“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.

All right, Eli Northrup, thank you so much for coming on the podcast.

Good to be here. Always for another Eli, had to make it.

So you are a graduate of NYU Law School, where I currently am an 1L. You have a long legal career. You were a public defender. You’ve been a policy advocate for Bronx Defenders. You clerked, you probably got great grades. You know how to sound smart in court. Why are you taking a turn here and running for office?

Yeah, it’s an evolution. When I went to law school, it was not something that I was thinking about at all. And I really was focused on public defense once I found it. When I went to law school, my grandfather was a lawyer. He was like a civil rights attorney at a point in his career. He did a lot of work around anti-Semitism and desegregation in the 50s and 60s. And so I had this conception in my head of what a lawyer does. They’re in court. They’re helping people. It’s like a social justice job. And then you get to law school. I don’t know if you’ve experienced this already. That’s not what you find most of the opportunities are.

But I spent a winter break in New Orleans in the criminal court system, working with the New Orleans public defenders, and it totally shifted my perspective. And I found that the public defense world was something that I fit in with in many ways. I felt like it was a chance to be useful, a chance to really fight and combat inequity and use legal skills to do that. And I also found that people that were public defenders were my people. They had a sense of humor. They worked really, really hard. And they had a mission. And it’s more like an identity than a career. And that’s really what I pursued out of law school. And even when I was clerking, I always wanted to be a public defender.

It wasn’t until I started to see the systemic inequities in the criminal legal system that you couldn’t solve within a case. You could do as much as-- you could do your best in a single case, but if this case is happening over and over again, there’s something wrong with the law that’s making it unfair. That’s when that led me to start advocating at the state policy level. It was really around cannabis legalization, because when I started in the Bronx in 2015, the number one case I handled was low-level possession of marijuana. And people weren’t going to jail at that point, but they were still losing their jobs and their families were taken away because of arrests, people were getting deported. And there was a huge inequity in who was being arrested. I mean, at that time, 90% of the arrests were for people that were black or brown, despite the fact that usage rates were equal across races. 50% of all arrests in New York City were in the Bronx. And yeah, just disproportionate consequences.

And so I took a bus up to Albany one day for something called a lobby day. I had no idea what it was. I just knew I had to show up at Union Square at like 4.30 in the morning. And I went up to Albany And I was like, what is going on here? This is like, we rallied and then we met with legislators and I started to see like these were the people that were shaping the policy that impacted everyone. And that sparked my interest in policy advocacy, which eventually led me to wanting to run. It really came out of my work trying to do it in the court system level, then trying to do it as an advocate, and then realizing there’s a limit to what you can do from being outside the room. At a certain point, you’re most effective if you’re actually in there.

Yeah. So in your time as a policy advocate, 2015 to now, the environment of criminal justice reform, the landscape has changed a ton. Can you take us through the different fights that you pitched in that role? And contextualize the current moment that we’re in, in terms of criminal justice reform. From the heyday of 2019, when we got significant bail and discovery reforms, but since then, there’s been a backlash. Take us through that period of time, and where do you see where we are right now?

It’s such an education. So I started to do advocacy work really in like 2017, 2018. And I mean, as I’m sure listeners know that there was a contingent of Democratic senators that conferenced with Republicans, the IDC, that really held up progressive legislation for many, many years. And that flipped in 2018. So when I started to go up to Albany, all of a sudden, all these things that hadn’t been possible for many, many years became possible. And so I was in the center of bail and discovery as it was moving forward and being passed. And cannabis legalization, similar, but a little bit different. I would say that ultimately, the cannabis legalization, the reason it was such a progressive bill–that was Andrew Cuomo’s, like, he was hoping to get a life raft. You can remember that March of 2021 was when he was embroiled in scandal and ultimately had to resign. But anyway, those three years, like, because I think of the IDC going away and Cuomo being weakened, these progressive pieces of legislation were able to pass.

I think with the backlash, you have to remember: bail and discovery reform passed during the 2019 legislative session, really during the budget, and went into effect April 1st, 2020, two weeks after the pandemic. And so, and there were stories in the New York Post and other places before they even went into effect that were like coming for them. And then also remember that’s the Trump-Biden election and Trump making cashless bail a centerpiece of democratic cities like being hellholes. Then all this disarray because of the pandemic and legitimate crime rates rising across the country, like in places like Oklahoma and Texas that did not do bail reform. But everybody in New York who were, I would say, not well-meaning were pointing to these criminal justice reforms as the reason. We now know, and the data shows clearly that bail reform has been a resounding success and that it has not impacted safety negatively one bit. But we had to ride this roller coaster, and the narrative sometimes in politics is just as important as the facts. And so, yeah, it’s been frustrating. This is probably another reason I wanted to run, because for the last five years, we’ve just been playing defense, trying to like prevent rollbacks from happening on these really important pieces of legislation that if anybody practiced or spent time or was accused of a crime and had to be involved with criminal court would understand how important they are.

So the pendulum swung. And I think we’re entering another moment where a lot of these other important criminal justice issues, like sentencing reform and parole reform, they actually have a chance of moving forward. I think that what we’re seeing is the data now supports what happened a few years ago and we’re entering a moment that progressive change is on the horizon in the landscape. Just look at the number of open seats in the state legislature and Zoran’s election and young people and progressive people becoming more interested and turning out. I think this next election, which I happen to be running in, but across the city and the state, I think it’s hugely important and could signal a real opportunity for more progressive reforms with respect to the criminal legal system.

