the money that came in for me was any negative on Alex. And while Alex did have money attacking him, that was about something having nothing to do with me. And the money that was spent attacking me, I am absolutely confident when the dust settles, will be shown to have been funded by people who very much wanted Alex to win.

Yeah, on that last point, I mean, if someone else is already doing it, you don’t need to. Like I understand why…

No, but I don’t… I know now that the people supporting me were not prepared to go negative on any other candidate.

So besides the difference in IE coalitions that you guys had, when people ask me, why are you doing this? A big question that they had was, “what’s the difference between these guys? They’re both Assembly Members. They seem like they agree on most issues. They’re probably going to vote exactly the same way in Congress. Why should I really care which one of them wins?”

I had my own journey with that question and I wrote a thing and came up with an answer that I thought that on balance you were slightly more progressive in certain key ways. Can you make the case in your own words what you think the difference is and why you think it matters?

I mean, I think you basically figured it out. But you figured it out with very slender evidence, right? You had to like search for evidence. And there’s a reason for that. And the reason for that is it was definitely in my, we believed it was in our interest during the campaign as a general matter. to not have a ton of daylight substantively between Alex and me. I don’t know to what extent he had the same view. So we were not looking to create meaningful policy differences. And the reality is, as you observed, I think kind of as we generally think about ideology, we’re not that different.

But I think what you figured out, which is a longstanding personality trait and part of my political identity that, if anything, I was trying to kind of downplay during the race, is that I do relish picking fights with powerful people. And there was a riff that Alex had during the campaign when he’d be asked about bipartisanship. And the riff was something to the effect of every bill I’ve passed in Albany, I got at least one Republican vote as a demonstration of his capacity to work across the aisle. And I think if you look at every bill that I’ve passed, with maybe the exception of the fish bill that I’ve made a joking video about, which is a bill that is foisted upon you by the leadership of the Assembly. I don’t think I’ve had a single Republican vote for any bill that I’ve passed. And that’s not because I don’t get along on an interpersonal and collegial level with the Republicans. But to some extent, I’m not interested in bills that would be modest enough for a Republican member of the Assembly conference to feel comfortable voting for them. This is not the U.S. House. Things are, the Republicans are a permanent minority. Their votes on bills are actually irrelevant because nothing goes to the floor without a majority from the Democratic Conference alone. So on anything of any significant ideological consequence, you will get a block vote no from the Republican Conference. That’s what I’ve had on every one of my bills.

The reason Alex, one of the reasons Alex has such a higher bill count than I have is because a bunch of his bills are passed on what’s known as consent, which means there’s no debate. Every single bill I passed was debated on the floor of the Assembly. Those are the things that interest me. That’s where I want to spend my time. I wrote about this in my session wrap up on my substack last year, how I picked my bills. I wanted bills that were responsive to an issue or a problem that my constituents would be able to proactively tell you about, or at least that I could explain to them in 30 seconds and they would care about. And so yeah, there’s a real streak in me that is suspicious of established authority, suspicious of powerful special interests, and likes taking on those fights and feels that that’s a big part of why I do this. And I do think that is a difference.

It’s so interesting because Alex’s whole case was basically what you just said. “I am the person who can take on special interests. I’m the person who has chosen the most difficult fight out there and I’m being punished for it. All of my dirty laundry is being aired in the street and all this money is being spent against me. And it’s because I am brave enough to pick this fight.” I wrote that I had nitpicks with that narrative and thought it was more complicated than that, but I think that was incredibly compelling.

You said for reasons you didn’t, you tried to tamp this down. Why was the minute you just gave me not a key part of your stump speech? Why was that not like your closing statement at the debates? What was the strategy behind that?

Well, how many minutes did it just take me to explain that to you? It’s complicated. And also, in part because of the circumstance of the race and the RAISE Act, that was Alex. Alex had that mantle. And it was sort of along the same lines. People said to me, why don’t you talk more about AI? You have good, strong positions on AI. I did argue at some points that I had a stronger record on AI than Alex, but he had a firmed up identity. I think that, you know, the RAISE Act, you know, there’s a funny backstory on the RAISE Act, which we also didn’t really talk about much during the campaign, which was that Brad Hoylman-Sigal and I had been drafting what effectively became the RAISE Act shortly after I was one of my primary for the Senate.

In fact, he had been exchanging drafts with Brad Carson, who went on to run the super PAC that supported Alex. Brad Carson and Brad Hoylman-Sigal were together at Oxford as Rhodes Scholars, they’re old friends. And Alex came up to me at some point in the fall of 2024 and said, “I’ve done a lot of work on AI. I’m really interested in doing a bill like what they did in California. I know you and Hoylman are working on it. Would it be okay if I took the issue?” And I thought about it for 48 hours and I went back to him and said, “sure.”

And that was probably the most fateful decision that I made in the last bunch of years in terms of affecting this race. The reasons I said sure, and who knows what would have happened if I had said no, he might have moved forward with a bill, we would have had dueling bills anyway, was number one, I looked at the bill that got passed in California and I concluded, and Newsom had vetoed it, and then they ended up doing, I think, a softer version through the budget in California or through executive action in California. And my view was even the bill that got vetoed was not going to have an actual impact on AI safety, that it was an important symbolic victory over those that didn’t want more guardrails and regulation, but it actually wasn’t going to change the trajectory of the issue. And we weren’t going to get a bill in New York that was materially in a meaningful way, stronger what they passed in California. And it would have been all I was able to work on of consequence to the entire legislative session.

And Alex did have relevant expertise. And so for all those reasons, I said yes. And whether or not that ended up being a political mistake or not was something I thought about a lot during the campaign. Obviously, everything worked out. But I think that the substantive reasons for that decision were borne out. And again, this became obscure during the campaign, which was we got a version of the bill that was as a practical matter, the same as I think what ended up going into law in California. So which by definition did not really move the needle.

But just on that, a big reason that it had a sort of tortured journey through passage was that it ran into, you know, it was sitting on Governor Kathy Hochul’s desk for many, many months. And she dithered about whether or not to sign it and there was a lot of...

Sure, but I would argue that the entire boundaries of the conversation about the legislation in its strongest form, both in California and in New York, I don’t really think, frankly, is going to mean a big shift on the issue of catastrophic risk. Everything being dealt with in this legislation is basically about self-policing and some amount of audit transparency. It’s certainly not about government regulation or approval of the release of AI models. And so I just think these issues are, they’re very big and I don’t, I think these bills are, they’re worthy efforts, but I don’t, and they get, they attract all this fighting because these companies are trying to discourage or encourage regulatory efforts. So I’m not diminishing the importance of them as a sort of political topic. But in terms of the substantive impact of these bills on the development of AI models and the risks that they pose, color me skeptical.

And I do think had I done the bill, it would have crowded out a whole bunch of other worthy work that we did. I think the consumer protection bill that I passed last year, frankly, will have a much more significant impact on New Yorkers than the RAISE Act, well, again, not diminishing the impact of the RAISE Act, and was vigorously opposed. It was the second most lobbied against bill in the entire legislative session. The first most was the Plastics Recycling Act that Deborah Glick was pushing. Every banking and insurance industry in the state fought like hell to kill my bill. But it wasn’t as sexy as the RAISE Act. And then, of course, it didn’t generate the OpenAI action that Alex’s bill did.

Yeah. I mean, a million follow-up questions about everything you just said...

Make this a two-parter. My team will be even more thrilled.

Part of my case was that not just that you had a streak of being more of a fighter, picking tougher battles. I also just thought that made you slightly more progressive. And I think that’s a bit of a term of art, but the progressive history of the Upper West Side is something that you shouted out in your victory speech.

I want to show you a graph I’ve made. Terrible podcasting to show graphs, but so this is on the x-axis is the margin that Mamdani won in the final RCV round. And this is the margin that you won.

It’s not an amazing correlation. If you’re a nerd about it, the R-squared is about 0.25. But it’s an immediately noticeable correlation that you did a lot better in districts that voted for Cuomo. And the more they voted for Cuomo, the better you did. And vice versa. On the bottom right, the best districts for Mamdani are Alex’s best districts.

When I look at that graph, what I see is that the voters in this race disagreed with me. I said that you were more progressive and they had a different opinion. Should I be concerned?

Look, first off, the only question I’d ask on that graph and that correlation in general is, the driver of that ideology or is it age?

Eli Miller

Okay, but if you’re the candidate that is favored by [older voters] which is also true….

I think there’s probably a stronger correlation with age. But then, I have the same exact question.

Yeah. Look, I think that there’s no question that there was a bit of an ideological sorting that happened toward the end of the race. I think I’d argue, though, that was more about vibes than anything else. And the truth is, I think, and again, I don’t know how Alex thinks about this, but he and I were engaged in kind of a prisoner’s dilemma throughout much of the race. We were both trying to hold on to as much of the electorate as we could. I represent a more progressive district and was trying to hold on to my base while also winning the votes of folks on the other side of the park. And he was trying to do the opposite. He represents probably the most conservative district. assembly district within the congressional district, and he was trying to hold on to his base while attracting more progressive voters. And that was a challenge for both of us. And I think that, take us both out of this, out of context of this race. I think we both, neither of us fits the profile of a revolutionary. But I think in the race to some extent, because I had support from not just Jerry Nadler, but Mike Bloomberg and Kathy Hochul, who are folks that are very much signified as moderates. And in the absence of that, he was sort of freer in a way to define himself.

He did have Our Revolution, which I do think cost him real support in his base. He is 10 years younger than me. I think that was a real thing. He definitely ran much more of a digital forward campaign than we did. So I think there was this sort of vibes-based sorting on both age and ideology that exceeded certainly any real mapping ideologically in reality.

Yeah, that makes sense. But I also… I asked Scott Stringer this when I had him on, but you mentioned in your speech that this is the district of Bella Abzug and of Ted Weiss and of, history of Vietnam protests and all sorts of things. And, when Scott Stringer, he told me like when he started in the Assembly, he was really the leader of the progressive movement in the State Assembly.

This district, it’s very hard to make the case that that’s where we are right now, especially in the context of the city. I mean, I was going to ask for this later, but this is maybe a good time to bring in the fact that there were three other big races in the city and they all went the same way.

Do you still see that this district is the bedrock of a certain kind of progressive politics and that you’re on the vanguard of something? Do you want it to be that? How do you think about that?

I think it’s complicated. I mean, I think all this stuff is complicated, which is sort of the story of my life. If I wrote a memoir, it might be called It’s Complicated.

We’re getting into the weeds.

Yeah, into the weeds, exactly. By the way, like, you know, if there’s a core value of mine, it’s like, let’s not discard the idea that complexity has value in politics, and let’s not associate complexity or conflate complexity with moderation. That is one of the things that drives me nuts about the politics of the moment, that we equate progressivism with reductionism. And I think that’s a terrible thing. And I think to some extent, to people that don’t see me as progressive, I think some of that comes from my insistence on acknowledging the complexity of issues. And you can have very progressive objectives and recognize that sometimes stuff is complicated. So that’s, I think it’s just important. That’s a part of who I am.

And look, the district was combined in 2022, the West Side District and the East Side District. I think it’s fair to say that certainly the Upper East Side portion of the district is more to the center than the Upper West Side portion of the district. And all of the district has shifted on a relative basis, or some combination of the parts of the city have shifted to the left around it, and as it has become a more and more expensive place to live, it has become a more moderate ideological place. I think that’s true.

Having said that, Jerry Nadler certainly, I think, fits squarely in the tradition of a progressive fighter who speaks with moral clarity on issues. And I hope to continue that tradition as well.

So that leads to my big question for you, which is how do you make decisions? And specifically, how do you make decisions when you do have this complicated and changing coalition behind you that has a lot of very loud, organized, constituencies that are going to be in your face with strong opinions? How do you balance those voices with the interest of a more diffuse majority?

And also when you’re balancing those dynamics, where does your own opinion come in? When you think that one side is being more reasonable than the other side, but the other side… there’s more of them, or they’re louder, how do you balance all of this when you’re an elected official?

This is going to sound trite, but I really just try to do what I think is right. And I probably pay, frankly, a lot less attention to the various pressure points than the average- I would like to think that I pay less attention to the various pressure points than the average politician. And I think that some of that comes from my time, both working for Jerry and working for Mike Bloomberg, who in different ways and for different reasons were in positions to be able to do what they believed was right and not be particularly preoccupied with who was shouting at them.

And that you can do that if you are, as I think I am, a good fit for the district. That gives you latitude and if you make sure you have enough political strength. And I think if you’re too dependent on a narrow set of people or groups that support you, then you can’t afford to **** them off. But if you have a fairly broad swath of support that supports you not because of a transaction, not because of any one issue, but because there’s a relationship of trust and they believe you to be someone of integrity and they’ll forgive you some disagreements and they’ll stick with you, that gives you the freedom to do the right thing.

When you’re running in a competitive primary, you are at your weakest political moment, because you feel like everything you say, everything you do can be the difference of a vote, which could be the difference of a race. But that’s not necessarily true. And to some extent, what all the groups that make endorsements and the voters are trying to do during a primary is they’re saying, “we’re trying to figure out… Once this person’s in office, we’re going to have a lot less control and power over them. So how are they going to behave in office?”

I think if you look at the people that endorse me, they are people who know me really well and they represent this district. That was a big difference in the endorsement list that Alex and I had. And I think at the end of the day, all those people, it’s not that I’m going to agree with them on every issue, but they know I’m going to do what I think is right.

So let’s test that out a little bit. I have a little game for you.

Oh, great.

It’s called Concerned Constituent. So we’re going to role play. I’m going to be a concerned constituent, and I’m going to have unreasonable concerns, and you’re going to have to use the trust that we have to...

I don’t know that I like this game.

Here’s one that you’re guaranteed to get 10 times a day: “Congressman, I hear there’s a new bus lane going up on 34th Street. I hate these stupid bus lanes. They make it really difficult for me to park my Subaru Outback and, you know, all the drilling. It’s going to be really loud. It’s going to be really annoying. You got to do something to stop this.”

Okay, can I just pause for one second on this role-playing? Which is, I don’t actually go around trying to piss off as many people as I can. So I’m going to answer these questions with how I feel about the issues. But, let’s not, I don’t want to make myself out to be Larry David here.

Oh, no, I would imagine your strong impulse is going to be- where, you know, I’m on the phone or I’m confronting you at Zabar’s or whatever- is that you want to tell me you agree with me, right?

Well, I think I would say there’s somewhere in between these two things, which is, I think it’s really important on controversial issues to speak to people in a way that they have a shot of hearing you. And I struggle with this too, by the way, because I do sometimes have an instinct to just tell people what I think in an unvarnished fashion. But there’s a balance between pandering and just telling people they’re wrong in a way that they shut down on you. Like part of the job of an elected official is to educate and inform and persuade. and bring people along with you. And to do that, you have to be able to speak to people in a way that they will hear you. That takes time, and I know we’re on a clock. So I will just respond to these issues on the merits, and you can translate.

Well, give me an empathetic answer, then. Give me something that I might hear, even if we only have two minutes, we’re in Zabar’s, but give me, you know…

Listen, you and I both know how hard it is to get around this city, including by car. And that’s because we have so many cars on the road. We do need to get people onto mass transit. We need to be able to make mass transit work. And bus lanes are an important part of that.

And on the relative value between losing some small number of parking spaces, and by the way, you and I both know you’re going to be circling for 1/2 hour to find a spot, whether or not those spots go away. There’s enormous value in making sure our buses can get across 34th Street before my kids graduate from college. And so, yes, we need to make sure that the bus lane is as minimally disruptive as possible, but I think it’s a really important thing to achieve.

Great. “Congressman, I live on 100th Street, and they’re trying to build this massive, ugly, luxury condo. And it’s going to be really disruptive. It’s going to take them three or four years to build it. It’s on this land that’s a beautiful library that I love going to. They’re going to rip it up. They say they’re going to build a new library, but I don’t know. Why should we build fancy luxury housing on 100th Street in Amsterdam?”

The median rent in Manhattan just costs $5,000 a month. We have a 1.4% vacancy rate in this city. The reason it is so expensive to live here is because we don’t have nearly enough housing to meet the demand. And we’ve got to start building housing. And I’m not telling you that one building is going to solve the housing crisis. But every community has got to be a part of the solution. And I believe and I will work to make sure that it is as minimally disruptive as it can be, that we get as much affordable housing as we can. Certainly that the library stays open and is made even stronger as a result. But we have to build, we have to start building housing in the city again. And sometimes that’s going to require some sacrifices by all of us.

All right, this one I’m not going to role play, but I do want to just hear about how you’re thinking about-, towards the end of the race, you got a lot of endorsements from rabbis, especially Orthodox rabbis. There are people who live in this district, I’m sure you’ve noticed, who have quite extreme views on unconditional support for Israel. And I know that they make that known to you and have strongly disagreed with lots of stances that you’ve taken. How are you going to keep them in the coalition when you want to take any step, however small, that means to curb Israel’s violation of international law?

I think there are a lot more people in this district than the political discourse credits that actually have a roughly shared set of views about Israel. And may have different points of emphasis, but basically agree with the following proposition, that Israel, as a homeland or refuge for the Jewish people, deserves safety and security, that safety and security is not a foregone conclusion and requires ongoing attention and protection. Also, that Bibi has been a disastrous leader for Israel and has dramatically worsened the plight of the Palestinian people through both what’s happened in Gaza and what goes on in the West Bank, all of which has made it much harder to see a path toward long-standing peace. And that both of these things can be held in our hearts and our heads at the same time.

That’s what I believe. I think there’s increasingly a pressure on people in public life to kind of reject one of those ideas. And I didn’t do it during the campaign, and I’m not going to do it as a Congressman.

This is probably where I should ask you a little more detail about Claire and Darializa. Have you spoken to them? Do you know them personally?

I know Claire. She’s a colleague of mine in the Assembly. I don’t know Darializa. And I’ve not spoken to them since the election. I have, as a practical matter, not spoken to a ton of people since Tuesday.

And are you, is there something you’re excited about to be part of a freshman class that has all this energy behind it and has a lot of firepower behind them, to come into Washington and make change? Or do you see this mostly as like- you are an ambassador of the establishment and these people just upset a lot of people who you might be close to?

I think it’s a really complicated moment. I think that a lot of what has driven the ascendancy of the left in the city is a frustration with the failure of the established political system, including the Democratic Party, to respond to people’s economic needs and concerns. And so voters are, I think, showing that frustration in these electoral upsets. I don’t think primarily these elections are about Israel and issues related of particular concern to the Jewish community.

At the same time, I think that there is a really troubling rise in anti-Semitism on both the far left and the far right. It has become an animating fuel, I think, in the politics of the far left and the far right. And I’ve talked to some people, again, haven’t talked to a ton of people generally, but in the last 48 hours, who are deeply troubled by that. I am troubled by that. And how we, how I’m going to kind of reckon with that, I haven’t really had a chance to wrap my head around it.

All right, let’s do a little bit of a lightning round to wrap up. One question that I was dying to ask you after the New York Editorial Board interview with Alex was what your personal P-doom is. What’s the likelihood that you think that superintelligent AI is going to literally destroy the world?

Look, I… at one point, there was a very widely read essay some years ago, really before, well before the AI boom. What was the name of the website? This wasn’t it, but it was something like “not when, but why” or something like that. [Editor’s Note: I’m pretty sure the essay in question is “the Fermi Paradox,” by Tim Urban on WaitButWhy.com from 2014]

There was a big essay basically arguing that the reason that we haven’t found other intelligent life forms is because all civilizations, once they reach a certain amount of sophistication, either obliterate themselves through with nuclear weapons or climate change. I think that was basically the idea, that basically life ultimately destroys itself. And I thought that was a fascinating and somewhat persuasive argument. So I guess throw AI into the mix, but I don’t know what my p-doom is.

It doesn’t seem like it’s something that you wake up every morning and go to bed every night thinking about.

No, but I think it’s very real. I think that this is going to be the most significant technological change in my lifetime. You know, when crypto hit the scene and there were all these crypto heads who were saying, this is going to change our world, I kind of always rolled my eyes about that, more than rolled my eyes about it, frankly. But I think that’s true with AI. It is going to be the biggest technological change in my lifetime. And we in government do have to reckon with it, both the potential for catastrophic risk and the economic upheaval and so much more.

All right, real quick, do you know what caucuses you want to be on?

I want to join the Progressive Caucus.

And what committees do you want to be on?

What I said during the campaign was that I’d like to be on Transportation and Infrastructure and also Financial Services in no small part because housing runs through Financial Services. That was also in part based on an understanding that I had about what was and was not feasible for a freshman to get. It has been more recently suggested to me that Financial Services is actually a very tough get for a freshman and that Oversight, which I had been under the impression was also a very tough get for a freshman, might be more achievable. So at this moment, those are three that are on my mind, but I also already hear myself saying this and sounding like a completely presumptuous freshman who’s going to get put on some completely random committee that has no relevance to my district, so I’m going to shut up now.

Well, if Hakeem is listening….

I was going to ask you, I think that one reason that I care about this race is that I think that you, or whoever won this race, becomes one of the most interesting endorsers for 2028. It is obviously June of 2026, so I don’t expect you to know who you want to endorse for President, but tell me a little bit about what you, people are going to start knocking on your door and saying, “I’d love to chat with you and tell you my vision.” Rahm is going to dial your number if he hasn’t already. What is your philosophy on making that decision?

Eli, I got to say, I have no idea.

You have no idea who you want to be President of the United States.

No, two different questions, you asked two different questions there. The question of how I would make the decision of who to endorse, I have not given that an ounce of thought. I have thought about the question of who I would like to see be the Democratic Party’s nominee, and I genuinely do not have a strong view of that at that point. I think there are a lot of potential candidates that to me seem to have real appeal. But I really don’t have a fully formed view. And I will say that I’m, as I am on so many things, what I do know is that I’m not particularly doctrinaire about it. It’s not that I would rule out or rule in certain people based on where they are perceived to fall on ideological lines.

So you wouldn’t be ruling out, for example, a certain Congresswoman from New York City who may or may not run for President.

I’m not ruling out anybody.

The last thing I wanted to ask you is just on a personal level, this is obviously a culmination of your very long career. You started out in your first like 15, 20 years... You were always the assistant. You were the campaign manager. When did you decide that you wanted to be the elected official? What was the evolution there?

It wasn’t really, it’s not quite the way you just cast it. I mean, it’s certainly true. I spent a lot of years as a staffer, but also I ran in 2016 for a State Senate seat, lost, ran again for Assembly two years ago, and this obviously. And I think that reflects the reality of my own kind of path here, which is my interest in actually running and being an elected official has ebbed and flowed over the years.

It generally was at a low point when I was in a position as an appointed official or staffer to make a big difference. The years I worked at City Hall and the Bloomberg administration was definitely a low point in my interest in running for office because I felt like I could have so much impact and be at home at night. And in fact, the council seat on the Upper West Side opened up in 2013 and it didn’t cross my mind to run for it at that point because I was just not interested. So it’s been an up and down thing.