New York is still way behind in sentencing and parole. We have tens of thousands of people upstate who are serving sentences they never would have received if they were sentenced today, but they have no opportunity to make their case or earn time off. And so we have a lot more to do still. Albany likes to think ‘oh, we checked that box.’ That’s not how it works. There’s so many people left behind. So I’m hopeful about that, and it’s one of the reasons that I feel motivated to run.

Yeah, well, that’s one area where criminal justice, where there’s an opening lane for reform in this new session after this election. Another one that a lot of people are talking about is housing. So I’m going to hand it over to Laeo to take that part over.

[Laeo Cnkovich-Rubsamen] So yeah, a little pivot from criminal justice reform, but the affordability crisis is looming large. And I know you have some experience in housing court and that aspect of the housing crisis. So I just wanted you to talk a bit about why we are in a housing crisis. Why does this neighborhood struggle to build housing? Specifically, why are rents so high?

I mean, I think the first thing I’ll say is that I don’t see these things as disconnected. Like I really see stable housing as investing in safety. And the thing that I’ve seen as a public defender is that when people get stable housing and people that are experiencing mental health issues or substance abuse issues, if they get supportive housing, that’s the thing that sets a different trajectory for their life. I think it’s such a good investment. And there was a study done recently in Chicago. It was comparing eviction rates to incidents of shooting, and it controlled for all these other variables. And it found a 2% increase in eviction rate within a census tract led to 1.66% more shootings. It was like the number one predictor of gun violence. So yeah, I think that solving housing also solves other problems. And investing in housing is also a really good investment. I mean, yes, I have seen clients, I’ve represented people facing eviction, and I’ve seen the destabilizing effects that it has on people.

So I’m invested in making sure that people have stability in their homes, but that doesn’t alone solve the crisis of affordability. There’s not a shortage of good ideas. I feel like there’s all these ideas floating around with regards to housing. It’s like the will to get them done. And certainly a faction of it is that people don’t like to see their neighborhoods changing and new projects can get held up that way. A faction of it is that there really should be affordability measures.

And I do think that the government has a role to play in investing in housing. I don’t think it should just be left up to the market. It’s one of those things that’s like the basic things need to be taken care of. Like when you think about education and safety and health care, Housing to me fits in that bucket. And so I really think we should be not thinking about housing solely as a way to make profit. And there are developers and they have a role to play. But the government investing in housing in a way that’s an investment in safety and stability and not necessarily a way to get huge gains, but a way to create that kind of stability.

[Laeo] Right. You touched on one of the key issues in the housing debate, the deregulation as the solution to the housing crisis versus more government intervention. And it seems like you are leaning towards more public intervention. I want you to kind of explain where you land on that. Do you see zoning reform as part of the process? Or do you think it’s more public housing, more voucher programs?

No, I think it’s both. I don’t mean to say that-- I think of it just as not letting the market solve the problem. So I think government involvement doesn’t necessarily mean that government builds all the housing. But it does mean that government has a role to play in things like social housing and bringing back a Mitchell-Lama type program where middle class and working families can actually afford to be here.

But no, I think we need to build more housing. And I do think that includes considering upzoning places that haven’t been revisited in a long time. That means getting rid of some regulations that don’t make sense. Like you want to have regulations to protect us, but we’ve regulated to the point that we can’t do anything. So I mean, that’s the kind of thing that I think you got to have an all hands on deck solution.

[Laeo] Yeah, I think that’s a perfect pivot to my question on SEQRA reform, in the realm of regulations that maybe we don’t need so much of anymore. Governor Hochul is currently trying to pass a version of SEQRA reform in her budget plan. Both of the single house bills have different versions, slightly watered down. Do you have thoughts on SEQRA reform?

I mean, yeah, I think it deserves reform. I think that, I mean, obviously we need to be conscious of building in a way that might impact people negatively environmentally. So it’s not like there’s no review, but it’s gotten to the point where it’s too much red tape. And so I am in favor of reform of the process and one that’s smart, but also allows us to actually build things because we’re just doing nothing for far too many years.

[Laeo] Moving on to the scaffold law, which is one of my personal pet peeves. So I’ll put my cards on the table there. The New York Labor Law, Section 240, places absolute liability on developers for all gravity-related injuries on their work sites. And this has kind of been the bugbear for lots of housing policy wonks, because it’s been shown to increase construction costs by somewhere around 10%. And that just means everything that we build in New York, commercial, residential, has a 10% tax on it because of this very specific New York state law. So I wanted you to weigh in your thoughts on scaffolding law.

I think that the thing is, I know labor unions and workers feel like they need to be protected. And so obviously you don’t want a 10% increase on everything. And when you have such a strict liability, this is something that I think we’re dealing with in other areas of insurance that creates these high costs. How do you balance that with the people working that could be potentially injured, making sure that they get the-- if something does happen, that they’re taken care of? And I’m not sure that I know exactly the answer to that.

But I know that having labor unions be on the other side of something, it’s difficult to get it through. And so I think that this is one where you’ve got two competing political forces battling it out in that sense, but it should be more reasonable. We can’t have a 10% tax on every single thing. So if there’s some way to reduce that cost, but also have people feel safe, I think that’s why you’re seeing it’s a hard nut to crack.