I will tell you that I have always had a pretty ambivalent relationship with being a candidate. And that has increased. I really struggled with it during this campaign. And I think a lot of the things that are appealing to people, a lot of people who work as staff who then run for office, there’s a, if you think about the Venn diagram between being a staffer and being an elected official, there’s a bunch of stuff that you do in both jobs. And then there’s a bunch of stuff that you do as an elected official that you don’t do as a staffer. And I think that stuff is what is appealing to a lot of people who run for office. And as I have gotten older, it is increasingly the pieces of the job that I like the least. Not all of it, but a lot of it, and that I have a very ambivalent relationship with.

We’ll close with this, something I’m sure you’ve noticed. It has to do with the Venn diagram thing and the people who are drawn to this.

People get into this world and it messes with their judgment.

Yeah, totally.

And it messes with their sense of the, like, power is very corrupting. And I have noticed in my limited time doing this, there are some people that I’ve talked to that I can just see have become, on a personal level, kind of unpleasant people because of how much they’ve given to this and how intensely they’re clinging to the power they have. To flatter you for a second, your reputation is not that.

Thank you.

But you’ve also never had this much power before. So how do you stay grounded? How do you keep perspective when you’re in this world and you have real, you know, it’s not paranoia if everyone’s truly out to get you and the air is thin when the altitude is this high and all the other metaphors you want to do.

It’s not that high. I’m going to be a freshman Congressman from a safe seat. But I take the point.

Listen, I am an incredibly blessed person. I love my life much more than I love politics. I have an amazing wife. We have great kids. We love spending time together. I got a great mom who lives in my building, as Matt Flegenheimer outlined in great detail in the New York Times. I have great in-laws who were out campaigning for me in the final days of this election. And I’ll always be happier hanging out with them than doing politics.

I’m very proud to do politics and government more than politics. And I think it’s a really important thing, and I’m proud to do it, and I hope I can make the world a better place through it. But I don’t need it. And my life is going to be fine, maybe even better, without it. And in the low moments of the race, the way I would calm myself down is I would actually visualize what my life would be in the event that I lost. and I would have a sense of calm because it was clear that it would be better. And so you just try to hold on to that and you try to be as normal as you can.

I’m 44. It’s also, I think, one of the things that’s good about being a little older and having seen a few things. And I’ve had power in my appointed jobs. Maybe in some respects, more than I will as a freshman Congressman. I don’t love the pomp and circumstance. I don’t love the performative aspects of being a politician. I don’t love the title and nonsense and the puffery and all of that. And I don’t think that’s going to change.

Well, condolences on losing out on that vision of calm tranquility. But congrats on winning, obviously. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast.

Thanks, Eli.

If you liked this project and want to support us, you can buy me a coffee. Please do not do this if you know me personally (just text me!), or if you work for a campaign or an elected official (Don’t bribe journalists! Shame on you!). Thanks so much!

“I am overwhelmed to see this beautiful village here” Micah Lasher told the assembled dignitaries onstage in front of the rapturous crowd at Jacob’s Pickles on Columbus Avenue a little after 10:30pm Tuesday night. Lasher had just been declared the winner of the NY-12 Democratic Primary, and looking across the stage, one couldn’t blame him for being overwhelmed. There, from left to right, stood Chelsea City Councilmember Carl Wilson, Governor Kathy Hochul, former Comptroller Scott Stringer, former Department of City Planning Commissioner Dan Garodnick, West Side State Senator Erik Bottcher, West Side State Assembly Member Linda Rosenthal, former Manhattan Borough Presidents Ruth Messinger and Gale Brewer, and City Comptroller Mark Levine. “I thank you all so very much,” Lasher told them, and for good reason; each one had loudly, publicly, enthusiastically supported Lasher, and had wielded their considerable platforms and political machines to his benefit.

Lasher’s broad elite support has been locked in since this race began last fall, and I have written more than once that I expected it to carry him to a relatively easy victory. This district, I wrote, runs through its political clubs, organizations and elected officials, and poses an especially formidable challenge to outsider insurgents. In past Manhattan elections, consolidating even slightly more than half of the support of the party elite was enough to coast to a double-digit victory. Surely a candidate who had consolidated virtually every single party elite would do the same.

Instead, Micah Lasher beat Alex Bores by only four percentage points, or about 4,300 votes. That’s five points less than what I predicted last weekend. More importantly, it’s ten or fifteen points less than I would have predicted at the onset of this race. That “beautiful village” onstage that Lasher thanked, the collective weight of the entire Manhattan political establishment, they all pulled the rope in the same direction, every day, for months, and it barely budged.

It budged enough though. Here’s how Micah Lasher eked out a narrow victory, in six charts.

Alex Bores beat my projection by partially executing two of my five “Bores Scenarios.” First, he achieved dramatic geographic depolarization. In the 2022 race between Jerry Nadler and Carolyn Maloney, there was a ludicrous 50-point gap between the margins on the Upper West and Upper East Sides. I predicted that it would shrink to a 30-point gap in this race, due to the Bores campaign’s efforts to “nationalize” the conversation, cast aside petty local squabbles, and focus on big, existential issues that matter to everyone equally. Instead, it shrank to only 15 points. Bores lost Lasher’s home base of Manhattan Valley (which I define as north of 96th street on the West Side), the highest-turnout neighborhood in the city, full of political obsessives whose kids played on Lasher’s West Side Little League team, by only 17 points. Lasher lost Bores’s native Yorkville, where the Bores’s Four Freedoms Democratic Club has been diligently organizing the area’s software engineers and Big Law associates for years now, by fewer than two points. Bores fought Chelsea to a draw, despite Lasher’s enthusiastic endorsements from Erik Bottcher and Carl Wilson, only two months after Wilson flexed the West Side Machine’s might in that neighborhood by crushing progressive challenger Lindsay Boylan in the special election for his City Council seat. And most shockingly of all, Lasher pulled off a two-point upset on the Upper East Side, a neighborhood wholly contained in the 73rd Assembly District that Bores represents, and won every single precinct that touches the east side of the park. The neighborhoods mattered, but they mattered less than they ever have.

Second, Bores dominated in precincts with more Millennials and fewer voters over 62 years old (Boomers and Silent Generation).

In order to fully realize the Millennial strategy, Bores would have had to pair it with a surge in turnout. This did not transpire, and in fact, younger voters turned out even less than I expected when I projected Lasher + 9 last weekend.

As the map shows, the only precincts with more voters than I expected were in the Upper West Side and Manhattan Valley, two naturally occurring retirement communities (and where most of my readers reside, so I should really be less snarky to them!) The Millennials of Hell’s Kitchen, Yorkville, and Murray Hill, by contrast, turned out even a little less than I projected, and I projected that they wouldn’t turn out very much.

Putting it all together, by depolarizing the geography of the district, and winning over younger voters, Bores achieved two big preconditions to an upset victory, but was unable to pair it with the Millennial turnout surge that would have pushed him over the finish line.

You can stare at a map like this forever, and keep finding amusing new narratives. For example, there are two tiny purple dots in Hell’s Kitchen and Chelsea amidst a sea of Bores green. They are Manhattan Plaza, the federally subsidized artist housing complex on West 43rd Street, and the co–op complex of Penn South between 25th and 28th Streets. Together, Lasher won these precincts by 343 votes. He lost the other 17 precincts of Hell’s Kitchen by almost 900 votes, or well over 20%.

On the flip side, Bores achieved a local surge in the precincts between Amsterdam and Central Park West in the lower 80s, possibly because of his team’s extensive canvassing operation all around Frank McCourt High School on 85th and Columbus, the district’s highest-turnout early vote site. Bores himself spent much of Election Day and the Early Vote period camped out in front of Frank McCourt, and you can see the fruits of that labor right there on the map.

The big story, however, is the East Side Lasher surge. In the waning days of the race, Lasher made a big push there, particularly with older Jewish voters and their local leaders, winning the endorsements of rabbis like Chaim Steinmetz of the massive Orthodox congregation Kehilath Jeshurun. Bores had accepted endorsements from Bernie Sanders’s Our Revolution (but not Sanders himself), and CUNY’s PSC union (which vocally supported pro-Palestinian campus protests last year), but did not actually move left on any Israel/Palestine policy position. At the time, it seemed like a savvy move, expanding his coalition without angering his base. In retrospect, it may have accomplished neither. A substantial chunk of his base may have been angered, and there is not much evidence that he achieved much left-wing or pro-Palestinian consolidation (instead, a serious chunk of those votes coalesced behind Nina Schwalbe, who rode a strong debate performance to an impressive 7% finish, despite receiving virtually no local institutional support and no outside spending).

This dynamic proved beneficial to Micah Lasher. But the coalition he won with makes this progressive more than a little queasy. As shown below, there was a weak but statistically significant correlation between Lasher’s margin last week, and Cuomo’s margin in the last round of ranked choice voting in last summer’s mayoral primary.

I argued two weeks ago that Lasher should be the progressive voter’s choice, focusing on his record of picking difficult fights and his willingness to buck the loudest voices in his coalition, more than any particular policy position or philosophy. It seems that voters on both sides of this district’s political spectrum disagreed with my assessment: more moderates voted for Lasher, more progressives voted for Bores.

Who was right? And what happens now? Lasher may feel beholden to his moderate East Side supporters, whom he needed to push him over the top in this brutally close race. Conversely, he might feel that more needs to be done to shore up his support with the district’s left flank, and focus his efforts there. Or he might feel neither: unless he does something that a large majority of the district finds truly heinous (see Goldman, Dan), or the demographics of the district change more rapidly than he can keep up with (see Crowley, Joe and Espaillat, Adriano), this seat is likely his for as long as he wants it.

The latter dynamic could work to the benefit of those of us who want to see Lasher pursue meaningful progressive policy changes. As Mason Williams (whose new book City of Fortune: Inequality and the Making of Contemporary New York is out now) pointed out to me in our conversation a few months ago, efforts to redistribute wealth and improve the material conditions of the less fortunate always run into uncomfortable coalitional strains when you represent some of the wealthiest people in the country, no matter how liberal those people claim to be. An unencumbered Congressman Micah Lasher, with political capital to spare, might have more flexibility to navigate those strains.

He might not, though. Or he might have flexibility and political capital, but choose to use it on other matters. Electing someone to represent you at any level of government is, at the end of the day, always a bit of a leap of faith.

Programming Note: This concludes my coverage of the 2026 NY-12 Democratic Primary. I will have one more thing out tomorrow (it’s a podcast episode, and you can probably guess who the guest is), but for now, that should be it. I want to take this opportunity to thank everyone for being such a generous and supportive audience throughout this project, for sharing my blogs with your friends and colleagues, engaging so thoughtfully in the comment section, and generally making this such a fun experience for me!

This was a labor of love; I got really obsessed with this race, couldn’t stop thinking about it, and found writing and podcasting about it incredibly fun and rewarding. It also took a lot of time and work. If you liked my work and want to show your support, I’ve set up a Buy Me A Coffee page here. Please do not participate if you know me personally (instead, just text me and actually buy me coffee!) or if you work for a campaign or an elected official (in which case you shouldn’t be bribing journalists! Shame on you!)

Lastly, please let me know what you think I should focus on next. I have a few ideas, but would be eager to hear yours. The world is large and full of ghosts…

This weekend, I spent many hours Citi Biking around Manhattan, going from one early voting poll site to the next. The weather was absolutely perfect, and these poll sites are a blast. Teams of canvassers in matching branded shirts fanned out in every direction, often in extremely close quarters with counterparts from opposing campaigns. Everyone seemed cordial (at one poll site, I saw one candidate’s mother cheerfully chatting with an opposing volunteer), honorable (everyone rigidly respected the imaginary “100-foot line” from the poll site entrance), giddy with excitement for their candidates, and charmingly self-aware about how little the passing civilians seemed to care for their solicitations (“You made it to the end of the gauntlet! High-five!” one volunteer cheered to a beleaguered pedestrian, at the corner of a particularly frenzied section of Columbus Avenue outside Frank McCourt High School.) It was a great scene, and after spending months behind a laptop, writing blogs and watching grainy live-streams of candidate forums, it felt so gratifying to see democracy in action in real life, out in the world.

The only thing missing was the voters.

At multiple points throughout this week, I tried to exit poll various early voting sites, as I did for last November’s mayoral election. It proved impossible, because there simply were not enough voters to poll. I don’t think I ever saw more than ten in an hour. Borough-wide early voting data backs this up: early vote was down more than 45% from 2025’s Democratic Mayoral Primary in Manhattan. “It’s been really slow,” nearly every volunteer admitted to me when I asked about turnout (although they always added some sort of optimistic spin, like “but the energy is great,” or “it’s gonna pick up this afternoon,” or “people are probably still hungover from the Knicks parade”).

All caveats apply! Maybe voters spent the long weekend out of town (Juneteenth was a Thursday last year, making it more difficult for in-person workers to flee to the Hamptons the weekend before Primary Day), but will turn up in greater numbers on Tuesday. Maybe turnout is slow in NY-10 and NY-13 (also Manhattan), but just as robust as ever in NY-12. Maybe I scared off some voters with my intimidating college-ruled notebook and nosy questions. But if turnout remains down 45% from 2025 on Tuesday, it’s not difficult to say what that means for the race: This would be great news for Micah Lasher, and very bad news for Alex Bores.

Two weeks ago, I modeled five ways that Alex Bores might be able to close his East Side structural deficit, and pull off an upset. If turnout is down 45%, the “Millennials Turn Out In Droves” scenario, the one that the Bores camp finds most narratively satisfying, seems basically dead, as does the “East Side Turns Out, While the West Side Stays Home” scenario. Brigid Bergin’s reporting in Gothamist, based on voter-level early vote data (not publicly available), found that at least through four days, the early vote trends old and west. The “Uniform Swing for Bores” scenario, where everyone across the district simply votes for Alex Bores at higher-than-expected rates, is still on the table, as is the “Neighborhood Depolarization Scenario,” where voters cast aside their petty regional differences and vote for the candidate they like best on the national, existential issues of the moment. But these are narrow paths, with very little margin for error.

What follows is what I project to be the modal outcome, the most likely result. It is not meant to be the median result (if I had to set a betting line for the margin, where the probability of the vote coming in above and below were the same, I’d probably set it around Lasher +6.5. I personally do not bet on politics, especially on not anything I’m covering). My projection is based on a close examination of the voter file, and the voting history of each precinct over the past five years. There are no public polls, so it is also, almost entirely, based on my gut. I think I’ve been covering this race as obsessively as anyone, and have a decent track record making similar projections (I’m one-for-one), so if you’re going to trust someone’s gut, it might as well be mine. But I have no special information. Proceed at your own risk.

I’m a novice with voter data, and I’m grateful to Adam Carlson and Michael Lange for their advice and support throughout this project. With that said, this forecast is mine and mine alone. Lange’s own NY-12 forecast should be out this morning; it will be interesting to see how far apart we are.

And one more thing: If you think I’m wrong, that I’m underestimating your favorite candidate’s chances, that I’m a horribly biased propagandist, you are of course free to tell me so in the comment section or on Twitter. I will take your critiques far more seriously if they come with your own prediction, down to the percentage point. Lastly, I would just say that I have no more power over this election than anyone else, and if you don’t like what I predict, you have 36 hours to go out there, knock on some doors, get out the vote, and make me look stupid.

Okay enough preamble. Here’s what’s going to happen on Tuesday, by neighborhood.

Midtown/Flatiron/Nomad

Dimensions: 14th to 59th Street, 5th to 8th Avenue.

Turnout: 5,410 (5.2% of total)

Projected Lasher-Bores margin: 12.2%

Breakeven Lasher-Bores margin: 3.1%

Here’s your daily reminder that land doesn’t vote. This zone is perhaps the densest concentration of business, media and cultural power anywhere on earth. Within this narrow two-mile strip lies Broadway, 30 Rockefeller Center, Carnegie Hall, the Empire State Building, the newsrooms of the New York Times, the New York Post, the Wall Street Journal, and the offices of virtually every major law firm. This zone is where Ryan Seacrest drops the ball on New Year’s Eve, and where OG Anunoby tipped in the game-winner to complete the 29-point comeback only twelve days ago. It has everything. The one thing this zone lacks is residential real estate.

There’s some, especially if you venture far enough south. If you want to get super nerdy, you can have a fight about which precincts feel more like Chelsea, and which deserve their own monikers (“Nomad,” or “Flatiron,” perhaps). But I wouldn’t sweat it. I project about 5% of the electorate to come from this zone, even though it makes up about 20% of the map. Please remember to ignore this zone accordingly on Tuesday night.

Hell’s Kitchen/Chelsea:

Dimensions: 14th to 59th Street, West of 8th Avenue.

Turnout: 11,283 (10.8% of total)

Projected Lasher-Bores margin: 15.4%

Breakeven Lasher-Bores margin: 6.3%

The single biggest inflection point of this race came on December 22nd, when popular Chelsea-based City Councilmember Erik Bottcher announced that he would drop out of the NY-12 race, and run for State Senate instead, immediately receiving every major West Side official’s blessing, including that of Gale Brewer, Mark Levine, Deborah Glick, Jerry Nadler, and of course, Micah Lasher. Bottcher returned the favor six weeks later, endorsing Micah Lasher for NY-12, and the coup was complete: Lasher had united the two West Side machines, and would be competing with the full might of every local club and organization west of 8th Avenue.

But how much do machines really matter anymore? Especially in an area with so many Millennials and young families, who turned out for Mamdani in impressive numbers this time last year? Our one 2026 test-case for this question came on April 28th, when Bottcher protege and Chelsea/West Village machine darling Carl Wilson Jr. faced off against progressive, Mamdani-endorsed activist Lindsay Boylan. Wilson won easily, and the race had jarringly low turnout, especially considering the intensity of the media coverage that the special election had received. Will Bores-friendly, machine-skeptical Millennials turn out like it’s June of 2025, or April of 2026? In this forecast, I land somewhere in between, but if team Bores is going to really prove me wrong somewhere, it could be here. The voters exist, if he can get enough of them to turn out. And Bores will have the help of his one West Side club endorsement, Layla Law-Gisiko’s fiercely anti-development Chelsea Reform Democrats Club, although Law-Gisiko herself seems increasingly friendly with Jack Schlossberg, who has supported her crusade against NYCHA’s Fulton Elliot Chelsea redevelopment with more enthusiasm than Bores.

Technically, Chelsea should be Schlossberg’s home turf, especially the parts of it that house Gen-Z’s infamous West Village Girls. Conventional wisdom suggests that this demographic does not turn out to vote very much (though the Brock Coylar piece hyperlinked above complicates this reductive narrative), and a big underlying assumption of my forecast is that the Schlossberg campaign has pretty much tanked. However, I do expect Schlossberg to get some votes in precincts 75064 and 75061 (Fulton Elliot Chelsea), though he will be competing with Nina Schwalbe and Alex Bores for those votes, and anyway, conventional wisdom suggests that NYCHA doesn’t turnout in Congressional primaries very much either. We’ll see.

Overall, I project Micah to clean up in the older, voter-rich parts of this district, for Bores to keep it close in much of Hell’s Kitchen, and for Bores to pull out a narrow victory in 75057 (Hudson Yards).

Midtown East/Murray Hill/Kips Bay:

Dimensions: 14th to 59th Street, East of 5th Avenue.

Turnout: 19,449 (18.7% of total)

Projected Lasher-Bores margin: -5.4%

Breakeven Lasher-Bores margin: -14.5%

I have far too much respect for my Gen-Z brethren who live in Murray Hill to make any sort of comment or judgment, but here how Vulture’s Jackson McHenry described the neighborhood, in his review for Mindy Kaling’s Murray Hill-based new show Not Suitable for Work: “The southern neighbor of Midtown East is best known for being the home of some of Manhattan’s most — and this is a gender-neutral term — basic bitches, from just-out-of-college frat boys to aspiring influencers who don’t necessarily have the trust funds to support life as West Village girls.” Are these fine people Schlossberg voters? Bores voters? People who haven’t changed their registration yet, and/or aren’t super invested in local politics? Only time will tell.

What we can say now, however, is that while the demographics (younger) and longitude (east) of this district favor Bores, many of the institutions favor Lasher, including both the Eleanor Roosevelt Independent Democrats and the Tilden Democrats of the 74th Assembly District. Conspicuously, the 74th Assembly District’s Member Keith Powers has not endorsed his fellow East Side Assemblymember. Former City Councilmember Dan Garodnick and State Senator Brian Kavanaugh both support Lasher.

I expect the demographics to win out here, but the margin matters a ton, especially in Stuy Town and Peter Cooper Village, where some of the world’s most diligent, politically active voters reside. I expect this tiny complex to deliver nearly 4,000 votes, and both campaigns will fight tooth-and-nail for every one. If Lasher can fight to a draw in Stuy Town and PWC, it’s probably game over. If Bores wins it by double digits, the rest of the map starts to look much less intimidating for him.

Upper East Side:

Dimensions: North of 59th Street, East of Central Park.

Turnout: 31,557 (30.3% of total)

Projected Lasher-Bores margin: -7.2%

Breakeven Lasher-Bores margin: -16.3%

Bores represents the 73rd Assembly District (5th to 3rd Ave, what Michael Lange calls “Oligarch Alley,”) but his political home is the Four Freedoms Democratic Club of the 76th Assembly District (Yorkville, East of 3rd Ave.) “Yorkville,” Four Freedoms’s Jaime Berman told me in January, “is for the girlies.” Young, professional class workers with cute small dogs, a few years into their careers in a prestigious, high-paying field, perhaps including software engineering. This bloc is Alex Bores catnip, and the only question, again, is how many of them he can get to turnout. Which is a big question, because the voter file is not super flattering to voters east of 3rd Ave.

It’s far more flattering to the triple primes of Park Avenue, the moderate, establishment voters over 65 who dragged Cuomo over 40% citywide nearly single-handedly last November. Here is perhaps the hottest take of my forecast: I think West Sider Micah Lasher will do just fine with this group. He won’t win, but he does not need to, especially if George Conway can take a slightly bigger-than-expected slice. Frankly, I have a hard time imagining that anyone will vote for Conway anywhere but here, but this is the one area where he might break fifteen or even twenty percent. This would limit Bores’s upside in this area considerably.

On the other hand, maybe these voters are loyal East Side institutionalists, who like their Assembly Member and want him to succeed. And maybe they are all coming back from the Hamptons in droves to vote for him. Once again, only time will tell.

I project Lasher to win only a handful of Upper East Side precincts, none by very much, but amusingly, one of them is 76044, where loyal Democratic voter Mr. Zohran Kwame Mamdani resides. He refused to say who he voted for, and I have no sources, but based on his connections with Morris Katz, his roots as a Morningside Heights resident, and his personal connection with his parents’ Assembly Member, I feel quite confident that he ended up voting for Lasher.

Upper West Side

Dimensions: North of 59th Street, West of Central Park.