[Laeo] But you’re heading to the Assembly with that as your crusade. Scaffold law.

I mean, I hate the other form of scaffolding. That’s something that, if you want to talk to people on the Upper West Side, within the first minute, you’re going to hear, what’s up with these sidewalk sheds everywhere. And I do think that, obviously, they’re well-intentioned, and they’re necessary for certain periods of time. but there’s not alignment between when they go up, when work gets done, and when an inspection happens, and no real tax for keeping them up longer. And that cost also gets passed on to everybody. I mean, scaffolding industry is a $8 billion industry in New York City. That’s crazy. And so somebody’s paying for that. You know what I mean? And that means they have a lot of power too. But those sidewalk sheds, that impacts people’s daily lives. And it might feel small, but when you see this stuff over and over, it’s big.

[Laeo] Okay, so these are two smaller topics, and one of them has been in the news a lot recently. The RAD-PACT conversions. I know Chelsea is not in this district, but there are quite a few projects that are in AD 69 that are in the pipeline. The Manhattanville houses are now PACT ownership. Do you have any thoughts about RAD-PACTS, and private ownership of NYCHA?

Yeah, I mean, talking to residents of Douglas houses and the Grant houses, the biggest complexes in the 69th Assembly District. People are very scared and oppositional to the idea of private ownership. And I think you need buy-in from residents if it’s going to work. And so whatever, and I think, and I guess in Chelsea Elliott, they ultimately supported this plan, the residents did. But I think that the backlash from it and maybe, and I don’t know how much information is getting informed, and there’s an inherent mistrust of privatization. I take my lead from the people that are living there and that will be impacted. I think you need buy-in from residents.

[Laeo] How, as a potential future elected official, how do you rebuild the trust in institutions that NYCHA would need in order to go about? Because they need money, and PACT has delivered $8 billion to them. How do we get those trust institutions back?

It’s hard. It’s hard. I think that’s an issue in so many areas, because the government hasn’t worked for people in all these different areas. You ask why people aren’t bought into society. It’s because why should they be when it doesn’t feel like they’ve been made to feel a part of it? I think there’s a bigger issue. And it’s something that makes me hopeful about Zoran’s campaign and very invested in ensuring the promises are fulfilled and kept is because people are excited. And if you can make people feel like that excitement is warranted and that we can actually deliver, and Democrats can deliver, and maybe this new generation of Democrats who are progressive can deliver, then maybe there does start to be buy-in on these policy things that seem scary and people have a lot of doubts about. So I don’t know the exact answer, but I do know that NYCHA needs a huge amount of money. But the federal government is spending billions of dollars every day on war. So it’s like, what are we really talking about? I mean, the pie is whatever we want it to be. And that’s also why people have distrust. There’s not enough money to fix our heat, but we can go, we can drop bombs in the Middle East. So I think those are the questions that people legitimately have.

Speaker 3

[Laeo] Yeah. And one final housing thing, just like yes, no, Bloomingdale Library, the NYC, EDC. Thoughts?

Well, I don’t know if I can give you a yes, no on it. People felt blindsided by it, but it’s a spot that the public owns. I think that something’s going to happen, most likely. And I think the hope is that it delivers units that are affordable for people in the community. And if the government has leverage, that should be where it’s directed.

[Laeo] So you want to see more affordable units?

Yeah. I think affordability is key there. But also I just know that how I heard about it is people felt like they weren’t given the right input. And what that teaches me as an elected is you really need to bring people in to have the conversations. These projects are not going to always make everybody happy. In fact, they’re going to make some people very, very mad, no matter what. But people need to be considered, and conversations need to happen. And then you ultimately, if it’s right, it can create a bunch more housing, and we can do it in a way that because the city controls the land, that, you know, there’s some affordability built in, then that’s the way we should go.

[Eli Miller] Yeah, just briefly on that one. So one direction an elected official can come in on that is making sure that the local organizations and the community feels heard. I’m wondering if you also see part of the role as making sure that something like what happened on 147th Street doesn’t happen where because there’s such an active resistance, the local groups say it should be 40% affordable units instead of 30, and then the developer says, no, it should be 30, and they go back and forth and eventually it just doesn’t happen. It’s a truck depot. So how do you balance that?

Well, I think the Bloomingdale Library is a little bit different because it’s not a private space, right? So there’s more leverage, I would say, although there’s all these considerations to make. No, it’s… okay, I think one of the jobs of an elected is to deliver hard truths and to have the credibility within a community to go to them and even when people don’t want something, to try to like explain the benefits of it and stand for it if it makes sense. But the other job is to take the will of the community and represent it in the same way.

What I won’t shy away from is hard conversations. Like I’ve represented people in the Bronx for 10 years facing really difficult circumstances and life-altering decisions. So I’m experienced in picking up the phone and having hard conversations. And I think that translates to this work with constituents, because you’re going to make people upset and people are going to have, and people that you’re close with and believe something. You need to have those conversations, but ultimately stand on what policy most benefits the neighborhood and the city, even if it’s a short-term negative. I’ll bring those principles with me. That’s all I can say, because each situation is different. But I know when politicians take the easy way out and that’s not leadership. Like, that’s just going along to get along.

[Laeo] Yeah, I guess taking a step back, a more optimistic note, how do you see housing growth on the Upper West Side in the next 10, 20 years? What is your vision for the future?

I mean, I think that people generally are bought in. I think that there’s enough of a crisis and enough people whose kids can’t live in the neighborhood or don’t see themselves and who really want that, that people know that the status quo isn’t working and so are more open to like housing. And you know, Morningside Heights hasn’t been rezoned, and there is a rezoning proposal from the community board that it’s just making its way through. Ultimately, it’s a city level issue. Columbia, man. Columbia controls something like half the district. And I think that they have not been good neighbors.

[Eli Miller] Can I push you on that? Columbia’s obviously in the district, and it’s been a political flashpoint in a million different ways in the past four years. Just like go off on Columbia for a little bit. I think it’s a good microcosm for how you see the neighborhood, how you see your role as a legislator.

Yeah. I mean, look, I think Colombia is a powerful institution that has brought a lot of good to the neighborhood. It’s not like I don’t want to neglect the jobs and the stability and the money and that it’s brought. But the issue, the problem is the dynamic is that the neighborhood has just had to rely on Colombia’s benevolence. And the power is out of whack. And in the last few years, they’ve done some pretty awful things. And in terms of suppressing speech, in terms of shutting down, in terms of pushing people out, eminent domain, not keeping their promises to like Harlem and West Harlem and creeping into those neighborhoods without really providing the benefits that have been agreed upon. And then Donald Trump comes along and threatens their funding and they just bow immediately to him. And so it also sends them, it’s a demoralizing message too.

They get hundreds of millions of dollars in tax breaks from New York State. And what I’ve seen is that they respond to the bottom line and they’ve got, it seems, because of the shifting leadership structures, their board of directors has really been making, these are people that don’t live in the neighborhood and don’t, they’re not concerned with Morningside Heights residents. I live across the street from the campus and I can tell you like people have a lot of righteous anger towards Columbia, which I share. And not protecting its students.

So I just think you need to bring them to the table. I would hope to for them to be doing it out of the goodness of their heart, but if you bring them to the table because suddenly they don’t get the tax breaks that they used to be entitled to, maybe that’s a way to do it. I just think that it’s unacceptable the way that they’ve been acting towards us and who live in the neighborhood.

[Laeo] Yeah. Switching gears slightly, we’re in budget season now. The state budget is about to hopefully come down soon. The City budget is happening, and we have a $5 billion budget gap. As a future state legislator, are there things that you see the state should be doing more of to help New York City fill the gap? There are a few unfunded mandates, the classroom size mandate, which has been talked about a lot recently, that the state could potentially help with. Do you have thoughts on that? Should the state be giving us money to build more classrooms?

I think like on the first question of filling the gap, I think it really has to come from the state and it should come. And I mean, I’m in favor of a tax on the top 1% of earners and raising the corporate tax as the mayor has advocated for and many people are pushing the governor to do. I think that it’s going to have to come from state revenue. Like even the city council budget that was proposed today, I think, papers over some stuff.

The class size thing is an interesting one, because I think, and I think that Senator Liu, who was the sponsor of the bill initially, has even been open to potentially some tweaks in its implementation. I’ve spoken with teachers who have said for certain classes, like it’s made a huge difference in certain classes, and for some other classes, it may not be necessary for the cap to be as low as it is. You’ve got schools that can no longer fit in their buildings, because when you close the class size, you need more classrooms. You’ve got therapy happening in the hallways. It’s leading to the closure of the-- or the potential closure of the center school, which had a lot of people in the district really upset about.

There are a bunch of unfunded mandates and it’s not necessarily well thought out how it’s going to impact people. I think you’ve got to be open to thinking about the class size things. Not in a way that like, I think there could be tweaks to it that could actually still serve students and allow us to transition. Because we’re going to have to have new school buildings and we’re going to have to have more teachers and the state should be paying for that if they’re mandating it. And maybe there’s a way to phase it in a way that’s more reasonable.

But I think that revenues need to be raised and it’s going to come from the state. And it should be directed to the city. And that’s the way to fill the gap.

[Eli Miller] This is your second attempt at running for this seat. Tell us a little about what it was like in 2024. You got the incumbent, Daniel O’Donnell, to endorse you, which was a big coup, considering that you were mostly an outsider and one of your opponents, Micah Lasher, was someone who had been working in politics for two or three decades. So I guess, specifically, how did you get this endorsement? And more generally, what was that race like for you? What did you learn from that experience?

Eli Northrup

Yeah, I was an outsider. I mean, my entire career had been as a public defender and as an advocate. And I really saw myself as an advocate and was motivated to run because of, as an extension of my advocacy work. And also like, I felt like I had knowledge of what the job of an assembly member was and that I would be good at it because I’m a lawyer. I’d written-- I drafted bills that have become law. I’d been part of negotiations. And I felt like I could do the job as an assembly member.