Turnout: 36,420 (35.0% of total)

Projected Lasher-Bores margin: 28.5%

Breakeven Lasher-Bores margin: 19.4%

As I wrote two weeks ago, it’s just not a fair fight. If you take a look at some of the dark purple precincts on Riverside Drive north of 86th street, you will see Lasher running up 30-40 point margins in the highest-turnout precincts in the city. You should know that I have spotted Bores 35 PERCENTAGE POINTS from the 2022 Nadler-Maloney result. That year, Jerry won these precincts by 70. Alex Bores has run an extremely impressive campaign, has received glowing national media coverage, and has shaped much of the race’s conversation around AI regulation, his strongest issue. But has it really been more than 35 points better than fifteen-term Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney’s 2022 campaign? Is such a feat even possible? Elsewhere on the Upper West Side, viewers should pay special attention to precinct 67039, The Lincoln Towers on West End and 69th Street. I project this complex of high-turnout seniors to break for Lasher by more than 40 points, and deliver him 263 votes on net, so many that it breaks my data visualization above. Jerry won it by 68, and netted 441 votes. It’s not a fair fight.

Of course the higher you’re projected, the farther you have to fall. If Bores simply loses some of these precincts by 20 points, he’s in business, and if he loses by only 10, he’s in the driver’s seat. And there’s a real narrative path for him to get there, one that involves the Boomer dads of this district, who love Ezra Klein and Matthew Yglesias, enjoy engaging in philosophical thought experiments about AI, and view themselves as independent thinkers who want to be ahead of the curve and don’t want a machine to tell them what to do. These dads exist in numbers on the Upper West Side. They are my people, in many cases they are my readers, and I love them dearly.

I am relying almost entirely on my gut here when I conclude that I do not believe Bores got all the way there, with enough of them, to make the Upper West Side interesting. Instead, I think the local institutions will do what they always do on Tuesday, and deliver a convincing, comfortable win for Micah Lasher.

Micah Lasher’s elevator pitch is simple: Experience matters, and he has the most. He’ll also tell you he has the best ideas: He wants to gerrymander New York to keep up with Republicans in Texas and Florida, claw back tax revenue from the federal government until it stops holding up critical infrastructure projects in the state, and guarantee every new grad a job (?). But the NY-12 Democratic primary is not an ideas race. Above all, each candidate is laser-focused on developing an aesthetic of leadership that establishes trust with voters. Lasher aims to establish trust by describing his eighteen years working in government (starting when he was in high school!), and bragging about how his former colleagues and bosses Jerry Nadler, Kathy Hochul, Mike Bloomberg, Mark Levine, Gale Brewer, Scott Stringer, and Brad Hoylman-Sigal have all enthusiastically endorsed his candidacy. “The people you’ve elected and trusted and known in this neighborhood for the past twenty years all like me,” Lasher is essentially telling voters. “I am the natural successor of the West Side machine, and I will carry forward its legacy.”

The case against Micah Lasher, then, is equally simple. It’s that he is endorsed by Jerry Nadler, Kathy Hochul, Mike Bloomberg, Mark Levine, Gale Brewer, Scott Stringer, and Brad Hoylman-Sigal, would carry forward their legacy, and would be the natural successor to the West Side machine. And in its current form, the West Side machine kind of sucks.

I.

Before we go any further, I should say that at the end of this blog I will tell you that I plan to vote for Micah Lasher and I think you probably should too. With that said though, you probably don’t need me to tell you why Mike Bloomberg, Kathy Hochul, and Scott Stringer are not ideal endorsers for a purportedly progressive Congressman.

Here goes anyway. Mike Bloomberg served as the 103rd mayor of New York City from 2002-2013. He is the centibillionaire founder of the financial information company Bloomberg LP, a reluctant cuddler of Knicks point guard Jose Alvarado, and New York City’s richest man. And he is currently donating $10 million to Stand Up and Fight, Micah Lasher’s allied super PAC.

This alone is pretty gross, and Lasher was roundly attacked for receiving so much support from Bloomberg at last week’s NY1 debate. He defended himself by arguing that while he vigorously opposed the existence of super PACs, there was no way for him to unilaterally disarm in this race. Then he went further: “We should be clear. There is a big difference between Mike Bloomberg, in whose administration I served, who lives in this district, who has no agenda he’s looking for me to carry out in Congress, who’s supporting me because he thinks I’d be a Congressman, and the AI companies that have spent millions supporting Mr. Bores.”

Each part of that argument deserves scrutiny. First, should we really believe that Bloomberg truly has no agenda? Would he really be indifferent if Lasher decided to advocate for a citywide wealth tax, for example? Or pursued some kind of regulation for financial information and media companies that could impact Bloomberg LP’s bottom line? If Lasher wins, he will have to run for office again in two years. Assuming he does not succeed in abolishing super PACs before then, does he really expect us to believe he wouldn’t care whether or not Bloomberg gave him another couple million then? All political donations are corrupting; it’s not credible to pretend otherwise.

Second, assuming the endorsement has no agenda and should be taken at face value, should we really trust Bloomberg’s judgment on this kind of thing? This is a man who enthusiastically supported Andrew Cuomo over Zohran Mamdani only a year ago (funding some truly vile mailers in the process), and who incinerated more than a billion dollars on his own four-month run for Presidency in 2020, mostly because he was worried that Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren might win if he stayed out. When it comes to preferred winners in Democratic primaries, this guy has a pretty awful track record.

And third, and most importantly, what does it mean that Lasher served in Bloomberg’s administration? Most opponents have gone for the haymaker; a memo that Lasher wrote for the State Legislature that declared Bloomberg’s morally reprehensible and flagrantly unconstitutional stop-and-frisk policy, and the less-discussed NYPD Gang Database to be “a proven crime deterrence method,” and “an invaluable investigative tool” respectively. Lasher has protested that he was a relatively low-level staffer at the time who was ordered to write thousands of memos, and he has forcefully denounced stop-and-frisk since. It’s hard to know quite how seriously to take this defense, but at the very least, Lasher does not seem to mind taking credit for positive accomplishments of the Bloomberg administration, low-level staffer that he may have been at the time.

But even if you put aside that memo, Lasher’s more substantive record concerned educational policy, something that has come up surprisingly little in this campaign. In his capacity as head of External Affairs for Bloomberg’s DOE, and then as the head of the education reform advocacy organization StudentsFirstNY, Lasher worked to expand the city’s charter schools, frequently antagonizing the teacher’s union UFT in the process. This rift was a big reason that Lasher lost his State Senate campaign in 2016, and presumably a factor in UFT’s decision to endorse Alex Bores this time around. Lasher has moved around on this issue a bit, but is clearly still skeptical of UFT. Last week the New York Editorial Board asked him whether he thought that the union had too much power, and while Lasher tried not to answer the question directly, he very much did not say no.

On my podcast last month, Mason Williams, a historian of NYC politics whose book on the Bloomberg administration comes out in two weeks, explained to me that Bloomberg’s attempts to create a “portfolio of options” for public school children increased metrics of success for some students, but also “replicated in a new institutional form the inequalities that have always existed in New York City public schools.” You should listen to our entire conversation, but this turned out to be a good representative of his take on the Bloomberg administration in general. A lot of energy and innovative reforms, with mixed results and, often, intense inequality that saw professional-class (white) Manhattanites come out ahead.

After Bloomberg, Lasher’s most touted credential is his work as chief policy director for Governor Kathy Hochul. He likes to brag about his (ultimately unsuccessful) NY Housing Compact and (successful) attempts to index the minimum wage to inflation. He skips over all of the other ways that Hochul’s administration has stymied the left, resisted tax increases, and repeatedly watered down the 2019 reforms to bail and discovery laws. Lasher explicitly endorsed that last move in December 2024, telling Ben Max that “the set of laws passed in Albany, particularly related to discovery,” played a role in the post-pandemic crime wave. Political strategist Adam Carlson told me that in his recent polls, Hochul and Bloomberg are both wildly popular in this district, more so even than Mamdani. The case against Micah Lasher, in part, is that I personally do not believe they should be.

II.

It’s Scott Stringer’s endorsement, however, that I believe deserves the most analysis. (He also came on my podcast, and you can check that out here.) After running Jerry Nadler’s first Congressional campaign in 1992, local organizer (and cousin of legendary West Side Congresswoman Bella Abzug) Scott Stringer was elected to replace Nadler as the Upper West Side’s State Assemblyman. At the time, he was one of the few true progressives in the ludicrously corrupt and ineffectual State Legislature, and he had some real accomplishments, including Brennan Center-endorsed reforms to the legislature’s transparency and voting practices. He also advocated for policing reform and was arrested in 1999 at a protest following the murder of Amadou Diallo. As Manhattan Borough President, Stringer championed affordable housing development across the borough, and as City Comptroller, he divested the city pension fund from the fossil fuel industry and became the first city-wide official to call for the closure of Rikers Island Jail. In 2021, when previewing Stringer’s first run for mayor, City and State NY’s Gabe Ponce de Leon adorned the headlined “Scott Stringer Has Always Been a Progressive.”

You could not write that headline today. After a lackluster second run for mayor, Stringer has quietly (or not so quietly if you follow him on Twitter) become one of Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s chief antagonists, with ties to both Westside Progress PAC and Next NYC PAC. He is also one of Dan Goldman’s most enthusiastic backers in NY-10, and frequently savages opponent Brad Lander, his successor in the Comptroller’s office. And he’s backing Stephanie Ruskay, the establishment choice in Assembly District 69, over Mamdani-endorsed criminal legal reform advocate Eli Northrup. Stringer’s biggest animating issue seems to be Israel/Palestine; he told me that he sees BDS and most other expressions of the local pro-Palestinian protest movement as “Jewish Hate” and that it reminds him of the discrimination that Muslim New Yorkers faced in the wake of 9/11. He also expressed a surprising amount of skepticism for the new wave of the supply-side housing movement, complaining that “now if you want to engage, they call you a NIMBY.” His 2025 mayoral campaign focused on combatting crime, and specifically on hiring 3,000 new cops. None of these are progressive stances by any current definition of the word.

Stringer and Lasher are different people, but they are extremely close, and Lasher ran Stringer’s 2021 mayoral campaign. More than that, Stringer is emblematic of how the politics of the Upper West Side political elite have changed over the past few decades. When Stringer first entered politics, this neighborhood was incredibly diverse, racially and socioeconomically, and dominated by artists, intellectuals, and other drivers of the city’s culture. Now, the same people (many of whom have not budged) are older, wealthier, and far more culturally conservative, at least by citywide standards. They are alarmed by their young adult children, who zoom around Brooklyn on pedal-assist Citi bikes from one DSA rally to another. They feel that the city they had such political and cultural dominance over for decades is now changing far too fast for their liking. And they’d like the built environment to stop changing so much too, which is why Gale Brewer vigorously fought the construction of a bus lane for the M96, and the pro-housing ballot measures; why Brad Hoylman-Sigal spoke at a rally to prevent housing construction on 86th and Amsterdam, on a lot with a collapsing church that actively wants itself torn down for this project; and generally why this neighborhood has built less new affordable housing than almost any other in the city.

This is the political culture that Micah Lasher has spent two decades working in and advancing. He thinks this makes him Jerry Nadler’s logical successor. The case against Lasher is that maybe these people have run things long enough, and we should try something new instead.

III.

But who then? I have already written at length about my distaste for the vapid campaigns of Jack Schlossberg and George Conway, both of whom seem to be collapsing in polls anyway. Nina Schwalbe had an impressive debate performance (Hell Gate declared her the winner) but has no chance of actually winning. Her name recognition is simply too low, and she does not have the organizational, institutional support to change that.

If you ask Schwalbe, she will tell you that her name recognition is low because the New York Times and other media institutions refuse to take her candidacy seriously. I am sympathetic, but I think this is backwards. She would get plenty of media coverage if she could articulate a differentiating campaign message, and then demonstrate that it was pulling supporters into her camp. Schwalbe’s core problem is that while she has a very different aesthetic performance of competence than any other candidate (scientific expert witness/“no-nonsense” neighborhood mom), she lacks this differentiating message. She cannot credibly argue that any of her competitors would not share her policy goals when it comes to public health and vaccines, her core issue. And she has not established any real distance on other issues, either.

She has always been one of the race’s harshest critics of Israel, brags about being willing to label their actions in Gaza a “genocide,” and recently announced her opposition to continued Iron Dome funding. But she has not prioritized and emphasized this issue early enough or often enough to get attention from activist groups like Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, or Jewish Voices for Peace, which could have given her a real activist organizer base. Instead, she prefers to lead with public health issues, and talk about how she will wear a t-shirt that says “Impeach RFK JR” on the House floor.

Her other marquee issue is fierce opposition to the RAD-PACT redevelopment of NYCHA’s Fulton Elliot Chelsea complex. When I interviewed her on my podcast, she told me that she believed that “elderly people shouldn’t have to move if they don’t want to,” that the federal government could be convinced to fill NYCHA’s $78 billion backlog of desperately needed capital repairs, and that more generally, building more housing supply doesn’t actually make anything more affordable (“We assumed markets solved problems for poor people… more supply, more supply meets demand. Supply meets demand. It’s a curve. I mean, that’s neo-Keynesian economics. And it didn’t really work.”)

All three points are completely, 180-degrees-in-the-other-direction, flat-out wrong. Elderly people have to move even if they don’t want to all the time, and especially when they live in substandard living conditions. Any alternative plan to renovate the building, and remediate the mold and asbestos in their apartments, would require a lengthy temporary relocation too. Truly committing to the idea that no one should ever move means that you never repair the buildings, and while this is essentially what has happened for the past few decades, it is not a good outcome for anyone! Congress has consistently refused to fund NYCHA capital projects, under Democrat and Republican majorities alike, for forty years. And increasing housing supply does lead to durably lower rents. Schwalbe’s housing platform betrays a certain intellectual habit that is unfortunately quite common among highly-credentialed scientific scholars: in her field, everyone needs to listen to experts and follow the science, but in other fields, wild speculation and appeals to gut feel and vibes are totally fair game.

All of which is to say, I like Nina Schwalbe (and I’m grateful that she was willing to come on my podcast!), but I would not vote for her even if she was not essentially a spoiler candidate at this point.

IV.

So that leaves Bores and Lasher, two candidates with unconvincing core closing messages, and nearly identical policy platforms. Despite the headline of this blog, I will be voting for Lasher, because I believe (unlike Our Revolution, the majority of NY-12 voters my age, and seemingly all of Twitter) he is slightly more progressive than Bores.

On June 29th, 2025, a week after the primary, Lasher endorsed Mamdani in a lengthy Twitter post, acknowledging their past disagreements, but also calling the Democratic nominee “a person not only of intelligence and integrity but with uncommon capacity for listening and growth.” Lasher was a genuine leader here; very few Upper West Side establishment elected officials had endorsed Mamdani at that point. It would take Alex Bores nearly three months before he was willing to do the same. This speaks to two crucial differences between the two Assemblymen. First, Lasher’s core base (aging liberals on the West Side) still allows him a little more flexibility to move left than Bores’s (aging liberals and moderates on the East Side). And second, while Lasher is willing to get out in front of his constituents and gently guide them towards what he felt to be the correct position, Bores is dispositionally more cautious, careful, and drawn to the path of least resistance.

This is part of what has made Bores such an effective legislator, and it has allowed him to identify and champion under-discussed issues where he can make significant impact without real pushback. I was particularly impressed by his work to increase the number of judges statewide, something that flew under the radar in last year’s session, but will make the state judiciary run much more efficiently moving forward. But finding the path of least resistance is a serious problem if you are interested in being a progressive leader while representing a lot of very not-progressive constituents.

It is also a serious problem if you want to be a leader on housing, which I still believe to be the most important issue facing this district. I do not believe Alex Bores is a secret NIMBY, or that he is insufficiently committed to the idea that a robust solution to the city’s housing crisis involves building a lot more supply. I do think, however, that on a case-by-case basis, he would be significantly more cagey and calculating than Lasher, and might slow down some projects in the process.

We don’t need to speculate: Bores and Lasher disagree, right now, on the biggest housing dispute facing the district today. Bores believes that the Fulton Elliot Chelsea RAD-PACT redevelopment did not have sufficient community engagement, that the survey that found that a majority of residents who participated do support the plan was illegitimate, and that they should do another one. Lasher believes that the redevelopment is the best and only way to give these NYCHA tenants 3000 brand new state-of-the-art public housing units, (while also adding a thousand affordable housing units and 3,000 market rate units to a neighborhood that desperately needs them), and that both NYCHA and the city are in a crisis and need to act as quickly as possible.

Lasher’s experience is not the bulletproof argument that he wants it to be. But experience in politics does develop one skill, at least for those who practice it seriously. That’s the ability to prioritize the interests of a diffuse, poorly organized majority over a concentrated, highly impacted, disproportionately loud minority. In this case, it is the ability to prioritize the thousands of Fulton Elliot Chelsea residents who want new public housing units (and the hundreds of thousands of residents of Lower Manhattan who need new affordable and market-rate housing), over the 24 seniors who don’t want to temporarily relocate (and nearby local neighborhood activists who have no stake in the conditions of NYCHA housing, but don’t like new construction within earshot of their Chelsea townhouses). In other contexts, it might be the ability to see the benefit of a bus lane that takes away a few parking spots, or a regulation that lowers prices and improves service for consumers, but negatively impacts an entrenched industry or incumbent.

If there is a stylistic difference between Alex Bores and Micah Lasher, it is that Lasher picks difficult, controversial fights, while Bores looks for low-hanging fruit. Both are important, and if Bores wins, I look forward to seeing what fruit he shakes loose. But right now, both locally and nationally, progressives need someone who is ready for the fight.

Programming note: This is the Case Against Alex Bores. I plan to publish the Case Against Micah Lasher sometime this week. When I do, I’ll hyperlink it here. Then, I will close with a direct issue-focused comparison, and finally, an endorsement.

Alex Bores has two closing messages, and they’re both incredibly compelling. The more straightforward message, the one he used with donors across the country, is best encapsulated on his website in the introduction to his signature AI Policy Framework. “Artificial intelligence is transforming America.” He wrote. “And we need leaders in Congress who actually understand the technology enough to ask tough questions, close dangerous loopholes, and make sure innovation doesn’t bulldoze families, workers, and our democracy. That’s me.”

Bores goes into (some) detail about how exactly he wants to regulate the AI industry in that memo. But you’re not going to hear about that in the final weeks of this campaign. That’s because Bores has a problem: He’s running in the wrong district for elaborate warnings about the dangers of artificial intelligence. Voters across the country are increasingly furious about the rise of AI, but comparatively less so in NY-12, an aging district with few soon-to-be-obsolete tech workers, and one of the only places in the country where it is physically impossible to site a data center. It is no coincidence that as of January, Bores had raised more money from Berkeley residents than from Manhattan residents.

Bores’s second message, the one that he’s closing debates with, printing on every flyer, and proclaiming from every campaign podium, fits NY-12 voters far better, because it ties AI to the issue they actually care about: Trump. “Trump mega-donors are trying to buy this election. They’re trying to steal it from you. Don’t let them.” Bores urged at last month’s candidate forum at the 92nd Street Y. He elaborated further in his closing statement of the PIX-II debate last Thursday night: “The A.I. oligarchs who are rigging our economy are scared of me... they named me their No. 1 enemy and said they would spend at least $10 million to defeat me.”

Those oligarchs are OpenAI’s President Greg Brockman, Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, and venture capital firm a16z’s co-founder Marc Andreessen, and according to recent federal filings, their political arm Leading the Future has spent only $6.2 million in independent expenditures in this race (though they may clear $10 million by Primary Day, June 23rd). What Bores says is superficially true. They are all billionaires, they all donated millions to Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign, and they all fiercely oppose Alex Bores.

When I first previewed Bores’s candidacy in January, I wrote that Leading the Future’s strategy made no sense, and even at that point, it had already backfired dramatically. As the East Side candidate, and especially as one with far fewer local institutional endorsements than West Side Assemblymember Micah Lasher, Bores entered the race at a severe disadvantage. Recent history tells us that in a normal, boring race, the West Side candidate crushes the East Side candidate. His only hope was to come up with a compelling narrative, something stronger than “I’m your local elected official, you know me, you trust me, I’ve done a good job.” Something that could ratchet up the urgency of the race, excite the imaginations of Democrats on both sides of the park, and make standard, hyperlocal concerns like bus lanes and scaffolding seem quaint. By flooding mailboxes in January and February with cartoonishly overwrought attack mailers, Leading the Future did more than just raise Bores’s name recognition (he was a two-term State Assemblyman; most people had no idea who he was at that point). They gave Bores’s campaign that narrative, on a silver platter. This, I wrote then, helped Bores way more than the mailers themselves could possibly hurt him. It was essentially an in-kind donation.

The next six months have borne this out. In a race with two celebrities, it is Bores who has dominated with the kind of earned national media that is worth solid gold in a district like NY-12. Because of Leading the Future, Bores was able to book an interview with Ezra Klein, with the headline “Why are Palantir and OpenAI Scared of Alex Bores?”, an interview that to a first approximation, every single NY-12 voter I know listened to. Because of Leading the Future, Bores has been the subject of lengthy magazine profiles in The New Yorker, Politico Magazine, and even Vanity Fair. Because of Leading the Future, the one story about this race in last weekend’s print New York Times, a week before the start of early voting, bore the headline: “A.I. Companies Don’t Know What to Do With Alex Bores” (Bores enthusiastically retweeted the story.)

“Judge me by the enemies I have made,” a famous resident of what is now NY-12 once said. Bores has asked voters to judge him based on his three deep-pocketed, utterly hapless enemies, and so far, voters seem to find this an extraordinarily compelling argument. It comes in three forms. There’s the competence angle: If these people are spending so much to stop him, Bores must be really good at AI regulation, in a way that no one else could be. (“They’re scared of me because I win,” Bores told supporters at a rally two weeks ago). There’s the precedential angle: If we don’t elect Bores, it will send a loud, clear signal to officials across the country that it’s too risky and perilous to regulate AI. (“They’re looking to make an example out of me,” he likes to say.) And there’s the real prize, the anti-Trump, anti-corruption angle. Big Tech oligarchs oppose Bores, so he must be the most anti-oligarch, anti-Big Tech candidate. Trump donors oppose Bores, so he must be the toughest on Trump, the one that Trump himself least wants to see in Congress.

All three arguments are worthy of scrutiny. The case against Alex Bores is that none of them really hold up.

II.

We can dispense with the “make an example” argument first. To the extent that Leading the Future is making any kind of example out of Bores, it’s a positive one. “If you run afoul with us,” they have said, “we will strike back clumsily, make you look like a badass man-of-the-people superhero, and you will be way more viable than you otherwise would have been.”

This would not be the first time that Bay Area billionaires have spectacularly failed to purchase elections. In his 2023 book Going Infinite, Michael Lewis chronicled the saga of Carrick Flynn, a pandemic policy expert who crypto billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried decided to support in his candidacy for Congress in Portland, Oregon. Bankman-Fried was new to local elections at that time but flush with cash, so he poured $10 million in independent expenditures, deluging the small media market with the same 30-second ad over-and-over. In Lewis’s telling, this (predictably) did not endear voters to Flynn. (Bankman-Fried also donated to Bores’s State Assembly campaign that same cycle; more on that later). This incident, and many, many others (see Tom Steyer, or 2020 Presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg) illustrate that when deployed clumsily, money alone cannot make a candidate win or lose.