But I had never been involved in electoral politics. It’s super intimidating to run. You put yourself out there in this major way. You don’t know if you can do the things you need to do-- raise money, build a volunteer base, gain support. You have to call everybody in your life that and ask them for something. I was used to being the person that people called. And all of a sudden, I’m calling everybody and asking them for something, which is an uncomfortable position to be in. The thing I’m proud of in that first race is that I brought my whole self to it, and I didn’t lose myself in it. I did not change my principles. The things that I said were things I believed, and I didn’t sacrifice for political gain. There was times when you’re constantly being pushed to do that. And so that’s something I felt strong about and that I like, I went hard. Like when I decided to do it, I really gave myself to it. And we ended up finishing second place in a field of five and, against a really, really strong opponent. Like I was the one who emerged to be the challenger. And I was really proud of the support I gained because it was authentic. It was people that believed in the things that I believed in and knew me as a fighter. and the elected officials and the Working Families Party and UAW, they all supported me because they knew what I was about.

So I do have to say though, like after losing, it’s devastating to lose. Like you have to convince yourself that you’re going to win to bring yourself to everything you need to do. And anybody from the outside probably would have like, you know, you have no chance. But it was really hard to lose. And then that fall, Trump won. And I was just like looking at politics and being like, it’s just not, I guess I was wrong about what people want. Like this is what I have to give is not what people are interested in. And I was very happy to be back at, you know, Bronx Defenders. Like I love the work that I do and I feel effective in it. And so I was going on about my life, like still like, obviously going to be involved in advocacy and politics, but was not thinking about like running again.

It’s just amazing how quickly things can shift. You know, Zohran, somebody I’ve known and respected as an assembly member and advocated with. Seeing him and the campaign he ran and the success of his campaign really inspired me. I was inspired by that because that was like, I was like, yeah, this is what I want too. And then Jerry Nadler steps down and Micah’s running for the seat and all of a sudden the assembly seats open again.

So the moment feels very different this time. I’m such a better candidate because I’ve been through it. And I know that I can do the things. I know I can stand up in front of a crowd and answer questions. You have a lot of self-doubt when you haven’t done something before. I proved myself to myself as a candidate. And I know that I will, no matter what happens, I’m not going to not be myself. I’m not going to turn into somebody different. I think that’s a really helpful thing about having done the work that I’ve done. If you can make it a decade in Bronx Criminal Court, you’re tested in all these different ways.

Yeah. This is a podcast about District Twelve. As someone who has experience running a campaign against Micah Lasher, what is that experience like? And do you have any advice for the other candidates in this race on how to run against Micah?

Eli Northrup

I never saw my campaign as running against Micah. I saw my campaign as running for the seat. Like I was just wanting to be myself. Remember when I announced two years ago, and I guess I didn’t really answer your question about Danny, but I will remind you, Danny was a public defender. He worked for the Legal Aid Society before he went into politics. And I think that that was something that he really valued and saw in me that we had that shared background, which is like really like, when I said that those are my people, that’s a special thing if you’ve done that, and I think that was one of the things that like I think enabled or maybe made it so Danny felt like he would go for me because he knew what my background was. But when I announced Micah was not running yet. So I never really saw it like that.

But I will say that this is somebody who is such a smart person on policy, has thought about policy from all these different angles. and is really good on a lot of different issues. And I may not agree with him, but he knows what he’s talking about. And I actually enjoyed that part of the campaign. I think it made me a better candidate. We really had substantive-- I think more than any other assembly race in the state, the 69ers, we’ve already had like 6 forums. You know what I mean? And people ask hard questions during these forums, and they’re expecting answers. So he had answers always.

And he was a political strategist for a long time. He’s run other people’s campaigns. So he’s got both the policy and the electoral thing down. And I was totally new to the electoral thing. I was learning it as I went. So, but you know, a congressional, this was his, this is where he grew up and his backyard really. And it’s a smaller district. And congressional races are, it’s bigger. And there’s so much money. And I feel like, I don’t quite know how people make decisions. And the winds are shifting. The political winds are shifting.

Obviously, I’m watching the race. I’ve been to a bunch of the forums because they take place at the political clubs at the same time. And I think it’s starting to-- it was like 12 people on stage at the Broadway Dems Forum. It’s starting to narrow down. I think by the end, there’s only going to be like four people really sticking around. Micah will definitely be one of them. I mean, I don’t know what will happen. I’m trying to focus on my race. I’m trying to keep my head down, but it’s swirling around.

Let me distract you from your race a little bit. Do you have a comment on whether you think George Conway would be a good representative for us in Congress?

I don’t think he would be. I don’t think he’s been able to answer basic questions about policy. And I was-- it doesn’t feel like he even knows the city very well. I mean, he said his favorite subway stop was the Hudson Yards 7 stop. That’s just… yeah, I don’t know. I don’t think he’s going to be in the mix at the end.

And same question, but for Jack Schlossberg. Do you think that he’s someone who you’d be excited about seeing in Congress?

Eli Northrup

It’s hard to say because I know Micah and Alex a lot more and have respect for their policy chops, and I know that they’ve done policy work. I first became aware of Jack through this campaign. He has a skill of getting young people excited. I think that when they start to have debates, and people are paying more attention to NY-12, there’s going to be hard questions. Can he answer those questions in the same way that those guys can? I mean, we’re going to see. You get better throughout the course of a campaign. I think if I had to bet, I think it’s going to come down to Micah and Alex.