And it’s not even clear that making Alex Bores lose is Leading the Future’s goal. When I spoke to Politico’s Calder McHugh in April, I asked him why these billionaires were so dead-set against Bores but had not poured similar resources into opposing Scott Weiner, a California state legislator who had passed nearly identical AI regulation in California to Bores’s RAISE Act, and who is currently running to fill Nancy Pelosi’s Bay Area seat in Congress with the exact same AI plan as Bores. McHugh told me that according to his reporting, Leading the Future had looked at Weiner, and decided that he, unlike Bores, was a heavy favorite, and that they would look weak if they opposed him and he won anyway. “They’re engaging in NY-12 because they believe Bores had little chance of victory… They felt like their money could be better spent against this guy who already had all these local dynamics stacked against him.” When I spoke to The New Yorker’s Gideon Lewis-Kraus, who has reported extensively on Bores, OpenAI, and Anthropic, he told me the same thing about Leading the Future: “They’re in this race [and not Weiner’s] because it seemed easier for them to claim a scalp. …They thought Bores was going to lose anyway.”

To recap: While Leading the Future would like everyone else to believe that they have the power to swing elections with their money and destroy their enemies, even they do not believe they have that power, and anyone who considers crossing them in the future will see that crossing them might have no effect, or might lead to outrageous success. This is well established at this point. We do not need to actually elect Alex Bores to drive it home.

Of course, there might be another reason why an elected official might emulate Bores’s platform, on pure campaign finance terms: there’s even more money on his side. The same federal filing that reported Leading the Future’s $6.2 million in opposition independent expenditures, also showed that OpenAI’s main competitor, Anthropic, had spent $6.5 million in independent expenditures supporting him. This also pierces the third argument, that Leading the Future’s spending casts Bores as an anti-oligarch crusader for the common man. In fact, some of the very richest AI oligarchs, the ones who own massive chunks of a company that is expected to IPO at $1 trillion sometime this year, are desperate to see Bores in power.

Why are they so desperate? And is it so bad if they are? In the last week, both Lasher and Schlossberg have hammered Bores for receiving Anthropic’s support, as if this alone makes him a captured hypocrite. But does it? After all, Anthropic are the good guys! They are the responsible company, the one that’s obsessed with safety, that was founded on the premise that Sam Altman and OpenAI were dangerous and needed to be stopped. They’re the people who heroically stood up to Pete Hegseth and the Trump Administration earlier this year, because they were concerned that AI agents might be given autonomous control over lethal military operations. Right? To truly evaluate the case for Alex Bores, we need to understand who Anthropic’s leaders are, what they want, and whether or not someone they’ve allied with could be the right person to regulate the industry.

III.

And to understand that, we have to take a big step back and consider the Effective Altruism movement, something that does not loom particularly large in the consciousness of Manhattanites, at least those who live north of Houston Street. But they’re going to have to learn in a hurry, because Anthropic is the dominant Effective Altruist company, the spiritual successor to Sam Bankman-Fried’s cryptocurrency exchange FTX and trading firm Alameda Research, and Alex Bores is the Effective Altruist candidate of this race, and one of the most successful EA politicians nationwide.

A brief primer (check out my conversation with Gideon Lewis-Kraus if you want a slightly less brief one): Effective Altruism is a philosophical movement founded in the early 2010s by an Oxford graduate student named Will Mackaskill, based on the work of utilitarian moral philosopher Peter Singer, among others. Its fundamental tenets are straightforward: 1) people have a moral obligation to make a reasonable effort to do the most good that they can; 2) people are similarly obligated to rigorously measure the impact of their attempts to do good, so they can maximize that impact; and 3) once people do that rigorous measurement, and learn that they can literally save a life by donating a few thousand dollars to the right charity, they should take the utilitarian implications of that finding at least a little bit seriously.

To the right kind of person, someone who loves math, logic, and being a contrarian, the sheer epistemic power of this argument is kind of intoxicating. I am in many ways exactly this kind of person, and I remain an adherent to this form of EA. I set up a monthly donation to GiveWell as soon as I graduated college and had a steady income. I think more people should do this too.

Somewhere down the line, the focus of the EA movement shifted slightly, with the thought experiment that is sometimes referred to as “Pascal’s mugging.” The idea here is that if you truly care about doing the most good, you should be willing to think about lives in expected value terms. Sam Bankman-Fried famously told Tyler Cowen that he would flip a coin that would double the well-being of all humans if it came up heads, and cause human extinction if it came up tails, as long as the coin had a 51% chance of coming up heads.

Furthermore, this theory goes, if you truly care about maximizing expected lives, you should be most concerned with preventing catastrophes and extinction-level events, even if they are vanishingly unlikely. So buying malaria nets and nutritional supplements for actual babies is good, but preventing the next global pandemic (or even making it a fraction of a percentage less likely) is better, and reducing the probability of a mass extinction event by .00001% is best of all.

As Lewis-Kraus explained to me, this kind of logic led the Effective Altruist movement into a tough spot, because it created some perverse psychological dynamics. Suddenly, the marker of an adherent was not how much they gave, or how much they cared about maximizing impact, but how committed they were to these counterintuitive logical conclusions, the kind that would sound absolutely crazy to a normal person outside the Bay Area, but would be recognized as true and virtuous to a fellow EA member. This, in my opinion, is how you get a cult.

There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with cults, but by 2022, this particular one, and its cult leader Sam Bankman-Fried, had an enormous amount of money and power, and a catastrophic inability to wield them responsibly (or impactfully). By the end of that year, SBF was indicted for essentially stealing billions in FTX customer funds, and deploying them not on Robin Hood-esque altruistic programs like malaria nets, but on private planes, flashy Super Bowl ads featuring Tom Brady and Larry David, extravagant political donations to Joe Biden, Mitch McConnell, and dozens of lower-level aspiring elected officials (including Alex Bores), and to investments in venture-backed startups, including a San Francisco-based, EA-aligned, AI startup called Anthropic. He was able to spend all this stolen money in such a decidedly un-altruistic way because by that point, the EA movement’s logical mode had become so elaborate and impenetrable that you could use it to justify anything. Buying that Super Bowl ad, SBF would explain, was the most efficient and altruistic use of his money, because it increased the number of FTX users, which in turn increased the amount of money he personally expected to have, which in turn increased the amount of future donations he could make towards pandemic prevention and AI safety.

Though they sometimes try to deny it, Anthropic is founded and run by co-founders of the Effective Altruism movement. They decided to start Anthropic because they believed that their former employer, Sam Altman’s OpenAI, was not taking its commitment to AI safety seriously enough, and that they needed to build a competitor that would. They are obsessed, as virtually everyone in the EA community is these days, with the idea that an unaligned superintelligence will one day seize control over our systems of power, and use them to kill every human on the planet. And they too, believe that the best and only way to prevent this is to do something (in this case build Anthropic into the dominant industry leader) that will make them hundreds of billions of dollars personally.

Bores has no equity in Anthropic, but he shares their existential outlook, recently telling the New York Editorial Board that he believed the probability of this AI extinction event (“p-doom” in EA parlance) to be about 10%. His supporters do too, the army of employees from Anthropic (and Jane Street, and other EA-aligned finance and tech institutions). Here is the case made by one such supporter, an AI researcher named Eric Neyman, who walks through the utilitarian case for making a maximum $7,000 donation to Bores’s campaign. In this 8,400-word blog (more than double the length of this one), Neyman comes up with precise, probabilistic answers to questions like how many marginal expected votes $7,000 should buy Bores, (about 20, apparently), how much greater Bores’s impact would be if he one day became a cabinet secretary (twice as much as a Congressman), and ultimately, how much existential risk could be reduced if Bores was elected (1-in-5000!) He concludes that this is “this is the best currently-existing political donation opportunity, by a factor of 2-3 or so.”

Alex Bores knows better than to talk in these terms in Manhattan, but this is the world that he comes from, this is the language that he speaks, and these are the terms with which he has managed to raise nearly $3 million in direct donations from tech workers in the Bay Area and across the country.

IV.

As I said above, I have great admiration for the Effective Altruism movement. I think people should care far more about the impact of their actions, philanthropic and otherwise, than many seem to. And I believe the movement has helped shine a light on many exceedingly worthy, under-discussed causes, including global health initiatives, pandemic prevention, and yes, the growing risks of unaligned AI.

But in its worst moments, this movement has also been categorized by a cocktail of concerning defects, including a fetishization of contrarianism, a set of rhetorical epistemic tools that can be used to justify absolutely anything, an alarming propensity for herding and groupthink, and a wildly irresponsible tolerance of, or even preference for, extreme risk. I do not know whether these qualities make for good inventors of frontier technology, or wise executives of a unicorn tech company. I do think that they make for bad public policymakers, and I do not want people with these qualities (in this case, Anthropic’s soon-to-be-centibillionaire leaders) holding any kind of power over my elected officials, as virtuous as their intentions may be.

More narrowly, if they are going to hold power with elected officials (and they seem determined to do so), I do not see why it is of profound moral importance that they hold power with MY elected officials specifically. It makes perfect sense that someone like Scott Weiner, who will represent a Bay Area district that is chock-full of young Effective Altruist tech workers, might lead on the issues that Anthropic wants him to. At the rate that Anthropic is spending, he will surely be joined by a bipartisan crop of Anthropic-friendly Representatives before long. The Upper West and East Sides do not have the same base of local Effective Altruists.

Bores wants Manhattanites who don’t know or care about EA to vote for him anyway because he’s opposed by the three billionaires of Leading the Future. He argues not only that they are emblematic of the Trump-supporting oligarch class, and that if he loses they will have unchecked power because no one else will dare challenge them, also that their opposition is what proves that he would be the best person to regulate the AI industry.

But it is impossible to separate Leading the Future’s opposition of Bores from Anthropic’s support of him. I have taken this long dive into the history of Anthropic to demonstrate that I do not agree that an Anthropic supporter would speak for the general public, and or that their chosen representatives would be the best and only people to regulate the AI industry.

There may be other arguments for electing Alex Bores to Congress next year. I plan to address those in a blog later this week. For now, you should know that the core argument that he’s closing his campaign with, the one he wants you to hear most, simply does not hold up.

Last Thursday, I went to the News Building on East 42nd Street to watch PIX-11’s NY-12 Primary Debate in their media spin room. A televised debate down the stretch of a contested campaign only ever conveys one lasting message to voters. It’s kind of tragic when you think about how much work goes into them. Teams of producers anxiously wheel around sophisticated, expensive equipment to make sure everyone looks and sounds perfect. Moderators spend hours researching and editing their questions into their clearest, most provocative form, and then practice reading each one aloud in the mirror so they approximate a tone of relaxed, conversational curiosity. And the candidates and their teams hole up for days, carefully memorizing every 60-second segment, brainstorming lines of attack and deflection, and deputizing staffers to role-play as their opponents. All that for one hour of TV, which is then reduced down to one fifteen-second soundbite or five-word headline. Our collective attention spans can’t handle more than that. At the end of the day, there’s a lot going on, and most normal people find politics pretty boring, so one takeaway is all you get.

Both Jack Schlossberg and Micah Lasher walked into this debate with the goal of making that takeaway the same thing: Alex Bores Is Secretly Evil.

Sensing that this had become the race’s most contentious topic, moderator Dan Mannarino decided to open the race with a question about AI regulation, Alex Bores’s favorite issue, and directed it to Micah Lasher first. Lasher spent about ten seconds describing his plan to guarantee jobs to new grads, and then pivoted, and went straight at Bores, who had not spoken yet. “Unlike Alex, who’s backed by millions of dollars from Anthropic and crypto companies, I won’t be beholden to anyone but the voters.”

And then they were off. Lasher attacked Bores for being “the most pro-crypto candidate on this stage.” Schlossberg jumped in, threw in a criticism of how Bores’s AI Dividend Plan would be a “dream come true for the biggest AI company in the world, which has given you millions of dollars,” and then added a twist: “I put Alex’s AI plan into AI to see if it was AI-generated, and the results would interest you.” Mannarino eventually pivoted to a question about income inequality, but Lasher and Schlossberg stayed on message. “Voters should ask why a crypto billionaire is spending three-and-a-half million dollars to help Alex… he has an A-Plus rating [with the crypto lobby],” said Lasher, while Schlossberg stressed that “the people funding [Bores’s] campaign are also funding MAGA Republicans across the country.” But it was a few minutes later, when the conversation moved to immigration and ICE, that the knives really came out. Schlossberg attacked Bores’s years working for Palantir with a savage (almost certainly unintentional) Freudian slip: “I know Alex says ‘I quit ICE,’... I mean, ‘I quit Palantir’.” And when Bores defended himself, arguing that he “resigned in protest,” after Palantir started taking contracts with ICE, Lasher lobbed a grenade. “Usually when you resign from protest… there’s a protest. In the Bloomberg News reporting on your departure, reporting that you had received a warning about sexual harassment five days before you left, facts that you did not dispute… your own campaign said you left because you had another job lined up.”

I have no idea how this played to voters watching at home, especially those just tuning into the race now. But from my perspective, these attacks fell flat. Bores has weathered eight figures of opposition spending, which stuffed mailboxes with precisely these points for six months now. So far, voters do not seem to be buying them. I don’t understand the strategy of repeating the exact same attack lines again, over and over, to his face, and hoping that somehow this will get voters to change their minds.

The network cut to a commercial break immediately after, so Bores did not have a chance to respond to the sexual harassment attack (he responded at length in his interview with Ezra Klein, and in his account, the conduct in question seems pretty unobjectionable). For the others, he seemed calm and unbothered, brushing them off with cocky one-liners about how “these vague attacks are just desperate, desperate attempts to dissuade Americans from seeing what’s right in front of them,” and how it was “disappointing to hear Micah repeat disinformation from Trump megadonors,” and even a cheerful, almost Trumpian “they’re so feisty today!” Again, it’s hard to know whether a majority of viewers found this suave and charming, or irritatingly arrogant. Who knows how many voters even watched the debate! For the ones that did, though, the one sentence takeaway was not that Alex Bores was Secretly Evil. Instead, it came from a different Bores one-liner, early on, after a particularly brutal round of attacks from Lasher and Schlossberg: “It’s clear they know who the frontrunner is.”

I.

Can Alex Bores really be the frontrunner in this race? If you’ve been reading (or listening to) my coverage for the past nine months, then you’ll know that I have been skeptical. History would suggest that the deck is stacked against Bores; NY-12 voters care deeply about local endorsements and institutions, Lasher has absolutely dominated in that area, and most critically, the West Side always beats the East Side. More voters, more Democrats, stronger organizations. But these are just anecdotes and narratives, and at this point in the race, you deserve data.. So I pulled the voter file, and for the past week, I’ve taken a deep dive into the demographics and electoral history of each of the nearly 400 precincts in this district, to figure out just how big the West Side advantage is. Here’s the default scenario (a comfortable Lasher win), and five ways Bores could close the gap.

It’s not a fair fight. We have two recent comps in this district for a race between a popular, well-credentialed West Side elected official and a popular, slightly-less-credentialed East Side elected official. They are NY-12’s Nadler v. Maloney in 2022, and the Manhattan Borough President race between Brad Hoylman-Sigal and Keith Powers last June. Hoylman-Sigal won in NY-12 precincts by a 56-40 margin, and Nadler rinsed Maloney 55-24. But this didn’t really sink in for me until I went into the voter file. There are about the same number of registered Democrats on each side of the district (~156k, if you were wondering), and they turnout at similar rates. But when there’s a local on the ballot, West Siders are just much more loyal than their East Side counterparts. With some extremely basic assumptions based on every voter’s prior voting propensity, I project West Siders to outnumber East Siders by about 1,500 in this race. But in this baseline scenario, I project the Lasher to dominate the big West Side neighborhoods by more than twenty-five points, while losing the East Side neighborhoods by only ten or so. This would lead to a comfortable, five-point win for Lasher, which would be the worst showing of any recent West Sider (Hoylman-Sigal won many Chelsea and Hell’s Kitchen precincts with over 70% of the vote, while Nadler touched 80% in Manhattan Valley). If this were a normal, boring race between normal, boring elected officials, this is about as well as the East Side candidate could hope to perform.

Alex Bores knows this, of course, which is why he’s trying so hard to make sure this race feels neither normal nor boring. One of my favorite lines of this election came from Maeve Buckley Andersen a few months ago: “Alex Bores is the candidate of the East Side, and trying very hard not to be so.” Bores wants to nationalize this race, and to make the stakes feel existential. In this scenario, he pulls it off, reducing polarization on both sides of the park by half, and then squeaking by with a miniscule swing of persuasion. To be clear, reducing polarization by half seems absolutely insane to me. Ask any NY-12 resident whether they’re from the East or West Side, and in their response, you will immediately learn that these people are extremely polarized. So Bores will not win on depolarization alone, as envisioned in this scenario, but the closer he approximates it, the less he has to rely on the rest of the scenarios. And they don’t get easier.

In this scenario, the two sides remain as polarized as ever. But Bores’s closing message about AI, about standing up to the evil Trump mega-donors who have filled your mailboxes with hate and lies, about freeing ourselves from the yoke of our future robot overlords, it all hits in a big way. Neighborhoods remain polarized as ever (Lasher performs nearly 40 points better on the Upper West Side than on the Upper East Side), but in every precinct, Bores convinces a dozen or so extra people to vote for him instead of Lasher. When you put it like that it doesn’t sound so hard! Of course, you have to do it in a district full of older voters, few of whom work in tech, and even fewer of whom actually know or care that much about AI. It would help if the electorate wasn’t quite so old…

As Michael Lange pointed out to me, NY-12 has a lot of Millennials. I project 31,650 of them will vote in the baseline scenario. But what if he boosts that number up a bit, to 36,000 or so? And what if he absolutely dominates with this group, even more than I project him to in the baseline scenario? At 44, Lasher is technically also a Millennial, but his target demographic is older, Boomer and Silent Generation liberals who have lived here for decades, and have longstanding relationships with Jerry Nadler, Scott Stringer, Kathy Hochul, and all the other aging Democrats that Stringer has worked for. Millennials are much more likely to see the 35-year old Bores, the new parent who put baby-cam footage in his first ad, with a relentless focus on making sure their jobs don’t get automated out of existence, as one of their own. In the baseline scenario, Bores wins Millennials by a few thousand votes. In this one, he gets them at a 2-1 clip, banking a 10k vote lead that Lasher can’t quite close with the rest of the electorate.

I think it’s really hard to convince an extra 5,000 Millennials to come to the polls, and it’s even harder to get them to support you at a 2-1 clip. But Team Bores will certainly be trying.

That’s because the last two scenarios simply aren’t plausible. In this one, Bores persuades at the baseline level, Millennials don’t do anything crazy, and everyone stays polarized. Instead, he closes the gap on geographic turnout disparity alone. Up and down 2nd and 3rd Avenue, Democrats are driven to the polls as if this were a mayoral race between Andrew Cuomo and Zohran Mamdani. Meanwhile, on Riverside Drive, they treat it like an off-cycle City Council race. This would be an organizational triumph for Bores, and it would be a tough one, because Lasher has all the best organizational endorsements. Either the Bores’s union endorsements end up mattering more than they usually do, his campaign has secretly recruited hundreds of young, active volunteers (anecdotally Lasher seems to be leading in this department as well) who will knock on doors twelve hours a day DSA-style, or there’s a Hampton Jitney strike the week of the election, trapping all of Park Avenue in Manhattan. Short of that, I just can’t see Bores making this kind of a dent with turnout alone. But this is what it would look like if he did.

If you’ve made it this far, you may be wondering why Jack Schlossberg and George Conway have not played more of a role in these scenarios, and have been stubbornly parked below 15% of the vote. It’s quite simple: I don’t think either of them have much of a shot.

Conway does not seem like he’s even trying, especially after a sloppy, unfocused debate performance where he did not even dominate the conversation during the section on impeachment, his delusional pet issue. Schlossberg is absolutely still trying, but he’s trying way too hard, swinging for the fences at every pitch, and my sense is that most voters are pretty sick of it. While it did not contain any truly damning revelations, the Fandos piece seems to have been something of a death knell for Schlossberg’s hopes of Being Taken Seriously, and NY-12 voters think of themselves as a Serious bunch. If Schlossberg were gaining traction, by this point you’d start to hear about some prominent NY-12 residents (and there are a lot of them) who were excited enough about his candidacy to go on the record about their support, the way Hollywood’s most famous reactionary moderates coalesced behind Spencer Pratt last month. Where is Amy Schumer’s Schlossberg endorsement? Why haven’t the West Village Girl influencers flooded my feed with content about No PAC Jack?

I think he’s toast, but if there’s one group that Schlossberg might still be able to win over, it’s voters over 80 years old. This is a bit of an ego hit to a candidate like Schlossberg, whose whole raison d’etre is his social media fluency, and ability to get a new generation excited about politics. But at this point he’ll take what he can get, and what he can get are voters who can actually remember the Kennedy Administration, don’t know what social media is, don’t follow local politics particularly closely, and watch a lot of television.

In the baseline scenario, he does okay, but not great with this group (they do read the New York Times after all.) In this one, he goes nuts, winning an outright majority of Silent Generation voters in many precincts. Is this enough to get him a plurality overall? Nope! But it’s enough to shake things up for Lasher and Bores. Specifically, it tips the scales ever so slightly to Bores, because Lasher does a bit better than Bores with Silent Generation voters in my baseline scenario. Geographically it looks like Schlossberg is taking more from east than west (look at Oligarch Alley!!) But it turns out he’s taking more Lasher votes than Bores votes even in those precincts, and when everything’s counted, Bores squeaks through with a 2022 Dan Goldman-esque narrow plurality. A hilarious result befitting a “clown car” race.

To me, this is Schlossberg’s absolute best case scenario. It feels absurd, and I expect him to do much worse. Bores’s other winning scenarios, in their most literal form, are also pretty absurd. It’s much more plausible that he gets over the top with some patchwork combination, where there’s a little bit of neighborhood depolarization, Millennials turn out slightly more than expected, the East Side turns out slightly more than expected too, and then he closes strong and wins a few hundred more late-deciders than anyone else.

Looking at the NY-12 electorate, I still think Lasher has the advantage, about a 60% chance of winning. But if Bores were to pull off an upset, and bring East Side Democrats the glory that they’ve been deprived of for so long, that’s probably how he would do it.

This week, Jack Schlossberg took a shot at Micah Lasher on Twitter: “Micah Lasher doesn’t think we should impeach Trump — says it’s a waste of time and we can’t afford it. I disagree — we can’t afford not to.”

Lasher clapped back with a clarification; he supported impeachment, but believed it to be largely symbolic, because it would be impossible to get the votes for removal in the Senate. Schlossberg fired back, then Lasher, then Schlossberg again. It was a rare spat between two candidates on their main accounts (usually this kind of work is left to the mudslinging comms consultants), and it centered one of this race’s rare issues on which candidates actually disagree.

To understand the potency of Schlossberg’s position, why it is so captivating to a certain kind of NY-12 voter, so captivating that it is the single animating issue of a different prominent candidate’s campaign, you have to understand the particular way that impeachment looms in the political memory of the Democratic Party.

I.