I’ve gotten to meet Nina, who’s also running, and been impressed with a lot of her answers and who she is as a person. And I think she’s a first-time candidate. It’s hard to be a first time candidate, especially if you don’t have money or fame. And so I went through that. But that doesn’t mean that it’s a failure for people that want to put their hat-- anybody who ran, there’s a lot of people-- I want more people to feel like they can run, because that’s ultimately going to lead to better results is a bigger pool of people who care.

Yeah, we just had Nina on in that very chair that you’re in right now. So unfortunately not in time for Nina, but when we get the rest of the candidates on, what’s one question that you want us to ask them?

Ask them about criminal justice reform. Because I haven’t heard any of them talk about it. And our federal prison system is in disarray. We have a prison in Brooklyn that is in terrible condition. And we have these mandatory minimum sentences at the federal level, which coerce plea deals. And I’d like to know where people stand on that stuff. I haven’t heard that be a topic of conversation at all, because we forget about people. And there’s this feeling that people deserve what they get, but the United States is so antiquated with the way that we treat punishment. It’s really the punishment system that makes everything else so unfair. So, yeah, maybe ask them some questions about that. Mandatory minimums.

I have a million questions about that lined up. Eli Northrup, thank you so so much for coming on and speaking to us. It’s been really great.

Thanks Eli, thanks Laeo. It’s great to be with you both.

All right, Nina Schwalbe, thank you so much for coming on the podcast.

Thank you, Eli. Excited to be here.

So how’s it been going so far? This is your first campaign. What’s it been like?

It’s super fun. I get to meet New Yorkers and talk to them on the street and hear what’s making them happy and what’s bugging them. I love it.

That’s awesome. Is there anything that’s surprised you about the process or that you feel like you didn’t expect?

It’s definitely a club sport and I’m not part of the club and that surprised me, although it shouldn’t have, but it did. So there’s definitely a machine at work. And if you’re not part of the machine, it’s an uphill climb.

Okay, well, let’s jump to that then. I’ve heard you say that it’s really important to elect an outsider this cycle and that the machine keeps getting it wrong. You know, look at where we are right now. And my sense is that what you’re saying is obviously true. And also the machine remains pretty popular among NY-12 voters. So what is it to you that you think that the machine is getting wrong? What’s the key mistake they’re making and why are you the right direction to pivot in?

I think the machine is driven by inertia and people that do things the way that they’ve always been done. And I think that’s really what’s wrong with the Democratic Party. And we’ve started to call those legacy Democrats or people that have a right or follow the regular trail. I mean, I’m running for Congress. I do not want to be president. It is not on my pathway. And I don’t see this as a career step. I see it that we need a Congress that’s standing up for the people and doing the right thing. And this isn’t just like the next job. I would say the other thing about the Democratic machine is that, the answer I get from a lot of people when I say, hey, I’m running for Congress, people say like, oh, but I’ve known candidate X since he was 7. I’m like, well, that’s great, but does that make you a better Congress person than I would be? So there’s a lot of that kind of home team loyalty, and that’s on both the east sides and the west sides.

So with that in mind, my big question is: You have a glittering academic career, you’ve been an expert in public service. Why in the world are you running for office? Like what’s going on here? What motivated you to take this step and yeah, why are you doing this?

So about a year ago, just a little over a year ago, The government, led by Mr. RFK Jr., Mr. Trump, Mr. Musk, basically canceled my sector. 200,000 people, and counting, lost their jobs. Tens of millions of people lost access to health care. And according to a study by BU, over 750,000 people around the world actually died because we cut lifesaving programs. And nobody in Congress seemed to care or be the voice of the issue of health. And without health, we really can’t have democracy. So I just thought after a while, enough people said, maybe you should run. And I thought, maybe I should run because we can’t afford a country, a United States, a New York Twelve, that doesn’t have a robust public health system and our basic rights protected. And I didn’t see anybody else standing up for that.

One thing that I’ve noticed about how this race has been going for you so far is that you seem to be every candidate’s favorite candidate. I’ve heard Jack, he’s really gushed about you. He’s like, “If I wasn’t running, I’d probably be volunteering for Nina.” But also, Micah and Alex have said very nice things about you. Is that nice? Is that flattering? Is that kind of annoying? What do you think about that?

A very wise politician named Helen Clark, who’s the former Prime Minister of New Zealand and has endorsed my campaign.

The former Prime Minister of New Zealand endorsed your campaign?!

Correct. If you look on my endorsements page, Helen Clark’s.

That’s incredible.

Right Honorable Helen Clark is the first endorsement. And I heard her speak. She ran for Secretary General of the UN. And she said that the mistake that she made was that, or one of the mistakes that she made or that was made was that she was running against people. And her advice to future politicians is, don’t run against people, run for office. And I really took that to heart. So we’re all running for office. We shouldn’t be running against each other. We should be running for office. And I really like that ethos, and it’s important to me.

Yeah. Well, then you’re going to struggle with my next question, but that’s okay. Before we dive into policy stuff, I have one more table-setting thing, which is directly comparing you to the other candidates. Something that I wrote about a month ago, and that I’ve heard from a lot of voters as they’re trying to make sense of this race, is that there seems to be a lot of alignment. If you watch the forum that you guys did at Bank Street a month ago, or any other many places you’ve got a chance to speak, it seems like you’re all pretty much in lockstep on a lot of the big policy areas. And the thing that distinguishes everyone is background and experience.