“People have got to know whether their President is a crook,” President Richard Nixon told the Associated Press’s Managing Editors Association meeting at DisneyWorld in Miami in November of 1973. “Well, I’m not a crook.” Things are different today. Our President is a crook, brazenly and unapologetically. But at the time, such allegations carried real weight, and Democrats eventually used them to take down a reactionary populist who had utterly dominated them for half a decade.

Under Nixon, Republicans had pulled off a historic realignment, by wresting the Southern “Dixiecrats” of the New Deal era away from the Democratic Party with reactionary “law-and-order” racial politics, and by identifying a “silent majority” of disaffected voters who snobby elites in both parties had neglected for too long. This formidable coalition left Democrats in a hopeless tailspin, and Nixon won a staggering 49 of 50 states in his 1972 reelection bid. In the summer of 1973, the Democrats finally busted out of their funk with the hearings of the Senate Watergate Committee, which painstakingly and diligently excavated the complex web of Nixon’s conspiracy to spy on his political opponents and then cover it up. These hearings produced hundreds of hours of gripping daytime television, with charismatic Senators Sam Ervin and Howard Baker grilling senior members of the Nixon administration under oath, leading to evasive squirming, and eventually, dramatic revelations. According to Gallup, over 70% of Americans watched the proceedings live at some point, and as many as 20% reported watching at least ten hours. (Ten hours of unedited footage of a bunch of lawyers asking dry procedural questions, ruffling through documents, and then taking long breaks! Live on TV! In the summer! What was wrong with you people?!)

In July of 1973, the Watergate Committee struck gold in their interview with White House aide Alexander Butterfield, who revealed, live on television, that virtually every conversation between President Nixon and his top administrative officials had been recorded for posterity. This set off a yearlong legal battle to get these tapes into the public record, which the White House fought at every turn, first by firing the Justice Department’s Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox (and firing the Attorney General and Deputy Attorney General when they both refused to fire Cox), then by agreeing to release the tapes but redacting an 18-and-a-half minute section of tape of a conversation on June 20, 1972 (and then lying about the redaction and claiming that it was a mechanical error), and finally by claiming executive privilege in court. The latter issue wound its way to the Supreme Court in July of 1974, in the landmark case United States v. Nixon, which pitted Cox’s replacement, Special Prosecutor Howard Jaworski representing the Justice Department, and legendary Boston trial lawyer James D. St. Clair acting as Special Counsel for the President. Jaworski absolutely obliterated St. Clair, and on July 24th, only three weeks after oral arguments, the Supreme Court unanimously rejected Nixon’s claim of executive privilege, ruling that the missing tape had to be released at once.

On August 5th, Nixon released the tape, which became known as the “Smoking Gun” tape. It was astonishing: clear audio of President Nixon and his chief of staff H.R. Haldeman discussing in frank terms how they planned to have the CIA convince FBI investigators to stop prying into Watergate by making vague (and false) claims about national security. Nixon’s remaining support in Congress evaporated overnight, and three days later, he became the first U.S. President to resign from office.

II.

If you’ve followed the New York Times and MSNBC’s coverage of Donald Trump over the past ten years, you may have noticed an obsession with finding Trump’s Smoking Gun tape. For over a decade, Democrats of a certain generation have been convinced that they are one mp3 file away from exposing Donald Trump for what he truly is, and from taking him out of politics for good. They thought they had it on October 7th, 2016, when the Washington Post published the “Access Hollywood” tape, a recording of Trump bragging about his success with women to television personality Billy Bush, and telling him that “when you’re a star, they let you do it… grab them by the pussy. You can do anything.” Democrats thought they had it in 2019, when, in response to a whistleblower complaint, Trump released a transcript of his phone conversation with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. “I would like you to do us a favor.” Trump told Zelensky, heavily implying that future military aid might be dependent on this favor. “Biden went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution [of his son Hunter] so if you can look into it... It sounds horrible to me.” And they thought they had a Smoking Gun in 2021, when the Washington Post published the recording of Trump’s phone call with Georgia’s Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, in which he falsely claimed that the election had been stolen and urged Raffensperger to do his best to “find us 11,780 votes.”

Trump has survived every one of these Smoking Gun moments, and in retrospect, it’s obvious why: you cannot uncover something that everyone already knows. While the details of each individual tape were scandalous and worthy of the outcry that they generated, none of them fundamentally altered the electorate’s perception of Donald Trump. It was not shocking in 2016 that the guy who ran Miss Universe, frequently called into Howard Stern to brag about sleeping with models, and generally made colorfully degrading comments about women constantly, might make offensive jokes about sexual assault. It was not shocking in 2019 that the same man, who had operated with flagrant self-interest, and frequently disregarded rules and norms around sensitive foreign policy issues, might be interested in exchanging State Department foreign aid for a personal political advantage. And it certainly was not shocking in January of 2021 that Donald Trump believed the election was stolen, and that Republicans in all levels of government should seize the levers of power to make sure that he didn’t have to leave office. He’d been screaming that on television and on social media every day for six weeks by that point. Trump has always enjoyed the advantage of being completely uninhibited in his public communications, which is that he has nothing left to hide.

Nevertheless, the obsession with Smoking Gun moments persists, because Democrats who came of age in the 1970s cannot stop chasing the high of Watergate. It was what worked the last time the party had lost its mojo to a reactionary anti-elite populist, and a recurring theme of this blog is that generals like to fight the last war. So ten years, and two failed impeachments, after Trump was first elected, these Democrats are eager for a procedural solution to Trumpism. What we need, they tell us, is an excellent lawyer, who can go to Washington, and hold some damn hearings. We need that lawyer to uncover secret truths about the Trump Administration, to catch them in a lie on national television in spectacular fashion. We need him to “Build The Case”, to diligently assemble all the evidence and then tie it all together with an ornate, elegant, easily digestible legal narrative. And above all, we need him to uncover new, shocking truths about Trump’s misdeeds, truths that are so horrifying and disqualifying and illegal, that the relevant authorities will have no choice but to remove Trump from office.

Nowhere in the country does this fantasy capture the imagination of the liberal Democrats in their 60s and 70s more than in New York’s Twelfth Congressional District.

III.

“Let’s start with you, Mr. Conway,” said moderator Errol Louis, about an hour into last April’s NY-12 candidate forum at the 92nd Street Y, before teeing a question up about pursuing a Trump impeachment trial. The question was largely academic at this point, because George Conway had for the past hour pursued a fascinating and novel debate strategy. Any time he was asked a question, whether about affordability, foreign policy, transit, or healthcare, he answered the same way. First, he would vaguely echo one of his opponents, (“I couldn’t agree more”, about Alex Bores’s supply-side housing plan, or “I keep hearing everything I agree with,” about Lasher’s vision for a new cross-harbor rail freight tunnel), then pause dramatically, and then pivot to the same topic: “But how are we going to get that done with this guy in the White House?” The only way to execute any progressive policy, Conway argued (though he was never specific on what that policy might be, or why he cared about it), was to immediately pursue removing Trump from power. “I sound like the broken record on this but He. Has. To. Go. The criminality has to stop, and it’s the power of Congress to take that step first.”

Louis tried in vain to get Conway to say anything else of substance, but after an hour, he relented, and asked about impeachment directly. Conway had at this point used all his best lines on the subject, and didn’t have much to add, so he restated his case as forcefully and simply as he could. “Impeach and remove. Full stop. There are so many impeachable offenses that this man is committing each and every day.”

Micah Lasher went next, and seemed genuinely confused that Conway had missed the obvious flaw in his grand plan. “I believe we can and we should impeach Donald Trump in the House of Representatives, and I believe he should be removed. But I don’t think there is any world in which that will happen. And that seems fairly self-evident to me. Maybe I’m missing something.”

Lasher is not missing something. As he pointed out a few minutes later, Senate Republicans were unwilling to impeach Trump after January 6th, at a moment when doing so would have had no effect on their legislative agenda (he was about to leave office), and crucially, after he had just sicced a violent mob on them personally. Most of the few Republicans that did vote to impeach were immediately primaried and kicked out of the party in disgrace. The idea that enough of them would do so to reach a two-thirds majority, in the middle of his term, with a presidential election looming, for corruption and malfeasance that had been in the public record for years, is absurd. The idea that if you could pull it off, President JD Vance might be more amenable to Lasher and Bores’s progressive policy agenda, is equally absurd, though perhaps compelling to a lifelong Republican like George Conway who not-so-secretly yearns for the “sensible, responsible, grown-up” Republican of the Reagan and Bush era.

But nostalgia is a powerful force, and it can make voters embrace absurdity. Up next, Jack Schlossberg objected to Lasher’s pragmatism, and leaned heavily into his particular brand of nostalgia to do it.. “My lesson from President Kennedy was to do things not because they’re easy, but because they’re hard,” he said. “I think this is a once-in-a-generation opportunity. It’s our country’s 250th birthday. What is going to happen next? What is the next chapter here? Are we not all completely and utterly disgusted by what we see?” Schlossberg didn’t have a substantive answer to Lasher’s concerns about the viability of impeachment, but he had something equally compelling instead: wild, out-of-control haymakers. “Maybe if you have a super PAC funded by a billionaire, you don’t understand how people feel around this district about President Trump.”

To Schlossberg, this is just one of a long list of middle-school-class-president-level ideas that are meant to generate attention with a (mostly out-of-district) online audience, and to force the experienced career politicians to sound boring and lame if they oppose them. You should be able to deduct your rent from your taxes! Trump himself should pay for Trump Tower’s NYPD security detail, and then also personally pay into a special fund to subsidize the city budget! And we should impeach him while we’re at it! The unabashed vapidity is kind of the point, whether Schlossberg realizes it or not. When you set it against the backdrop of the Kennedy name, pedigree, and considerable political resources, you get a contrast that is genuinely eye-catching. Schlossberg may not ultimately be able to convert those eyeballs into votes at a high-enough clip, but that’s a problem most of the candidates in this race would love to have.

To Conway, however, impeachment is not just an attention generator. It’s his entire identity as a candidate. “I strongly disagree that removal is impossible,” Conway responded. “And it’s not just about holding hearings and uncovering the criminality — it’s hard-nosed lawyering. We need that. We can make the case.” We need to beat Trump in court and in Congress’s court-like functions, this argument goes, so we need someone who has the specialized skillset of a courtroom lawyer.

The lawyer-to-elected-official pipeline is well established, and there are many ways in which the skillsets overlap. Both jobs require extensive public speaking, familiarity with law and the public policy concerns that shape them, and a deep network of rich and powerful people who are eager to give you money. But the rules of the game differ dramatically. Politics is about convincing a majority of people to join your side. The legal system is about slowly, methodically uncovering something approximating objective truth. It doesn’t matter what people think outside the courtroom, you just need to convince a tiny, captive audience, who have been trained to speak your specific elite language, and reward you for your knowledge and proficiency of the intricate rules and customs of the court. You can spend thousands of hours pouring over millions of pages of documents, transcripts, and recordings, and then painstakingly walk the judge, the jury, or your negotiating partner through them, adding your brilliant, subtle, lawyerly narrative twist to each relevant detail. Underlying the existence of an independent judiciary is the assumption that there are some matters that are beyond the scope of democracy, that are too important to leave to a vote. We don’t settle murder trials with a vote, for example, even high-profile ones. There are some matters for which we have to take the time, spend the resources, and most importantly, hire the elite technical experts, to get right.

In the dark, ugly heart of Democrats’ Watergate nostalgia, sits the uncomfortable belief that electing our President may be one of these matters, that it too may be too important to leave up to a vote. After all, didn’t we elite Democrats know that Nixon (and Trump) was unfit to lead? That he was breaking rules and norms at too fast a clip? That he was dangerous and corrupt and fundamentally unworthy of the power that he held? And given that, shouldn’t there be a way for us to remove him from power without having to ask all these annoying (and “deplorable”) commoners for permission? The Watergate fantasy allows liberals to indulge in their worst, most elitist belief, which is that they know better, and should be awarded special power because of it. In the Constitution, our framers did not entrust the elite with this power. Instead, they insisted that a President could only be removed from office with a broad small-d democratic mandate, a two-thirds majority of elected Senators.

In a healthier democracy, Trump’s staggering offenses would easily compel a bipartisan mandate for removal. He would be replaced, as Nixon was, with someone who would pursue the same ideological agenda, but with a higher commitment to the rule of law as well. But we do not live in that democracy, and it does no one any good to pretend that we do. In our world, the only way to get rid of Trump is to convince people that his policy agenda stinks, that Democrats have a better one, and that it will materially improve their lives if they vote for us instead of them.

Trump’s net approval rating is twenty points underwater at the time of writing. This is a winnable fight. Candidates like George Conway, with no policy agenda whatsoever, or Jack Schlossberg, with a bad one, appeal to NY-12 voters’ sense of nostalgia. But they’d be absolutely no help in the fight, and we need all the help we can get.

David Siffert, thank you so much for being here.

Thank you for having me.

Briefly, could you just introduce yourself? Describe your candidacy for the seat. Why are you running? What is your campaign built around? What are you guys excited about right now?

I’m David Siffert. I’m a civil rights lawyer, NYU law professor, and progressive Democrat running for New York State Assembly in District 66, which is parts of Lower Manhattan, specifically the Village, Soho, and Tribeca. I have spent a lot of time working with the state legislature, the class I teach is specifically about it. I’ve written over 100 bills for the state legislature. I’ve had some bills that I’ve written, passed, and become law, but more often than not, I’ve watched them get carved up or just ignored and have gotten increasingly frustrated. I’ve worked on all sorts of different issues from trying to make housing more affordable, trying to protect immigrants, but I’ve specialized, especially recently, in the intersection of technology and civil rights. I worked at a nonprofit advocacy organization specifically dedicated to those issues. I did both impact litigation and legislative advocacy. So a lot of what I was doing was writing legislation for the state legislature on these issues.

I’m unsurprisingly, increasingly worried about the rise of unregulated artificial intelligence and the way big tech is sort of having their way with all of us. The impacts are pretty broad, from privacy to civil rights to misinformation, environmental harms, education, and eventually catastrophic risk issues as well. And I’ve written bills on a lot of these things. I worked with Alex Bores to pass the RAISE Act, which is right now the nation’s premier AI safety bill. But by and large, there’s a lot of complacency in Albany around this issue and not a lot of expertise on it. After Alex Bores leaves the assembly at the end of the year, we just won’t have an expert in the assembly. And that’s really troubling at a time when the federal government’s obviously not going to come and save us, and we’re at a real inflection point about what our society is going to look like and how technology is going to impact that. And we have an opportunity to shape that, and we are at risk of missing that opportunity. And I have seen how progressive champions are able to make a huge difference, and I want to be one of those people.

You mentioned in there that you don’t think that the federal government is going to come save us with AI regulation. One of the candidates in NY-12 is trying to be the face of the federal government coming in to save us with AI. Is it that you’re not optimistic that Alex Bores is going to win this race? Or do you think even if he does win, that’s not going to spur an amazing federal regulation framework that will save us in your terms?

I would say more the latter. Having someone in the federal government who will be speaking up about it and keeping it on people’s minds, I think, could be important. But we have such a dysfunctional Congress, and especially with the Senate filibuster and the current federal administration. I’m really pessimistic at the moment about doing anything important. We’ve seen how much the AI industry has captured this administration, and has pushed through an executive order and attempted to push through legislation preempting state regulation of AI. And at the very least, until this administration changes, I don’t see much hope. Now I assume what Alex is hoping to do is put himself into a position where when the administration changes, maybe there’s an opening. I think that as long as there’s a Senate filibuster, I’m still pretty pessimistic. But with a friendly administration, something might happen. I don’t think we can wait three years. I think things are moving really, really quickly, and within three years there’s going to be a lot of changes.

You were involved with the RAISE Act as you say. One naive response to that bill might be: “Good news! We passed this landmark bill. We have this very strong AI regulation in New York State. And so the box has been checked and we can focus on other things.” I take it that’s not your perspective on this issue.

Definitely not. So when we started off, I talked about sort of the different categories of risks of AI when, you know, went through privacy, civil rights, misinformation, education, environment, yeah, they can go on forever. But this only dealt with one of them, which is the catastrophic risks. It doesn’t deal with most of the concerns at all. Even within the catastrophic risks, it’s sort of a bare minimum. All it requires is these companies to create safety plans and file them with the Attorney General. It doesn’t require, for example, pre-development or even pre-deployment audits. It doesn’t have strong whistleblower protections. The damages are pretty minimal. So there’s a lot of room to grow in terms of AI safety. I actually thought when this bill went through that it was going to be a no-brainer. I was shocked at how much resistance we faced trying to get the governor to sign it. I really thought this was a bare minimum bill that we could all agree on. I didn’t even think the tech companies were going to fight it because I thought it was so milquetoast in terms of filing a safety plan.

So wait, can you elaborate on that? Both, just give us like a bare bones: What does the RAISE Act do? And maybe not that bare bones, get a little bit nerdy, get specific. And then tell us about specifically your involvement in the advocacy journey and fighting to get it across the finish line.

I mean, the core of the RAISE Act is basically don’t, if you’re, it applies only to frontier AI models. These are the big massive companies, the OpenAIs, ChatGPT, the Anthropic Clouds. It says don’t deploy a model that is going to kill a lot of people or cause huge amounts of damage. And file safety plans with the Attorney General to show that you’ve thought about these problems and that your system’s not going to do that. And if you don’t comply with all of this, you know, the AG can come after you and you can be fined.

What’s an example of a safety test?

One risk is what if someone logs on to ChatGPT and says, Help me develop a novel biological weapon that’s going to kill a million people. We really don’t want ChatGPT to give a good answer to that question, right? And so you want OpenAI to have made sure that ChatGPT is not going to answer that question. And there’s a lot of things you could imagine them doing to make sure it doesn’t. And the bill itself doesn’t lay out in detail what steps those are. but they have to file what they did, the safety plan that they have and they put in place with the Attorney General. So the idea is for these companies to take some responsibility for the products they’re putting out.

So why are they objecting to such a common sense policy?

They do not want to slow down. It’s obviously very convenient to believe something that’s very profitable to you, which is that the faster we build these systems, the faster these systems can help people, and the faster people’s lives will be made better.

And so how does that manifest specifically in Albany when you’re fighting over a state law?

It means that Tech NYC will come in and spend millions of dollars trying to hire people and put out ads convincing, for example, the governor not to sign the RAISE Act or trying to stop Alex Bores from getting elected to Congress after he succeeds in passing the RAISE Act. And part of it is money and part of it is expertise, which is I think something people miss, which is, you know, I can go up to Albany and tell people about the privacy risks related to big tech, and then I come back to New York City to do my job, and Tech NYC sends in a fleet of lobbyists with a lot of expertise on how technology works, explaining to the legislature why we don’t need to do anything or why proposals are bad. I don’t, I’m not there, so I can’t respond. And I think part of the reason the RAISE Act was successful is because Alex did have that expertise, and every time they sent a lobbyist down, Alex could counter the narrative and was very successful at it. Unfortunately, we won’t have him after this year.

Couldn’t you hire someone, like a staffer? I mean, normally, either that’s someone who is in someone’s office or that’s another group, right? There are advocacy groups with built-in experts to counter other advocacy groups with built-in experts. Why does it need to be the elected official specifically?

It doesn’t need to be the elected official specifically. If there were as much money in the slow-this-down space as there were in the speed-this-up space, it wouldn’t be so important, because you could have a battle of the expert lobbyists. The fact that there’s so much more money on the side of build-it than don’t-build-it is why this is a problem. And elected officials personally just have a dramatically outsized voice, more so than any staffer or any lobbyist. And a few well-placed elected officials have the ability to take on a lot of money’s worth of lobbyists. But an organization like I worked at the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, as a small non-profit organization, we would do half a dozen Albany trips a year and would be emailing legislators every day for meetings. We can’t compete with Tech NYC.

Is there a solution here where, you know, because Alex specifically is getting a ton of money from PACs that are aligned with Anthropic, which I think is at least nominally a little bit more Team Slow-It-Down. You know, now there’s this crypto billionaire who’s very excited about Alex and is giving him money. Do you have hope that in the future, in New York State specifically and in general, that Team Slow It Down will put together the amount of money and the organizational resources to make this a fair fight?

I wouldn’t run if I didn’t have hope. I’m running specifically because I think we can build a society that works for New Yorkers. If I thought that AI dystopia was inevitable, I wouldn’t be up here talking about it.

I guess I more meant specifically about the organizational mismatch though. Like right now it seems like what you’re saying is that we need a heroic knowledgeable elected official to fight back against all this money.

We need a lot of things. One person can do a lot of good, but I’m not, I’m always skeptical of the hero narrative. You know, Alex Bores did a lot, but he had a whole group of folks with him. You know, he had the sort of team Anthropic and the team slow-it-down money behind him. plus himself, plus a bunch of nonprofits and advocacy organizations like STOP, and collectively, we were able to beat back big tech. It’s gonna be a team effort. So you need some, I believe you need at least one person in the legislature who be the face within the legislature for it. It doesn’t have to be just one, preferably it’ll be more, but that person can’t do it alone. It’s sort of like a necessary but not sufficient condition.

Taking a step back, generally, when you’re working in the state legislature, you mentioned one thing that made Alex effective was that he had specific subject matter expertise on this issue. A big part of his candidacy in this race is that he brags about being voted one of the most effective legislators in the country. He told some reporters earlier this week that he passed many more bills than Micah Lasher did, and that was a sign that he was more effective.

What makes an elected official effective, specifically an Albany state legislator? And both, I guess maybe it’s a two-parter, but both in terms of Alex and Micah and how effective they are, and then also in terms of yourself and how effective you hope to be.

I think the first thing I want to say is that Alex is bragging correctly. He is an extraordinarily effective legislator, given how junior he is. For the RAISE Act, I think his expertise was absolutely necessary. But one thing that’s been impressive about him is his ability to find areas with less resistance and push there and take advantage of opportunities. So he’s done work on court reform. He’s not even a lawyer. but he’s listened to people who are, understands that there’s a need, understands that there isn’t organized opposition in the same way as there is big tech, and managed to get important bills through. And this has been through a bunch of different subject matters that he knows a varying amount about.

And so, again, expertise is useful, but it’s not necessarily necessary to be effective. And I’ll say, Being effective requires a lot of different things. Alex has a lot of these skills, one of which is being able to figure out where the opportunity is. Another is being willing to compromise. Another thing is sort of being a smart negotiator in terms of figuring out how to get what you need with upsetting the fewest number of people, where you can safely give and where you can take. Now they’re just being a really hard worker. Alex is absolutely all of those things. I think Micah is, in some ways, cut from a similar cloth. Smart, serious, hardworking. And actually, given how junior he is, I think he’s also pretty effective. Alex has been, I think, uniquely effective. But I respect both of them in terms of being competent legislators.

Okay, and brag about yourself a little bit. Tell us about why you’re going to be the most effective option of the people who are running.

Yeah, I guess the first thing I want to say is there are often, legislators tend to paint themselves in one of two ways. One is sort of the champion of the values, and one is to get it done. And there are legislators who are such necessary voices for causes that are unpopular among powerful people, and they use those voices extremely effectively, and they’re sometimes punished for it, and they don’t pass as many bills. And I have a lot of respect for that category of legislator that really sticks to their values and can express it in a positive way.