It makes it difficult for people who are really like, ‘I want to vote for the most progressive candidate. I want to vote for the person who is closest to me on the spectrum.’ So my question for you is, are you the most progressive candidate in this race? Are you going to claim that?

One of the interesting things about the debates and how they’re set up is that you don’t really get to listen to the other candidates. So I think we’ve only had two opportunities in all of these interviews. There was an endorsement, a United Federation of Teachers endorsement where we all got to listen to each other, and then there was one of the forums where we all got to listen to each other. So I must say I have not spent my time in this race delving into everybody’s politics.

But I do believe that we need to abolish ICE. I think that and really reform the Department of Homeland Security in a massive way. I’ve worked for a major US agency, which was inefficient. And when a department isn’t working, you just have to get rid of it. Now, I know the others have said that too, or I understand the others have said that too.

I think on the issue of Israel and Gaza, I do believe that Israel is committing war crimes and should be tried for genocide, and I think that makes me stand out from the other candidates.

And the other area is LGBTQ plus rights. I mean, I think everybody agrees. I don’t want to speak for the other candidates, but trans kids right now are being targeted by the right, they’re being scapegoated by the right and we’re falling for it. And this is a highly marginalized group of people who have need healthcare and mental health needs met.

The other issues are, I believe that housing is a human right. I believe that healthcare is a human right. And I don’t believe that market economics solves for social issues. And I’ve seen that in decades of work, particularly around vaccines. So I don’t believe that the market solves issues that the government fundamentally needs to take care of. So I guess that puts me on the left.

Yeah. Well, let’s go to...

You tell me, is that on the left?

That’s definitely on the left. As you say, the abolish ICE stuff, I think you’re all pretty aligned. Israel and housing stuff may be a little bit less so.

Let’s go to housing then. So I read that you have two sons who are about our age and/or just graduating college?

One is a junior in college and one graduated in December.

Congratulations. And so I’m sure he and you have both noticed that if he wants to move back to Manhattan right now, and to this district in particular…

I’m going to cut to the chase. He lives with his parents.

As did I after I graduated. The housing market is insane. Why do you think that is? What can we do to fix it? And specifically, why do you think this district has struggled to construct new affordable housing? You know, in the ballot measures that we just passed, one of the things that it’s doing is taking more extreme steps for the areas, the neighborhoods that haven’t built affordable housing at the rate that they’re supposed to. And the Upper West Side and the Upper East Side are two of the six worst offenders in that area. So why is this, why are we in this position and what do we need to do about it?

Well, let’s start with what we need to do about it. Because I think looking back, I’m not sure. I think that there was a time in the 80s and 90s when we assumed that markets solved problems for poor people. And as I mentioned earlier, in vaccines, there used to be a mantra that said, and I worked on a project that said, making markets work for vaccines. And the concept actually even won a Nobel Prize, but it doesn’t really work. And we saw in COVID, that it doesn’t really work. Actually, poor people don’t get the vaccines. And I think it’s the same as housing. 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.

So moving forward, I’ve been struggling with how to explain why we shouldn’t destroy Chelsea Fulton housing, which I know is an issue that you’ve also been following closely. And what I want to say is: My parents are no longer alive, but if they were, they lived on 69th Street in Lexington in a small building. I’d like to say to them, well, would you like me to just knock down your house and I’m going to build a tall tower and you can live there? Of course, they would say no.

And I think about the population density in many of these areas. Housing is a right, it should be guaranteed for everyone. And elderly people shouldn’t have to move if they don’t want to. So for me, it just walks it down from, is there a market solution to this problem? Or are we really talking about where people live, which is most fundamental? I’ve spoken to so many people in the district who are rent burdened, young people, old people, let alone the kids who have to live with their parents. I don’t mind my kids living with me. I think it’s great, actually.

I’ve had a good time living with my parents too, but…

They might want to move out at some point. But supply is not, we have to lower the cost overall. Everybody is rent burdened. And so we have to lower the cost for everybody. And there are ways to do that, proven policy interventions like vouchers. Vouchers is a way the federal government can alleviate rent burden.

The other thing that I’ve been struck by, which again, you’re surely more of an expert than me in this topic is apartment warehousing, where landlords in rent stabilized apartment buildings leave apartments empty and they call it warehousing. And that’s because they don’t want to release those apartments under rent stabilization. They want to wait until Albany changes the law and lets them rent them at market rate. So there’s a building right next to mine on 97th Street where there are 60 apartments that are warehoused. What about those 60 apartments? So let’s start there. And there are things that we can do.

Yeah. So I have two responses to that.

Some of this NYCHA housing, these apartments are in very bad states of disrepair. There’s asbestos, there’s mold, there’s basic utilities that they’re struggling to provide. They’re substandard living conditions. It’s really like an act of violence that the city is doing to a lot of these people.

And NYCHA has a $78 billion backlog of capital repairs it needs to make. I think housing is a human right, I agree with you on that. What can we do to help the hundreds of thousands of people in NYCHA housing right now and who are going to live there for the next 20, 30 years? What can we do to get them the repairs and quality of housing they deserve?

Yeah, we can fast track those repairs and get them the federal funding that should be allocated. We should be getting federal funding that we’re not. And I would love to see our Congress people, and I will stand up to make sure. Congress has appropriated money for housing here in New York, and we’re not getting it. The administration is holding on to it. And then we can fast-track. When I was down at Chelsea Fulton, people talked about all the ways you could fast-track repairs. For me, the tragedy and the crime is that we know those repairs need to happen and they’re not happening.