Can you give us an example of someone…

Instead of getting a name, I’ll just say, it is relatively common in the DSA space to have a legislator who’s really vocal and then winds up punished for being vocal.

I think on the flip side, you see a lot of legislators who play the inside game well, are more complimentary to people in power, but then do it in order to pass more bills. I tend to judge those people based on whether they’ve actually succeeded in passing good bills that really help people, it’s very easy to convince yourself that you’re in that category and then not actually get that much important stuff done. That’s the majority of people in that group, but I’ll say Brad Hoylman-Sigal is an example of someone who really got a ton done. He was not a flamethrower, but he got a lot of just an enormous amount of really important bills through.

But there’s a whole lot of people that don’t do very much at all and really kind of fall into neither category. There are very few people that manage to do both, and those are the people that I really respect as legislators. One example would be Julius Salvazar in the Senate or Jessica Gonzalez-Rojas in the Assembly. They’re both really good at standing up for what’s right. And they haven’t done it in a way that’s compromised their effectiveness. Both of them have gotten really, really significant progressive legislation through. And so I would like to model myself after people like that. And I think I’m probably, because I’m not in the legislature, I’m known for being a vocal advocate for civil rights, for privacy, and speaking my mind on that stuff. But I think it’s all, I can give an example of my working within the system to get stuff done. I’ll tell the long story and feel free to cut it into a shorter story.

We love long stories.

So we had proposed amendments to the POST Act, which would have required increased disclosure obligations on behalf of NYPD to disclose the surveillance technologies they use. NYPD testified and said, oh, we can’t pass this bill, because if we have to do a new report every time we have a distinct surveillance technology, that means when we upgrade our camera from the 2024 version to the 2026 version, we have to do a whole new notice and comment process. It’ll take us forever. It’ll produce all this paperwork. I’m in court the next day suing NYPD to try to get documents from them. And their lawyer comes up to me and says, “hey, I talked to the deputy commissioner and we’d like to try to work something out in this bill.”

And I proceeded to sit down with NYPD’s policy lawyers over a course of a year, just about, hammering out the details of the language of this bill. And they would go to the higher ups, and I would go to the civil rights organizations, the privacy organizations, the public defender organizations, say, what do we think of this? They would do the same. We’d come back and say, OK, well, we’ve got to tweak this. It took about a year. In fact, we had to go through, we got approval from three different NYPD commissioners because they kept on getting fired or resigning in disgrace. But finally, Jessica Tisch signed off, and NYCLU signed off, and Legal Aid signed off, and Brennan Center signed off, and STOP signed off, and we all came to language and passed the city council, and it was signed by Eric Adams. So, you know, even...

Sorry, can you describe in one sentence what that bill did?

It did a whole lot of things in terms of the disclosure obligations and the record keeping obligations about NYPD with respect to their surveillance technology and the data storage and sharing and stuff. But the premier thing it did is it said, you can’t just have an IUP on cameras and fold in robots and drones and pole cameras and dashboard cameras. And you have to, every time it’s a distinct technology with a different function, you need to have a separate IUP about it.

But I think the upshot of all of it is that even if there’s an organization that you’re suing all the time and you disagree with, if you go in and negotiate in good faith, good things can happen. Now, it doesn’t always happen. It really depends on having a good faith negotiating partner on the other side of the table. And there have been plenty of times when I didn’t feel like I had that. But when you do feel like you have that, then I think you can make important progress and be effective.

What is your agenda moving forward for policing reform? Or if you want to talk more generally about criminal legal reform. We had Eli Northrup on and he was talking a lot about bail and discovery. What is your perspective on those issues in the next legislative session?

Eli and I agree a lot. We’ve been part of a lot of coalitions together and work together on a lot of things. I agree with Eli on bail and discovery issues. He tends to know a little bit more about them than I do because he’s been a public defender and he’s seen them on the ground, whereas I just hang out with public defenders and have studied it. I tend to know a little bit more about the privacy and surveillance components to it. So where my comparative expertise is on things like, how do we feel about law enforcement using fake social media profiles to trick kids into giving up their data? How do we feel about law enforcement trotting out cell site simulators to protests to harvest identities and datas of people’s cell phones that are in the area? How do we feel about facial recognition?

On this podcast, we feel bad about all of those things.

Then we are of like mind. So those are things that I know comparatively more about. I think assuming Eli and I both win, we will be pushing for a lot of each other’s priorities.

Another thing you and Eli Northrup have in common is you both have the endorsement of Our Revolution, the advocacy organization that sprung out of the 2016 Bernie Sanders presidential campaign. Separately, Bernie Sanders endorsed a whole list of state legislative candidates across the country Eli Northrup and your colleague Jessica Gonzalez-Rojas made that list. You did not.

So you are in the illustrious group of people who are endorsed by our evolution, but not Bernie Sanders himself. The one reason, I mean, that’s just a bizarre thing in general, but Alex Bores also has that distinction. And a lot of people in this district are kind of puzzled through what that means. Is that a credential of how progressive they are, or is that a credential of knowing someone in the right place? Help us understand this.

I wish I could help you understand this. This is my first time running for office. I had helped friends who had run with their questionnaires before, but I’d never been through endorsement processes before. And they are so opaque. And sometimes you have a friend on the inside, and that is helpful for getting the endorsement, but it’s also helpful for figuring out what’s happening on the inside. And if you don’t have a friend on the inside, you just have no clue.

So Our Revolution, I earned that endorsement without a personal inside connection. I have no idea how I got that endorsement. except that I think that I share a lot of values with them and have done a lot of work for causes that they believe in. But in terms of the politics of it, the policy I understand, but the politics I don’t.

Alex and I disagree on policy a lot. You know, we align on AI safety, but I think he’d be the first to say that I’m more progressive than he is on criminal legal reform things, for example. So it’s a good example of being able to work with people you don’t agree with on every issue. I don’t have any reason to think that Alex is more conservative than Micah Lasher, for example. I think both of them have been pretty moderate on sort of the hot button progressive issues in some ways.

Can I push you on that? Is there any bit of daylight that you would want to highlight in terms of left versus right, more progressive? Is there an issue where one of them has been more of an ally to something you’ve worked on?

The only major one is the tech stuff, where Alex has been a real ally on the tech issues. But on the other ones, I’m sure that the two of them could tell you differences, but as someone who’s just an advocate trying to get them to sign onto bills, I think I got each of them to sign onto some bills and not other bills, and I didn’t have a, outside of the AI safety tech regulation stuff, I didn’t, especially when it came to the more criminal legal stuff, I didn’t get a sense that there was a huge amount of daylight.

I mean, I’m not sure they could tell us differences. I’ve heard many reporters try to get them to say differences and they’re pretty buttoned up on it.

Yeah. So I do think I have different politics and policies than both of those people. And in respect to Bernie Sanders, I had no idea who was even going to endorse. So if there was an endorsement process, if there was an application I was supposed to do, I certainly missed the memo on it. I suspect that there wasn’t. So I have no idea how Bernie made his decisions in terms of who he was going to endorse.

I will also say that in my assembly district, this isn’t, this isn’t Southwest Queens, this isn’t Northwest Brooklyn. I think I have values that align with the district, which I always say is more of the like Elizabeth Warren/Brad Lander than it is either the, you know, Joe Biden/Kathy Hochul, or the Bernie Sanders/Zohran Mamdani lane. The way that power is currently distributed in Albany, more often than not, way more often than not, I wind up on the same side as DSA pulling to make things more progressive. whether that be on the budget, on criminal legal reform stuff, or on any other issue. But I do think that there’s a more fundamentally philosophical difference that I have with, for example, Bernie Sanders that may be a reason that he didn’t go with me.

Do you feel like you’re the most progressive candidate in your race though?

I feel that way, though maybe the other candidates would say otherwise. And I will also say, there is a candidate specifically running as the moderate candidate, but of the people considered the leading contenders, I think all of us would probably identify within that, like Elizabeth Warren/Brad Lander lane. So while I feel like I’m the most progressive and I don’t want to cast anyone as a conservative or whatever, I don’t think that would be fair to most of the people running.

Talk to me a little bit about the person that, talk to me a little bit about the person that you’re replacing, Deborah Glick. She’s obviously a legendary person who’s been in this office for decades. Do you see yourself as her logical successor, like the baton is passed and you’re going to pick up where she left off?

I have a lot of respect for Deborah Glick. Not only was she the first openly gay elected government person in New York, She’s been, for 36 years, completely incorruptible. 36 years in office, and there’s no amount of money you could offer that would get her off of her values. And I think that’s one of the most important traits in a government official, the way that I don’t think that power has-- you know, power rots people’s brains in a real way, and I don’t think that’s happened to her in 36 years, which is impressive.

There’s also frustrating parts of that too, which is when I try to get her to sign on progressive bills and I come in with members of the community to sit down and talk with her about progressive bills, if she doesn’t feel like that aligns with her instinctive values or whatever, she will also not get a move for us. which obviously it’s frustrating as an advocate. I view myself as more progressive than she is, and I think that I have a record of that, especially on the criminal legal reform space. Which is not to say that she’s conservative or anything like that, but there’s some concrete areas where she just has not been, she hasn’t signed onto bills, or if she has, she hasn’t been champions on bills. And so I do think I would do things differently. I think that she is someone who works within the system type of person. And there are benefits to that, and I would hope to take advantage of those benefits, but I want to be a progressive champion in a very specific way that I think would be different than how she’s done things.

The one policy area that I want to just briefly dig into that we haven’t touched on yet is housing. This is obviously something that everyone’s obsessed with in your district in particular and all over the city. I’ve heard you talk about this Housing Access Voucher Program. Tell us about that.

Relatively simple. The Housing Access Voucher Program is very similar to the federal Section 8 program. It’s a state program to give vouchers to people who are in roughly the bottom quarter or so of income earners. to cap their rents at 30%, I believe, of their income. Would be a super important way to have comparatively low-income people be able to afford to stay in their homes, especially in New York City as it gets more expensive.

We have funded it at $50 million statewide. Obviously, it’s not even worth talking about, really, at the current amount. Obviously, good that we’ve gotten it off the ground. But we need actually to fund it. And I think there’s a push this year to fund it at $250 million. And I don’t know whether that’s going to be in the budget or not. I have no idea. I think even $500 million or $1 billion would probably be able to meaningfully change the way the city works for lower-income people and the state works for low-income people. So I believe that vouchers have to be a really big part of the solution to the housing crisis.

The standard neoliberal or YIMBY or market-oriented response to a program like that would label it pejoratively as “subsidizing demand.” Democrats are really good at subsidizing demand and giving people money so they can buy something. But as long as supply is restricted, that has both a limited amount of upside and also has an exacerbating effect on the part of the demand that isn’t subsidized as long as supply remains constricted. This is the narrative. If Ezra Klein were in this room, he would say something similar to that.

Do you see a supply-side solution specifically in the 66th district as part of your vision? Are you excited by opportunities to build a lot more market rate or mixed income housing? Or do you want to push back on that neoliberal narrative and say that actually, vouchers are really important and there’s something that Ezra Klein gets wrong about this?

I do want to push back on the neoliberal narrative in a few different ways. There’s some things that are right about it. One thing that’s right is that there’s a limit. You’re not going to fully solve this problem with vouchers. That’s one thing that’s correct. I think that the exacerbating effects are exaggerated. I don’t think that the evidence actually shows that vouchers have very serious exacerbating effects. I agree that supply statewide needs to be part of a solution. There are more people that want to live in New York than there’s housing in New York. And if we don’t do something about that, there’s only so much that we can fight the market.

But I find a lot of the details to be missed. A lot of economic analyses are directional. but they don’t do a good job in engaging with the extent of the impact. So for example, I think building more housing, market rate housing, in neighborhoods where everyday working New Yorkers can afford market housing is really important. The impacts are very tangible and immediate. Some of the classic YIMBY ideas of getting rid of parking requirements, getting rid of single-family zoning near train stations or whatever, I think are no-brainers. The idea that we should have, by and large, building up to six-story buildings in most places seems sort of like a no-brainer to me.

The difference, I will say, is that building market rate housing in Assembly District 66 or some of the nearby areas, 100% of market rate housing is luxury housing. The YIMBY’s data on this is shoddy. The data I’ve seen says something like, building luxury housing reduces rents for working people. And the numbers I’ve seen is a 10% increase in housing yields a 1% reduction in rental prices. So maybe they got the directionality here, but the major effect of building more market rate housing in the Village is you’re making developers rich and you’re making quality of life in the Village worse.

Talk to me more about the second part.

Yeah, I mean, there’s a reason that people are NIMBYs, right? People are NIMBYs because construction is annoying, tall buildings are annoying, people like the character of their neighborhoods, things change when big buildings come in. And can we shape all of our policies based on these things? No, we can’t just say no construction because it’s annoying to the neighbors. But if we’re not actually getting tangible benefits for the city, we’re just making developers rich and annoying people who live somewhere. I don’t see a reason that we should be doing, there’s no benefit to it.

One benefit could be that you’re paying property taxes on those new apartments, and that just helps the city’s tax base.

The amount of additional property taxes is really small, and a lot of it is avoided by various tax schemes. You could change those laws.

This sort of makes me a Yes in Your Backyard person. The way I get around just being yes in your backyard, not in my backyard, is that there’s a huge need for affordable housing in the 66th Assembly District. Building market rate housing in the 66th Assembly District is not going to help the 66th Assembly District or I think the rest of the city.

That would be the other case. Okay, so maybe property tax is marginal, but you can negotiate and convince these developers to...

So this is where I’m going. We have a situation in the Village right now, where by and large, there are two types of people who live here. People who are over 65, who bought in forever ago and owned their units, or people who have some sort of rent regulation, rent stabilization, SCRIE, whatever it is. Or you have people who are 25 to 35, who work in tech or finance or whatever, and then leave as soon as they have a kid. That’s not good for our neighborhood. And it’s a product of the housing market. And I live in Lower Manhattan because I value the diversity of people and culture that Lower Manhattan has historically had, and that is being priced out.

I do not view “don’t change anything” as viable. I view that as something extremely harmful to our neighborhood. And so the question is, how do we allow people to afford to live in a Village. And building more market rate units I don’t think is going to be able to do that. Building more affordable units absolutely will. And those can’t just be “affordable”, they need to be permanently, deeply affordable units, preferably accessible as well.

How do we get that built? There’s a lot of different ways you can get that built. You can do it, Emily Gallagher’s Social Housing Development Authority. Social housing has been super effective in Lower Manhattan, especially in the 60s. We built Westbeth, we built Mitchell-Lamas. We haven’t done that really since the 70s. I think we could do more of that.

But we need more housing than is going to be able to be purchased directly by the state government. And so we are absolutely going to have to work with private developers to build affordable housing. And what that means is that we’re going to have to let them build some luxury units in order to get them to build affordable units. Now, my vision of this has always been, the Village has this extremely valuable commodity: air rights. And every bit of air right is gold to developers. And we have to figure out how much those air rights are worth, and we need to make sure that they pay for those air rights. And the way they pay for those air rights is in affordable housing.

It’s one thing if you’re in the middle of a historic district, there’s a lot of AD 66 that’s not a historic district, where we can build a building that’s taller than six stories. And right now we have a building plan that’s 40 stories in the Village, which is 100% affordable. And I’m in support of it. We’re not going to get all 100% affordable buildings, but we’re going to have to build some taller buildings in some parts of lower Manhattan. We are going to need to get real quantities of deeply affordable housing in those buildings. It’s the only viable way to keep the Village affordable, to the types of diverse people we want in the Village.

So I’m not someone who opposes construction in lower Manhattan. I’m someone who wants developers to pay for the public good that we’re giving them, which is the air rights. And I’m someone who does not believe that giving those air rights away for free is going to result in meaningful trickle-down benefits of rent reductions across the city.

Thank you so much for making the time. Our final question, we really do hope to get Micah and Alex and the rest of the candidates on this podcast. We’re still working on that. When we get them, what’s one question you think we should ask?

I mean, I want you to ask each of them to name two issues they disagree with the other one about. I think that would be really good.

And I guess the other question I would ask is, why are you going to be the one that’s going to be Jack Schlossberg? Because it’s not a ranked choice race, and if you’re worried about Jack Schlossberg being the leading candidate as someone who wants someone with more on the ground experience, and you’re deciding between Micah and Alex, figuring out which one’s more likely, I think may be relevant.

Well, thank you so much for coming on. We really appreciate it.

Thanks for having me.

“What I would do,” Zohran Mamdani, then an upstart two-term Assemblymember running a long-shot bid for mayor that was polling below the margin of error, told the New York Editorial Board in February of last year, “is to stop playing these kinds of budget games and to make it clear to New Yorkers that they need not expend hours of labor, of time, of anxiety towards fighting for an amount of money they’ve been told is the maximum they could win, when in fact, there is a far larger pot.” Under a Mamdani administration, there would be no need for Eric Adams’s annual budgeting chicanery, because we would raise a lot more revenue through expanded progressive taxation, and then use it on big, memetic projects that meaningfully affected the lives of everyday New Yorkers.

“I believe there are enormous savings that can be had in the city budget,” then-presumptive City Council Speaker Julie Menin told the same New York Editorial Board eleven months later. “Enormous areas of potential savings. I outlined a few of them: the no-bid contracts, the healthcare savings….” Past City Councils had been too generous and indiscriminate about awarding big no-bid contracts, and insufficiently focused on auditing spending and preventing fraud and abuse, but this would all change under a Menin-led Council. Under her responsible, savvy leadership, we’d run such a tight ship that we’d have extra money lying around for new projects (Fair Fares expansion! Social programs for poor kids!), and we’d never have to deal with annual budget crises.

You can pit these visions against each other if you want to, and label one “left-wing” or “socialist,” and label the other “moderate” or “neoliberal” or “boring.” But you can also view them as complimentary tendencies, which are both necessary for effective government. That’s certainly how Mamdani and Menin talk about them. “As someone who is very passionate about public goods, I think that we on the left have to be equally passionate about public excellence,” Mamdani told Derek Thompson last June, on the need to spend government funds more efficiently. “I find these labels to be sort-of a false narrative in the sense that I have done progressive things: paid sick leave, living wage…” Menin promised. If you want to accomplish big things in a city budget, you want to be able to find new sources of revenue, and you want to identify ways to save money by cutting down on waste and fraud. And you would imagine that you need both if you are trying to close a $7 billion emergency budget gap.

But you’d be wrong! This week, Mamdani and Menin announced that they had successfully closed that gap without significant new revenue or savings. It turns out you can do it all through other forms of budgeting dark magic. Here’s how they did it:

1. Giant influx of aid from state government

Having already thrown in $1.5 billion to shrink the gap from $7 billion to $5.5 billion, Governor Kathy Hochul agreed to throw in a lot more to close the gap entirely. The exact amount of additional aid from Albany is subject to the hall-of-mirrors, choose-your-own-adventure quality of NYC budget math. NBC News is calling it $4 billion, Vital City thinks it’s “about $3 billion,” and Mamdani’s official presentation labelled only $352 million of “direct aid” vs. $3.5 billion of “state authorization.” Whatever the number is, it makes up the majority of the now-filled gap, so much so that Vital City’s Paul Francis gave his piece the snarky headline “Call It What It Is: A State Bailout of New York City.”

To counter-editorialize for a second, this is good! The state is flush with cash right now, and it’s mostly cash from New York City taxpayers and businesses. The state is bailing out the city in the same way that Yankees owner Hank Steinbrenner is bailing out Aaron Judge when he pays his salary. When you have a massive star generating an insane amount of value for you, it’s not altruistic to pay them a (relatively small) portion of that value.

2. Relaxation of upcoming obligations

The State Government has also given Mamdani license to spend a lot less than they are nominally legally required to spend on programs like CityFHEPS (discussed at length in my last blog) and the “Carter Cases” that compensate public school students with unmet special education needs. The city will also save some money from a slightly looser implementation of the state class-size mandate. This is basically “last-in-first-out” budgeting, making cuts to the most recent program expansions, like laying off the employees with the shortest tenures. It’s an arbitrary heuristic, but it solves a lot of political problems (older programs have more entrenched constituencies). Together, these are worth about a billion dollars towards the gap, again depending on who is measuring.

3. Accounting magic!

Three weeks ago, the New York Times’s Sally Goldenberg reported that Mamdani was considering “pension restructuring” to fill the budget gap. Fiscal watchdogs like the Citizens Budget Commission’s Andrew Rein found this extremely ominous, because delaying pension obligations is the municipal budget equivalent of racking up credit card debt, permanently devastating your long-term financial future in order to prop up unsustainable present-day spending.

Happily, this is not exactly what Mamdani is doing. Instead, he’s adjusting the “amortization schedule,” a 20-year payment plan the city agreed to in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. Basically, the city took out a giant loan to meet their pension obligations, and then bizarrely, agreed to make extremely high payments towards that loan until 2032, and then start receiving a portion of those payments back from 2033 on. Under the new restructuring, they will make lower payments until 2033, and then make (smaller) payments moving forward instead of receiving money back. Basically, as shown in the graph below, we’re smoothing our repayment schedule into a more sensible, flat shape. Fiscal alarmist Comptroller Mark Levine gave this decision his blessing, telling the Times that it made sense to avoid “the big cliff in 2032.”

Moving from the blue line in the above graph to the green line will save the city a full $2 billion over the next two years. And it will not affect actual pensions, because this is a repayment plan for a loan, not the pension accounts themselves. It is admittedly pretty cool when you can save billions of dollars without changing anything or having any real-world impact.

4. Yes, yes, fine, a nominal amount of new revenue and some very speculative savings.

The city will generate about $500 million from the brand new pied a-terre tax on second homes worth more than $5 million. And the Mamdani comms team wants to make sure you hear as much about it as possible! The city will also aim to save $1.47 billion through boring technical adjustments to things like office space, workforce software, and other “efficiency improvements.” Here is the extremely aspirational slide from Tuesday’s budget presentation.

The numbers give this slide a sheen of precision that it frankly does not deserve. The city has not done any of these things. If we actually do them, we can expect to save money, and these numbers represent best guesses for how much money we (hope) to save, compared to an unknown and unknowable baseline. I too would like to save outrageous sums by pledging to spend “more efficiently” or “improve financial management.” And indeed, as best as I can tell, these aspirational savings do not actually count towards closing the gap. Which is fine, because the state funding covers it.

II.

In a vacuum, this is pretty impressive work from Mamdani and Menin. An Adams or Cuomo administration would have taken the opportunity to implement blunt austerity measures on their least favorite initiatives, and then moved on. But there will be budget gaps in the future (the 2028 gap now projects to be especially gnarly), and many of these tricks, like the pension amortization restructuring, are not repeatable. And there’s a bigger question. Shouldn’t Mamdani and Menin, who ran on increasing revenue and cutting waste, be able to actually do that? Especially at the beginning of their term when their political capital is supposedly at its apex?

This year, the answer is no. They can’t raise income taxes, because Kathy Hochul thinks that might cause capital flight, and there aren’t enough progressive state legislators to pressure her to change her mind. They can’t add a toll to the state’s Pass Through Entity Tax, because that would infringe on hedge fund partners’s god-given right to an uncapped State and Local Tax Deduction (while the plebeians who make W-2 income are capped at $40k). They can’t raise property taxes, because the city’s property tax system disproportionately burdens small apartment buildings in working-class Black neighborhoods, and no one wants rents to go up there. And they can’t reform the property tax system to make it more equitable (something Mamdani explicitly ran on last year), because that would increase property taxes on townhouses in Park Slope and Brooklyn Heights, neighborhoods that voted for Mamdani by 50 points last year.

They can’t raise revenue in other ways either. They can’t expand metered parking spots in dense parts of Upper Manhattan (“It’s not a no,” Deputy Mayor Dean Fulihan said in March, but no one has mentioned it since), because that would provoke the ire of the incredibly well-organized Manhattan car owners, who feel entitled to free plots of public land for their Subaru Foresters. They can’t add a tax on the expansion of Waymo’s lifesaving autonomous taxi pilot, because Kathy Hochul killed that pilot when human taxi drivers (and their predatory medallion owners) protested. They can’t build new mixed-income housing on publicly-owned, incredibly valuable land, because you need eight kinds of community input to do that and the community inevitably does not want new mixed-income housing.

And they can’t save money. They can’t cut overtime, or any other part of the $6 billion NYPD budget, because that might make Commissioner Jessica Tisch quit, and without her fearless, savvy leadership, the city would plunge back into a crime-ridden 1970s hellscape. They can’t merge public schools with dwindling enrollment to save on overhead, because as City Council Finance Chair Linda Lee told Ben Max last month, it’s very irresponsible to do that without getting substantial feedback from the community first (and you’ll never guess what feedback the local community gives about closing their local public school). They can’t wean themselves off billion-dollar no-bid contracts to provide shelter beds for homeless people, because it’s prohibitively expensive and politically impossible to build and operate those beds in house.

“For too long,” Mamdani liked to say on the campaign trail, “New Yorkers have been encouraged to imagine less.” He promised to change that, telling supporters in Forest Hills Stadium that they “deserve a city government as ambitious as the working New Yorkers who make it the greatest city in the world.”

But a mayor, on his own, cannot make a city government more ambitious. There are too many legal and political constraints. So far, all he and Speaker Menin have accomplished is a series of desperate, hail-mary, unrepeatable maneuvers to preserve the status quo, and freeze the 2023 budget in amber. Ambitious working New Yorkers should be encouraged to imagine more than that.

All right, Scott Stringer, thank you so much for coming on the podcast.

Eli, it’s great to be with you this morning.

Thank you so much. I want to start by asking you about Jerry Nadler, who I know you’ve had a long relationship with. What is it about the congressman that’s made him such a beloved and successful representative of this neighborhood for the past 30 years? And I’m curious about both leadership traits and skills and abilities that he specifically has, but also about the political culture of the Upper West Side that you think has supported and enabled him to be the leader that he’s been.

Well, first of all, I met Jerry Nadler when I was a teenager, and ended up working for him at the ripe old age of 20 years old when he was a State Assemblyman at the district office on West 72nd Street, way back in the day. And what always struck me about Jerry was two things.

First, unbelievable integrity. A true reform Democrat taught me very on about right and wrong in politics and government, but also about how to make decisions that are yours. He taught me at an early age, don’t play to the crowd. stake out your own position, which means you have to read and learn and talk to people. And honestly, those early day lessons stayed with me for my entire life.

And part of what I think Jerry brings out is not just being about himself, but he really brought to the forefront on the West Side over many decades, a generation of young people who wanted to get involved in politics, progressive Democrats, liberal Democrats, thinking Democrats. And I was part of that young crew, and some went on to do some very great things in the private sector, the public sector. There was a group of us that ended up running for office. I succeeded Jerry in the Assembly, ran his congressional campaign, so he picked a good one early on. And he has been just a legend in this community for all the right reasons.

That’s super interesting what you’re saying about finding your own stance and not going with the crowd. Because on one hand, this is a place where people seem to really care about civil rights and social justice and inequality. It’s an incredibly progressive district. It’s also very wealthy, and over the past 30 years, it’s become more so. It skews older. At least today, it doesn’t have the demographic profile of a district that you’d associate with being on the progressive side, and yet it has a long history of being progressive.

In your 30 years of public service, what was it like navigating those two dynamics where people both care a lot about social justice, but also have material interests that might run counter to that at certain moments? Were there times where those things ran into conflict for you and how did you negotiate that?

Well, look, you know, I really got my start in a congressional campaign when I was in 6th grade for my cousin, Bella Abzug, who was a world-famous progressive member of the House, upset the political establishment, and represented the Upper West Side. And even doing walking tours of Zabar’s in the 1970s, it wasn’t always a quote-unquote wealthy district. It was a very diverse district. You had people living in single-room occupancy hotels that we were fighting to protect from from speculators who were trying to tear down those buildings and evict those tenants. Every organized protest happened at 72nd Street in Verde Square, whether it was to end the war in Vietnam, to all the other social justice and civil rights struggles.

And as the district did get wealthier, yes, there was a certain shift from being the super progressive district, but not so much. If you look at the people who ran for office after Bella Abzug, you had Ted Weiss, you had Jerry Nadler. I got elected to the Assembly. There were various different elected officials, and we all had this basic fundamental belief that government could benefit working people, that government was there to help, not hinder people who were struggling. I think that’s the rich tradition of this district. I think it’s very true today at this moment where we’re conjuring the Trump administration, ICE, and all the challenges that we face. I think this district has always been, and probably will be for the next generation, the epicenter of what reform democratic politics is about.

Yeah. So reform democratic politics, can you contextualize that from when you started out in 1992? What did it mean, what were the key fights that you were pitching in terms of being a reformer?

Well, look, when I got elected to the Assembly, legislators didn’t have to be present on the Assembly floor to vote. And the Brennan Center for Justice had said that In their analysis, the New York State Legislature was the first or second most dysfunctional place in the country. And they initiated a number of rules reforms, ending empty seat voting, more committee reforms, votes coming to the floor. And I was the legislator that agreed to sponsor this very radical bill, which would essentially end the golf games on Tuesday and force everybody to vote on Mondays.

Were there literally golf games on Tuesday?

Oh yeah, no, you swipe a card and you’re gone for the day. And there was literally no one sitting in their seats. The success that I had was we actually didn’t just propose a bunch of rules reform that fell flat, but we actually convinced the leadership at the time to initiate these reforms that went for many, many years. Then the assembly went back to empty seat voting, and now there’s a call to go back to having members sit in their seats, because if you go into the chamber today, nobody is there, nobody is there, everyone’s voting, in their offices, just having the votes get called. And that was my first reform effort in Albany.

And at the time, I was probably considered the most progressive liberal member of the legislature. I was actually the first legislator, along with the late Senator Franz Leichter, also a West Side legislator, who actually voted to slightly, slightly, slightly raise taxes on people making a little bit more money to deal with the Pataki budget cuts. that didn’t work out so well. But a lot of the work that we did back in the 90s and 2000s, I think, was very significant and sort of a lesson of what’s possible going forward today.

Yeah, I bring that up because when you’re leading that effort, you’re getting people in the assembly to vote against their own personal interests. Obviously, a lot of those representatives are either politically or just personally not interested in making their lives more difficult and exposing themselves to more scrutiny. What is the skill set and the toolbox that you bring to a problem like that, where you’re trying to convince people to do something that they instinctively don’t want to do?

Well, I think the challenge always is you could do it two ways. You could use the bully pulpit, which many people do, But there’s also an inside game there’s sitting down with colleagues and members and working through a lot of initiatives. one thing I will tell you that I learned early on in my first year in the assembly, going back to before fax machines, right? I introduced so many bills. I had the experience. I was 32 years old. I thought I knew everything, right? And so I introduced all these bills and I keep introducing bills. And I just think this job is just for me, right? I mean, I’ve been ready for this. And then at the end of session, I passed two bills because I have not yet understood the skill set of getting bills passed in the Republican state Senate.

So that, to me, was an early life lesson. You can introduce a lot of bills, you can have a lot of great ideas, but there is a skill that you have to develop to actually get things done. And that takes time. And people say to me, well, what were your best years in the assembly? I say, my best years were nine through 13, when I was chair of the city’s committee, when I had really gotten my rhythm down. And I think it’s very important for people who get elected to office to also take the time to maybe spend a little less time today on Twitter or on podcasts, except yours, and really focus on how you can actually accomplish an agenda.

One of the sort of ongoing fights that you pitched during your career was fighting to protect and build new affordable housing in this district, specifically and across the city. When you’re, you know, fighting to build affordable housing on the Upper West Side, what are the dynamics of that? What is the day-to-day of the actual work of that process?

And why is it so difficult? Why is it that right now the Upper West Side lags behind a lot of other neighborhoods in terms of new affordable housing construction?

Well, first of all, the West Side, and I started politically, in addition to work for Jerry Nadler, I was a tenant organizer focusing on the Mitchell-Lama housing program, which I thought was just the greatest housing probably ever constructed in the United States. Homes to hundreds of thousands of units, homes to 400, 500,000 families. If you look at the West Side urban renewal area south of 100 Street, starting at Parkwood’s Village, working your way down to 86th Street, those 20-some-odd buildings really represented the affordable aspirations of thousands of thousands of people. And these folks moved into the West Side in the 50s and 60s and 70s. When they got here, they didn’t just exist. They didn’t just move into an apartment. They brought an activist lifestyle to the neighborhood. They built our schools, the daycare centers, they built our synagogues and churches, I don’t mean physically, but in terms of membership, they created the political life that’s world famous on the upper side. You started out the interview saying, look, there’s only one congressional district in the country that’s quite like this over time. Those folks actually came in and built that.

And we had public housing. Amsterdam Houses, Douglas Houses, Stephen Wise. You look at this district, this multiracial, affordable district, led the way, led the way in terms of affordable housing, middle income housing, housing for the working poor. And that created the vitality of the community. When I became borough president early on, we also started to say, well, how can we replicate this? What’s the way to do this? So just like Mark Levine when he was borough president, did sort of a count of all the opportunities we have to construct new buildings, new construction. I actually partnered with a group called Picture the Homeless, where in those days we didn’t have handheld computers and fancy digital apps, but we literally took out pen and paper and walked the borough of Manhattan looking for places where we could construct this housing.

And then when I became Comptroller, I had a little more heft and I was able to do audits and sort of just look at all the vacant property that the city owned. City owned vacant land. And we said, look, if you took all that vacant land, and I talked about this in the mayoral campaign, you can, with free land, build the next generation of Mitchell-Lama too. You can build affordable housing. And the city has control of that land. We identified 1,000 parcels of land. And I went to de Blasio and said, man, there’s 1,000 vacant property. And of course, it wasn’t his idea, so he didn’t like it. And then they testified somewhere, some of his housing people, and they said, Stringer’s wrong. It’s only 600 vacant parcels of land. And I was like, damn, okay, I’m on to something. 600’s a lot. And to me, the passion has always been, how can you bring Mitchell-Lama to the city? How can you build real, affordable housing? And at the same time, make sure that we maintain the housing that we have. And that has to do with NYCHA public housing.

Right. So, and this connects to the big housing struggle of today, which is that unfortunately, with the money that we currently have, it’s very, very difficult to build at the scale that we need just through the public sector. We do, in NYCHA, for example, need private investment to do some of these like RAD-PACT programs.

And even on some of the publicly-owned land. One project that we’ve been obsessed with on this podcast is the Bloomingdale Library on 100th and Amsterdam. They’re going to build this big building that’s going to be market rate housing, and then, you know, 30% of it or something is going to be affordable.

If you, in 2010, said, let the private industry build tall buildings full of market rate apartments in dense neighborhoods, that would not have scanned as a progressive position. That would have been something that I think a lot of people in the neighborhood would be like, “what are you talking about? These developers are evil. These buildings are ugly.”

So has your perspective changed on the need for specifically more market rate housing units? And do you think that there’s a gap between where the neighborhood is on that issue and where you think we need to be?

Oh, look, my position really hasn’t changed. I’ve always believed that we do need more density. We do need more housing construction. That’s why the first thing I did as borough president was go find the places where we could build and build so that we can meet the housing crisis needs that young people are feeling. Look, the more we build, the more we will attract people to this city. But you have to walk and chew gum at the same time.

So what I always said to people in communities that were worried about large-scale development, blocking shadows, traffic congestion, are there going to be enough schools? What I always said to the community board when I was borough president is, “I know you’re not going to like this. You’re not going to like the Fordham University plan. Right. You’re not going to necessarily like the Columbia University plan, which will create luxury housing and it will certainly create more density. So tell me you don’t like it. But then, in your analysis, tell me what gets you from a no to a yes. Because I want to get to a yes”. And that has always been my mantra.

When you have a development plan, there should be community engagement. If you want to engage, now they call you a NIMBY. If you’re carte blanche, you’re a YIMBY. This is the craziest debate I’ve ever seen. Why can’t we just have rational discussion, planning for neighborhoods, recognizing that we do have to build density, we are going to have to build to meet the housing crisis that we have. But you know what? We’ve got to make sure that we have schools and that we have infrastructure and we have all the things that you need, whether it’s commercial space, we need places for people to buy food and restaurants. And so to me, it’s an exciting community negotiation that has to happen if we’re really going to be able to build the infrastructure the city’s going to need over the next 30, 40, 50 years.

We had someone on this podcast, a housing advocate named Sam Deutsch, and he expressed what some people in this world feel on the YIMBY side that you were describing there. They feel that some of the people that are on the community side there are not really negotiating in good faith, or are just a blanket no for any increased density. Do you think that’s too cynical? Do you think that there’s more appetite for this?

I think there is more appetite. Look, I think people recognize that we are in the midst of a very serious housing crisis. We have unaffordable affordable housing. So even when we build affordable housing, it’s not affordable to working people in the city. I think that’s a crisis. We do want to attract people from all over the world to continue to come here. If the entrance fee to this city is a $2 million condo and a $7,000, $8,000 a month rent for a one-bedroom apartment, the city will die. It will not be diverse. It will not be economically mixed. And that is not the kind of urban planning that is required now.

So yes, we have to put new tools in the toolbox. We have to reform some of the laws that have sort of impeded development and growth. But we have to make sure that as we build our communities that we protect the longtime residents in our neighborhoods. It’s really wrong to me to only talk about building luxury housing when we can’t take care of our NYCHA residents, that we can’t have a public housing plan like Mitchell-Lama too.

So imagine having a city hall and a state government that could actually walk and chew gum at the same time. Let’s build fair market housing and give developers an opportunity to meet the housing needs. Let’s build Mitchell-Lama 2 to make sure that working people have access to housing, hard-working people who may not make a lot of money, but they are very much a part of the city. And then let’s make sure that the NYCHA residents, who quite frankly made this land, this borough valuable, that they don’t get pushed out because no one was willing to make their repairs and help them. That’s, to me, the comprehensive approach.

Yeah. And then specifically on the NYCHA side, do you have thoughts about how conversations specifically around the Rad Pack conversions are going and whether you think there’s a better way forward than those kinds of programs.

Look, I think we still have to continue to make sure that the community and the residents are respected as stakeholders. And I would go as far as to say they’re actually equity stakeholders because when they moved in, they made the land and those buildings valuable. It’s not their fault that the federal government and the government in general has withdrawn from making basic repairs. So I do think we have to find other opportunities to maintain and help those buildings, but always with bringing the community to the forefront.

Switching gears slightly, another issue that you’ve been outspoken about throughout your career is criminal legal reform and policing reform. You got arrested during the protest after the Amadou Diallo killing. You were one of the first elected officials to call for Rikers to close. I could go on. I’m interested in how these conversations play out in this district, particularly, because, I mean, I take your point that this district has changed a ton. I was born in 1999. My parents tell me they grew up here in the 60s and things were very different.

Oh, they’ll tell you that you couldn’t…, I grew up in Washington Heights, but you couldn’t walk down Columbus Avenue back in the 70s.

Right. But, in my lifetime, it has felt like crime in this neighborhood is something that happens for sure, but it is a little bit more abstract than it is in other neighborhoods. So what is it like having conversations about criminal legal reform here? And how do you contextualize our current moment in terms of like the bail and discovery reform was in 2019? Where do you think the district is on this issue right now?

Look, I think people want to live in a community that they feel safe in. They want, you know, I have two kids at my age, they’re teenagers, they’re now taking the subways. If you don’t think I worry about them every time they get on the subway, that’s, no, I worry. For the longest time, I took them on the train because I grew up here in the 70s when there were 2,000 murders a year. I remember how dangerous the A-train was when I was growing up. And when the crime stats go up, parents get worried. So there should not be a disconnect between safety and justice. And I think we have made some great strides and trying to make sure that we provide justice for people, give people a second chance. Incarceration shouldn’t be based on skin color. But at the same time, we also have to keep the city safe.

During the mayoral campaign, everyone’s talking about, we’re spending $800 million in police overtime. That money could be used for nurses and doctors and help for people with mental illness. Well, they’re 100% right. But you know what? If you want to reduce overtime, you have to hire 3,000 more police officers so that we’re not paying police officers to work multiple shifts, creating a dangerous situation for them and the public. But also it makes no sense to pay $800 million. All you have to do is have those thousands of cops. And I think that is as important as pairing them with mental health professionals and going into the trains and helping people. I don’t think there has to be this disconnect.

And look, I know the mayor’s putting together this big community safety agency. I thought the announcement was quite frankly pathetic. A deputy mayor in charge of two staffers, $260 million, and nobody knows what the hell that agency is going to do. That just sets us back from doing the things that he wants to do, which is a combination of social justice, but also keeping the city safe.

So, all right, let’s get to Mamdani. The overtime is part of this budget crisis storm that we’re in right now. I’m curious, both in your experience as a Comptroller and also, you mentioned the Pataki budget gap that you were in the assembly for.

Right now, it seems like on the menu there’s a bunch of different bad options. There’s cuts to cityFHEPS, the voucher program that keeps people from being homeless. There’s these school mergers that could save money but are very controversial and the community seems to hate. Overtime is one of the things that’s under-budgeted.

Do you think that we can get through this and make up $5.4 billion with some combination of spending cuts and Julie Menin’s accounting tricks, where if we measure things differently then the number gets smaller? Or do you think that this is a time where we actually do need to do another revenue-raising tax increase in order to get through it?

Look, I think what’s unfortunate is the new mayor has not yet learned the art of budget negotiation. So rule #1, don’t make threats you can’t keep. So when you threaten property tax increase as an either or to a tax the rich increase, it may play well at a rally with 3,000 screaming people. But that’s just not how you negotiate a budget.

And when Julie Menin and the Council rightfully said, no, we’re not doing that. One, because there are people, especially in communities of color, that would tip them in terms of their own affordability crisis. And the fact that you just don’t show up and say it’s got to be my way or the highway. the problem when you win an upset victory, you think that that’s going to be the way it is forever. And what I try to caution some folks is that elections are really a yearly occurrence, right? And the longevity of a successful administration ain’t what it used to be. The pendulum swings very quickly the other way.

So part of what you have to do is come in and put aside some of the campaign rhetoric, which I think he’s doing, by the way. I do think the revolution has just about ended. And he’s now focusing on the reality of: “I got to balance a budget.” We got a $5.4 billion budget deficit. No, it wasn’t $12 billion, but $5.4 billion is nothing to sneeze at. They’re going to get to that balanced budget.

But I think what the mayor is concerned about is not so much this budget, but “my God, I promised everybody everything.” The one thing that is clear is free buses and all these initiatives are just not happening right away. And I think he’s worried about that base. If you look at last week when he did the 100-day rally and Bernie comes back and they’re trying to gin it up and say, “I’m not really going to do free buses anymore. I’m really going to make them faster by 6 minutes.” Okay, well, that’s not what you said during the campaign. Then the second thing is, “oh, universal, universal childcare. Well, it’s not going to be for everyone but a couple thousand seats.” All right. And then, “you know what I’m really going to be? I’m going to be like Al D’Amato. I’m going to be Senator Pothole.”

He’s starting to recognize that in tough economic times with Trump uncertainty, he’s going to have to pull down the rhetoric, lower expectations on the base vote that he got, and just be a good mayoral manager, which is what I think people want him to be right now.

There’s been reporting that you’re not just saying critical things, but also organizing against him in some way. You’re fundraising for a PAC. Is your objection mostly of a sort of technical managerial flavor, that you think that this is a skill set that he’s a little bit inexperienced at, and that he needs to just execute the job better? Or do you think that there’s also a fundamental policy differences that you guys have, where you think that he has different priorities and you’re in a different part of the spectrum?

First of all, I happen to like him personally. We sat together for some 35 debates. You really get to know somebody, so I personally like him. But for me, after being in government for close to 30 years, my elective office, I’m a citizen. I have a Twitter account as well. and I’m entitled to my opinion. Some people don’t like to hear what I have to say. I don’t care. I’m going to get on the Eli podcast, you know, now that I know him. And I want to be able to give my opinions, but that doesn’t mean I criticize him for the sake of criticizing the mayor. You know, I would have done this if Andrew Cuomo was mayor. The only person I wouldn’t have criticized probably was me. Certainly would have criticized Brad Lander. So I’m not against Zohran Mandani, but I am using my voice and my beliefs to make sure this city is good, not just for me, but for the two kids that I’m raising in this city.

I follow your Twitter account very closely. And one specific criticism or concern that you have seems to be about Israel-Palestine stuff. So one Tweet, and I don’t want to just focus on one anecdote so if you think this is an unfair one, we can pivot to a different one, but I think it’s hopefully representative.

Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia protester who was detained by ICE and was released, he gave a speech at a Seder in the streets where he said, “Let us all pray together that the Israeli occupation and the Israeli genocidal regime will have ended.” And then he called for total and complete divestment. I think he was talking about both universities and also the city.

You took exception to that. You Tweeted, “Total Jewish Hate. Wake up and fight back, people!”

Yeah, I stand by that.

Okay, so tell me, help me understand a little bit more. Labeling the current Israeli regime genocidal and calling for the end of that regime, is that Jewish hate?

Let me just cut to the chase so we don’t have a big Middle East debate here. But let me tell you where I’m coming from as, and I Tweet as a former Comptroller who invested in Israeli bonds. What has me very concerned is that the BDS movement, and the way the DSA catalogs priorities for the mayor, eight of the first 10 priorities are anti-Jewish. Some of it’s about Israel, but a lot of it is about divestment from Jewish institutions. And when elected officials can come to the controller’s office and talk about those issues of divestment, that is very concerning to me because we’re starting to normalize Jewish hate. Even if it is not the intention of some of these characters, it’s what it is. That’s why you see the amount of hate crimes. That’s why you’re starting to see a very uneasiness in the city.

And by the way, what this reminds me of. It reminds me of when I was in elective office after 9-11 as borough president, after the attacks on the World Trade Center, the Muslim hate in this city was off the charts. I was the first Jewish elected official, I think the only Jewish elected official at the time that went to Park 51, which was the proposal to build a mosque in lower Manhattan, and said, everybody stand down. When there were attacks on the Muslim community, I worked with the Jewish and Muslim community to make sure that mosques were safe. And when there was an attack or an attack on a Jewish synagogue, you could call up our Muslim brothers and sisters, and we were all together. That has to, we have to go back to that collective.

And part of it is knowing when to pick your shots. BDS and pension investment in Israel, the investment is so small, it’s not even a rounding era. And it’s been in existence since Harrison Goldin was Comptroller. We just gotta think about this.

Yeah, you said something that is new to me. What are the non-Israel-related Jewish institutions that BDS is pushing to divest from?

I don’t have the list in front of me, but there’s Jewish businesses, any business that does business, anybody who does business with Israel. I mean, it’s creating an untenable environment for the Jewish community in the same way it was untenable for the Muslim community. And we all worked together 20 years ago. We’re in the same situation we are today. And I think we have to be mindful of this. So I look at when elected officials think they can just go to the controller’s office and talk about an investment that they have no idea what they’re talking about. I mean, the amount of stupidity online and people say to me, Scott, don’t, don’t educate on Twitter.

I was going to offer that advice also,

But it’s either that or online chess.

Happy to meet you there [for online chess] if you want.

So, I want to ask you briefly about NY-10 before we get to NY-12. You’ve publicly endorsed Dan Goldman. On Twitter, I get the sense that you specifically are concerned about Brad Lander and don’t think he’d be a great congressman. Is that basically because of the stuff that we just talked about, Israel and BDS? Or is there a deeper concern you have about his performance succeeding you as Comptroller?

Look, I have a concern when somebody is so willing to change their positions on a dime based on polling, right? So, when Israel was up, Lander was a Zionist. Israel’s down, now he’s, you know, anti-Israel. It has nothing to do with his positions. It’s just the waffling part and the pandering part has really been very much a part of his career.

And as Comptroller, he was asleep during that entire Eric Adams Administration. He did not do the work that was necessary to hold Adams accountable. I think if actually, if Brad had done his job as Comptroller, I think Adams would still be mayor because he would have held him accountable. Like you can’t get away with stuff. He chose not to do that. Then he woke up, wanted to run for mayor.

And so he’s a nice guy. I mean, I like him. We hang out. It’s great. But why would you run for Congress against our leading fighter in Washington? Dan Goldman, by any measure, has been a force nationally in Congress for all the right reasons. He’s a progressive, he’s strong, he’s an adult, he doesn’t waffle. You don’t have to agree with him on everything, but you kind of know he’s got your back. And I think the Lander campaign is totally inappropriate and pathetic going against a Democrat when we’re trying to take back the House. What I’m hoping for is that voters wake up and realize that Goldman is critical when we take back the house, and I, and I hope people understand that.

Mandani didn’t think Lander was a good Comptroller. Even though Lander was telling everyone he was going to be deputy mayor, first deputy mayor, Mandani’s telling everyone “hell no,” right? So Mandani now is stuck, right? He thinks he owes Lander, even though I don’t think he really does. And now what is he going to do? So, “oh my God, I got to give him something, but I don’t want him in my administration. So I’m going to just see if I can gift him a congressional seat.”

This is not a consolation prize, people. And Mandani should take care of him after the election. There’s a lot of things that Brad is talented to do in the administration. But don’t tell me I have to replace a great congressman because you wouldn’t make him a deputy mayor or a commissioner. It’s just not right.

Well, I mean… he’s currently polling like 20 to 30 points ahead of Dan Goldman

He was polling ahead of Zohran Mandani too.

Well, there you go. So moving to NY-12.

The mothership. 12.

The mothership. I love that. You’ve endorsed Micah Lasher. I know you’ve known him for many, many years. Why do you think he’s what we need? And specifically, can you tell us about an anecdote, a time when you saw him use leadership skills that impressed you?

I’ve known Micah literally since he called me up at the age of 14 to get involved in politics when I was in the Assembly. And I have watched him grow to a point where I think he is the heir to a great congressman, Jerry Nadler. I’ve seen him in the different jobs that he’s had, make a tremendous contribution to the city, whether it was representing the city in Albany as the mayor’s legislative representative, which is a very serious job, to somebody who was a policy director to the governor of the state of New York, to somebody who served in the Assembly in the first two years, has taken on the Trump administration in Washington because he’s smart, because he’s focused, because he understands how to use legislation, not just locally, but nationally. And I think this moment in time, for the same reason I’m for Dan Goldman, we just need smart, thinking legislators who are going to go to Washington and take back this country. And Micah Lasher, by any measure, is just ready for that fight.

I will tell you the personal anecdote I have with Micah Lasher. When he believes in something, and I disagree with him, he will come back to you. Facts, figures, analysis, deep thought. I mean, imagine electing a congressmember who actually acts that way every day, who doesn’t put his finger in the air and say, “well, I’m going in this direction” because you can sit and talk with him. Sometimes I like to think I’ve changed his mind over the thirty, forty years I’ve known him. A lot of times he’s changed mine.

I’m curious if you have specific insight into any of the other candidates. I’d love any comment on Jack Schlossberg in particular or if you have any interactions with George Conway or Alex Bores.

Yeah, look, I have a lot of respect for all these candidates. Isn’t it great that in NY-12 and in this district, whether East Side, West Side, it’s always choosing from the best that we’ve got. So I have a lot of great respect for the other candidates. I don’t know Jack Slossberg personally. I knew his uncle who, when we did some issue work together, walked the streets actually for David Dinkins in the campaign back in 1993 and 1989. I follow George Conway. I know Alex is a hardworking legislator. Nina has been great on public health and raising her voice. And some of the others I don’t really know, but I respect all of them. There’s not a bad apple in the lot. Just for me, you know, Micah Lasher is the one that I think would best represent the district. But I just really respect these candidates.

Our last question, when we get the rest of the candidates on, what’s one question we should ask them?

I think the best question to sort of flesh them out, although we’re probably tipping them off, is talk about the first 100 days. Talk about how you put your marker down. I also think, I recommend to all these candidates to watch the Bella movie. It’s on Channel 13 about a trailblazer in Congress who shook up the political establishment in two ways. One, by being loud, outspoken, and strong, but also understood how to bring home the resources New Yorkers need. And that’s what we need from our congressmember in NY-12 and NY-10.

“That’s what being mayor is” a fictional former Baltimore mayor tells Tommy Carcetti in The Wire’s fourth season, using a particularly graphic metaphor to describe the way that every constituency kept dumping unsolvable, no-win problems onto his desk. “You’re sitting and eating [expletive] all day long. Day after day, year after year. When I realized that, I decided that being a downtown lawyer and seeing my family every night made for a fine life.”

Not everyone agrees, of course. Eric Adams famously loved being mayor, at least in the beginning: “I say every day that I wake up, ‘When does the hard part start?’” he told the press early on. “Because it’s not hard for me. I love every moment being the mayor.” The hard part did eventually start for Adams a year later when an influx of migrants filled the city’s already-stressed shelter system, led to $4 billion of unexpected social services expenses, and permanently ruptured his relationship with the Biden administration in the process. And it continued into the next year, when a series of cascading corruption scandals eventually culminated in Adams’s federal indictment.

We’ve just reached the proverbial “100 days” mark of the Zohran Mamdani administration, and while he seems to have retained some of his jovial, energetic spirit from the campaign, you’d have to say that the hard part has started already. In his first three months as mayor, he has been handed one steaming bowl of excrement after another.

On January 25th, a historic blizzard dumped nine inches of snow onto the city. A similar snowstorm wreaked serious havoc on the de Blasio administration, and the city hall press breathlessly covered the snow as “Mamdani’s first big test.” This was all very silly. Mamdani did not clean house at the Department of Sanitation, which runs snow removal, nor any of the other highly technical service-providing agencies that manage the city’s response to snow. If they had botched their response, it would not have been because Mamdani’s team did anything differently than Adams’s would have. In the event, they did pretty well, the streets were quickly plowed, and Mamdani was happy to publicly perform his competence, energetically shoveling out a car in Brooklyn, and scurrying around for as many outdoor press events as possible.

Nevertheless, the blizzard posed serious problems, and gave critics new angles to attack the Mamdani administration. On his brand new talk radio show on John Catsimatidis’s WABC 77, Andrew Cuomo accused Mamdani of allowing seventeen homeless people to die because of his pause on sweeps of homeless encampments. The city reported that none of the deaths occurred in encampments (and therefore would not have been prevented by more sweeps), but Mamdani reinstituted sweeps anyway a week later, against the wishes of former City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, who now leads the city’s largest shelter provider, Women In Need. A few weeks later, Jessica Tisch and the police union media apparatus tried to stir up outrage after a group of teenagers in Washington Square Park lobbed snowballs at two police officers. Mamdani seems to have emerged from all of this pretty unscathed, boasting a 63% approval rating in a recent Siena survey. But for six weeks, his administration focused obsessively (and nearly exclusively) on managing a crisis they bore absolutely no responsibility for and had no easy way to fix, and they had to defend themselves from a constant stream of bad-faith attacks anyway.

Mamdani better get used to that. Another storm looms, this time emerging not from the clouds or the North Pole, but from the accounting spreadsheets of the Comptroller’s office.

II.

“Mayors make their own budgets, but they do not make them as they please,” Karl Marx very nearly said. “They do not budget under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all past mayors weighs like a nightmare on the balance sheet of the incumbent.”

Seemingly out of the blue, the city has a massive budget gap. Mamdani first sounded the alarm on January 28th, calling a press conference to decry what he labelled the “Adams Budget Crisis,” or ABC. The flashy spectacle and memetic title are classic Mamdani comms fare, and they are in this case slightly reductive. The NYC budget is the product of negotiations between City Council and the Mayor, so the entire 2021-2025 City Council bears some responsibility as well. And some of the underlying problems predate the Adams administration. But on two key points, Mamdani was correct: He has inherited a huge problem, and it is unambiguously not his fault.

The city is legally required to submit a balanced budget every year, but ask any HBO showrunner, and they’ll tell you that budgeting is an aspirational act. You put aside the amount you’d like something to cost and then cross your fingers. Or if you’re a little bit more cynical, you calculate the amount that you think something will cost, then write down a dramatically lower number anyway, and hope that it’s someone else’s problem by the time the bill comes due. Whether because of delusional wishcasting or sinister myopia, year after year, Eric Adams and the 2021-2025 City Council budgeted dramatically less for certain uncapped expenses and programs than anyone reasonably expected them to actually cost. The city’s Independent Budget Office released a report last December on the biggest underbudgeted offenders, and the findings are eye-popping.

In Fiscal Year 2026, the city budgeted $578 million for NYPD overtime. The NYPD has gone over budget on overtime by hundreds of millions of dollars every year in recent memory, and this year will be no exception. They are currently on pace to spend $894 million on overtime in FY 2026, creating a budget gap of more than $300 million. The IBO projects that across all uniformed agencies, the city will spend more than $600 million more than budgeted just on overtime.

City Hall (at least theoretically) has direct control over the uniformed departments and their spending practices, so it could actually do something about that one if it felt like holding its supposedly-brilliant, savant-like, technocratic data geniuses who run those departments even a little bit accountable. But the city has less control on the spending side of the unfunded mandates from the state, which also balloon way over budget every year. These include the MTA’s Access-a-Ride reimbursement program (for which the IBO projects the city will have to contribute $168 million more than it budgeted in FY2026); settlements of the Department of Education’s “Carter Cases,” which reimburse families of children for their private special-education expenses if their public schools are not adequately meeting their needs ($515 million over budget in FY2026, per the IBO); and spending related to the state’s class size mandate, which will not affect FY2026, but which will force the DOE to spend $200 million more than its current FY2027 budget, and then more than $700M more in FY2028 and FY2029.

And then there’s CityFHEPS, the city’s housing voucher program for low-income families. As the city’s housing crisis has worsened, both the number of eligible families (ie the ones who are at severe risk of eviction and homelessness), and the cost of housing each one in a market-rate rental apartment, have grown significantly. The program now serves over 65,000 families, and costs over $1 billion dollars a year, despite receiving only $600 million in the initial FY2026 budget. The IBO projects that the city will spend more than $600 million over budget in FY2027. Comptroller Mark Levine has an even grimmer projection. “It was in the budget for the fiscal year we’re currently in for about $600 million,” he told Errol Louis in February. “It’s actually going to come in at over $2 billion, and the gap is even bigger for the next fiscal year.”

If you’re wondering why Levine and the IBO diverge so dramatically in their projections, welcome to NYC budget math. All of the numbers above are blurry, ballpark figures couched in many layers of uncertainty. For one thing, projections of the future are generally wrong. But even descriptions of the present vary depending on the source you look at, and what accounting tricks they decide to use. (One example: the City Council’s current budget proposal is much rosier than Mamdani’s, in part because they choose to count payroll for new hires in the next fiscal year, not the current one, as Council Finance Chair Linda Lee explained to Ben Max last week.)

When Mamdani announced the “Adams Budget Crisis” in January, he repeated Levine’s projection of a $12.2 billion budget gap. A month later, at the State Legislature’s annual “Tin Cup Day” in Albany he had a slightly different picture. “I’m glad to report that by assuming an aggressive posture on savings without compromising City services, incorporating updated revenue and bonus estimates, and using in-year reserves, we have lowered that $12 billion gap to $7 billion,” he told state legislators. Even the Mamdani-friendly Hell Gate raised their eyebrows, wondering if the initial projection had been skewed to make his pitch for tax increases seem more urgent.

But everyone agrees that CityFHEPS is dramatically underbudgeted. When you combine that with the overtime spending, Access-a-Ride reimbursements, Carter cases, class-size mandates, (and subtract $1.5 million that Kathy Hochul has already agreed to throw in from the State budget), and everything else you allegedly get a $5.4 billion shortfall, over the next two years. If you go by Levine’s numbers, CityFHEPS alone makes up a third of that.

And this is assuming the program does not expand its eligibility criteria, despite a 2023 City Council mandate to do so. Mayor Adams refused to implement this expansion, prompting Legal Aid and other advocacy groups to sue him in state court. The lower court ruled in Adams’s favor, on the grounds that because a state law authorized the city Department of Social Services to administer CityFHEPS, only the State Legislature, not the City Council, could compel a change in eligibility criteria. But an appellate court reversed this ruling last June and ordered the city to expand the program as mandated. The Adams administration refused again, and their Law Department vowed to appeal again, which drew the ire of then-candidate Zohran Mamdani. He pledged on his campaign website to drop this lawsuit when he took office, and tweeted that it was “a ridiculous waste of time during a housing crisis.”

Mamdani evidently feels differently today. Last month, he announced that he would continue to pursue the appeal, in the hope that another court might allow him to defy the City Council-mandated expansion just as his predecessor did. City Council Speaker Julie Menin, who usually antagonizes Mamdani from the right, expressed outrage, and joined progressive activists in urging Mamdani to drop the lawsuit.

There is a policy argument for continuing to fight, if Mamdani wants it. CityFHEPS is not a durable solution to our housing crisis. It helps tens of thousands of families get housing and stay out of shelters, but at a cost: in theory, at least, subsidizing demand in a supply-constrained market actually drives prices up for everyone who isn’t eligible for the subsidy. And it’s extremely expensive, so much so that the Citizens Budget Commission, a “nonpartisan” moderate think tank, controversially argued last February that it would actually be cheaper to keep people in the notoriously expensive shelter system. Women in Need’s Chris Mann forcefully refuted this math soon after, and his boss Christine Quinn reiterated the importance of the program, regardless of its cost savings, soon after, writing that the vouchers “remain the most effective path to helping families transition from shelter to permanent housing.” She’s right. As expensive and inefficient as they may be, without these vouchers, tens of thousands of New Yorkers will become homeless.

But the policy disputes may be beside the point for the Mamdani Administration. The $5.4 billion budget gap exists with CityFHEPS at its current level, pre-expansion. Mamdani and the current City Council simply cannot afford to add another billion in unbudgeted costs. The question they face is not how much they can expand CityFHEPS, but how much of it they can even afford to keep in its current form.

III.

Because cuts are coming. There are roughly three ways Mamdani can shrink this budget gap: cut costs, raise revenue, or run a deficit and dip into the Revenue Stabilization Fund, the city’s $7 billion cash reserves, to make it up. Mamdani floated a combination of the last two options in his first budget proposal in February, pairing a billion dollars of reserves with a 9.5% property tax increase. He called this the “path of last resort,” and stressed that he thought it was a bad idea and did not want to do it.

He’s right about this on the policy substance. The property tax system is the one lever that the city government can control to raise revenue immediately without state approval. But it’s a terrible lever, which passes costs directly onto renters. And it does so in racially disproportionate ways, thanks to our insanely convoluted and inequitable property tax assessment system, which punishes multifamily homes and apartment buildings and rewards townhouses in Manhattan and Park Slope. Mamdani has pledged to fix this too, but it will take many years and will require a political coalition strong enough to withstand the heat from those townhouse owners, who are extremely politically active, and who, in many cases, made up a key portion of Mamdani’s slim electoral majority last year. Without reforming the underlying system first, a property tax increase is just straightforwardly bad policy, something that Mamdani basically admitted even as he proposed it.

Raiding the reserves would be worse, because they are supposed to be for acute periods of economic crisis, like 9/11, the 2008 financial crisis, or the COVID-19 pandemic. While I will admit that the vibes are not amazing at the moment, and there have been some ominous economic indicators recently, we are still absolutely not in one of those acute periods. The local economy has been booming over the past few years, and FY2025 saw an 8% year-over-year increase in tax revenue. The reserves are often called the city’s “rainy day fund,” and it is not raining.

The substantive analysis hardly matters, anyway, because both of these ideas are functionally impossible. Julie Menin, Donovan Richards, Mark Levine, and basically every single other city elected official immediately objected to the property tax increase. It would need City Council approval, and not even the Mamdani-aligned councilors are on board. Ratings agencies, which hold the financial equivalent of a loaded gun to the city’s head at all times, swiftly reacted to the rainy day fund proposal, downgrading the outlook of NYC’s municipal bonds to “Negative.” This is the bond market’s way of telling Mamdani that if he even thinks about using reserves, if he so much as glances at the routing number of the account they sit in, they will jack up interest rates and make it impossible for him to build anything while he’s in office.

The City Council countered last week with a proposal that would close the budget gap entirely through accounting tricks. According to Speaker Julie Menin, Finance Chair Linda Lee, and the rest of the Council, the city could save a whopping $3.5 billion from “reestimating anticipated expenditures and revenues,” and hundreds of millions more by auditing city contracts and “identifying efficiencies.”

It is surprising to me that this proposal has not generated as much outrage from Comptroller Levine and the rest of the technocratic, brow-furrowing fiscal alarmists. It seems exactly the same as writing down on a piece of paper “we will find ways spend less money somehow [shrug emoji],” which is concerningly reminiscent of the delusional underbudgeting that got us in this mess in the first place. To Mamdani as well, who forcefully decried the proposal on purely technical grounds: “Double counting previously identified savings, overestimating revenues, and exaggerating debt service savings does nothing to close a deficit.”

IV.

Mamdani’s preferred solution is to raise income taxes on the city’s highest earners, and increase the corporate tax rate. He needs Governor Kathy Hochul’s approval for that, and she has told him and everyone else that she is unwilling to give it. Her stated rationale is a technocratic one: capital flight. “I am in competition with other states who have less of a tax burden on their corporations and their individuals,” she told NY1 last week. “I need people who are high net worth to support the generous social programs that we want to have in our state.”

Mamdani and his DSA allies are dubious. “I do not believe that there would be an outward migration,” Mamdani told state legislators in February. It’s notoriously difficult to project how much flight will occur when a city or state raises taxes (there is research supporting either side). But it’s an empirical question, not a political one.

On the political side, Mamdani’s side believe they are operating from a strong position. They have an Emerson poll out today that indicates that a (very slim) majority of New Yorkers would prefer tax increases on millionaires to spending cuts. They have a “Tax the Rich” rally scheduled for this weekend with Bernie Sanders to ramp up pressure. Governor Hochul had to cut short a press conference this week when protesters chanted “Tax the Rich” so loud that reporters could not hear the Governor speak.

Many on the left believe that Hochul’s refusal to raise income taxes is a loser for her politically, and that she has let her ties to wealthy donors and her conservative, upstate roots cloud her political judgement. I’m not so sure. We are currently living through a bipartisan tax revolt in this country, where voters across the spectrum have grown extremely skeptical of taxation, and not-particularly-moderate Democrats like Chris Van Hollen, Cory Booker, and Katie Porter are willing to cater to that impulse with proposals for further sweeping tax cuts. Even some progressives are on board, either because they believe that taxes are primarily spent on ICE detention centers and bombs overseas, because Instagram and TikTok have convinced them that they are much poorer than everyone else and therefore they shouldn’t have to pay taxes, or because a relentless focus on billionaires and the “Epstein class” has given them the impression that we could cut taxes for everyone else and raise enough revenue if only the oligarchs “paid their fair share.”

Can Mamdani really claim that New Yorkers are truly desperate for income tax increases in that environment? Despite the enthusiasm, he was elected with a razor-thin majority, on a platform that emphasized increased spending on ambitious new programs, and de-emphasized raising revenue to pay for them. The iconic chants and posters read “Freeze the Rent,” “Deliver Universal Childcare,” and “Make Busses Fast and Free.” “Tax the Rich,” a frequent rallying cry of Bill de Blasio’s “Tale of Two Cities” inequality-focused campaign, did not make the cut. It is entirely unclear whether he would have won on a platform of no new programs, and income tax hikes purely to maintain the city government’s status quo. Personally, I am dubious.

Mamdani could also raise revenue in other ways. In February, Eli Dworkin of the city’s nonpartisan Center for an Urban Future released a timely report on five revenue-generating policies the city could take without needing the State’s approval. They include expanding and taxing an autonomous vehicle pilot (which the human taxi-driver unions have fought tooth-and-nail, successfully delaying the implementation of this lifesaving technology), constructing a massive amount of new infill housing on city-owned land (a famously easy and popular thing for an NYC mayor to do), and instituting a universal metered street parking program in most of Manhattan (an obviously good idea that would spur Manhattan’s car-owners to violent revolution). Dworkin concedes that even if Mamdani could take all of these steps, they would only generate $1.4 billion.

The truth is that there is no politically popular and fiscally responsible way to close this gap. Mamdani, Hochul, and the City Council will muddle through anyway, and come to a compromise that includes savage cuts to cityFHEPS and other crucial social services, additional drips and drabs of state funding, vague promises to finally do something about police overtime, plenty of accounting magic, and maybe even a tiny revenue raiser or two. No one will be particularly happy, and there will certainly be no money left over for free busses or further childcare expansions. Mamdani admitted as much on Wednesday.

It makes sense that the new mayor has tried to focus his time and energy on fun, symbolic stunts instead, like generating buzzy press coverage for routine pothole maintenance, or celebrating the conclusion of a years-long investigation into a sketchy delivery company in front of adorable red pandas in the Prospect Park Zoo. The actual work of being mayor is an utterly miserable, political death trap. It’s an endless sequence of no-win bowls of crap, and Zohran Mamdani has to eat every single one.

Correction: A previous version of this blog mistakenly attributed a widely-shared meme about pothole filling to the Mamdani comms team. In fact, the DNC’s Instagram account is the original source of this meme. I regret the error and appreciate the reader who pointed this out.