I agree that that’s a tragedy and a crime. I think the reason they’re not happening is because we, the city and the state, don’t have $78 billion. And both Democrat and Republican administrations of the past fifty years have been consistently unwilling to fund that kind of a project to that kind of a scale. And so it’s just gotten worse and worse. So I mean, if what you’re telling me is that you’re going to go to Congress and get us that kind of money and build a coalition for that, then that seems awesome. But short of that, and while we wait for that, I do think that we need to consider other solutions.

But we don’t have to keep going back and forth on this particular issue, except that I’m wondering, how do you think about this in general? This is sort of a metaphor for a bunch of different things. The idea that there are these people and they don’t want to move. And moving them is very painful to them, and it’s something that we should take really seriously. When you’re approaching a problem like this, how do you make space in your decision-making framework for hidden downsides of keeping the status quo? How do you generally think about that?

Yeah, that’s a great question. So for me, it’s about looking at the data and the evidence, and it’s looking at, so we have higher rates of asthma, as you mentioned. There are mold in those apartments. So what’s been the remediation plan for those apartments immediately, and how do we put a hierarchy to the urgent risks versus the less urgent risk? And we know that things like we have elderly people in elevators, and the elevators get broken. That seems like an imminently fixable problem. So first to say, you know, what’s urgent and high-risk and how do we fix that?

And then what are the longer-term solutions? So we focus first on what is the high-risk issue which can and should be fixed immediately to protect people’s health. And then the question is, what’s the solution? And that usually involves engagement with the community. So come up with hypotheses, come up with answers, but then engage with the community on what’s right for them.

And for me, that also in this area involves looking at the history. One of the things that strikes me about this is, I live in an area called Park West Village, which is on 100th Street and Central Park West. And the more I learn about the history of those housing projects, I’ve learned now, being schooled by many of my neighbors and long-term residents, that was one of those areas that Robert Moses mowed down. And what did our community lose? And we haven’t, so that’s essentially what we’re doing again. We’re sort of mowing down areas. And what are we going to lose in terms of the community, the neighborhood, and the things that make New York, New York when that happens? So being informed by the past to help decide our future decisions.

So it’s a systematic process. And the answers may be, if we go through that process, some things we haven’t thought of before.

I must say the other part of this housing issue that I find interesting seems to be the strong voice of the real estate lobby. And for me, that’s very similar to what we deal with in the health field. If the healthcare industry is really on the side of something, then it means we need to step back and take a look. And that also worries me about this issue. So I just would like to hear more debate, step back and have more debate. It’s a new process in which we look at the data, the evidence, and we consult with the community.

And you think that the RAD-PACT process that NYCHA went through from 2019 to now and ongoing is insufficient? We need to do more of that?

Well, we have a bunch of residents that are unhappy and old people, and it’s mostly black and brown people who say they didn’t really get it, what’s happening, and we need to hear their voices too. I think instead of just shutting them down and saying, you were asked, which is what I hear people say, you were asked, you voted for it, let’s move along, that just doesn’t work for people. And particularly low-income black and brown people and elderly people. That just seems wrong. So let’s step back and find a new solution that works for them and works for others too.

I think for the Robert Moses, and this is the first time I’ve actually spoken out loud, but it’s, for me, it’s the idea of steamrolling through a problem and ignoring people’s voices in the community. And what does it mean when you just steamroll through? Like, we decided this, we’re doing it anyway, we’re knocking down all these houses and we’re moving forward in the name of progress. I just think sometimes you need to take a beat and stop and listen again. And I think we have some really good examples of that having happened in the city.

Can I ask you, with that framework in mind: On 100th in Amsterdam, there’s a library, Bloomingdale Library, and it’s like a three or four story library and it’s on a big plot of land and so and it’s city owned. The idea is to knock it down and build a 30 story monstrosity and the first five stories will be a library and then the rest of it will be a mix of market rate and affordable housing. And the market rate will cross subsidize both the affordable and also the library.

Obviously, this is a project that people are bringing up a lot of similar concerns about, why are we steamrolling through? Why are we Robert Moses-ing this old thing that has been in the neighborhood for a while. And then, of course, there’s concerns about construction noise, and there’s concerns about how ugly this building is going to be. The issues you’re bringing up right now about, you know, blasting through Robert Moses style, how do you sort that out on a project like this?

Yeah, it’s interesting. I’ve heard, I’ve spoken to a number of neighborhood advocates, because that’s right, literally on my block, about how they feel about it. And I haven’t heard the knocking down that library, which people consider a relatively nice library, or that health center is the big concern. The concern I’ve heard from the tenants associations that I’ve spoken to, particularly in the buildings that are still rent stabilized, is the ratio of affordable housing to market rate housing. And they talk about a project also that was done a little bit further uptown, which is a similar project. I think it was 147th Street, is that right?

The one that was then turned into a truck stop, right?

But that the problem isn’t the library or having some portion of it be market rate, it’s the ratio of the two. And I think that seems like a fair concern. That’s again what the tenants, I’ve spoken to now three tenants associations in the neighborhood, and they’ve all raised that as the concern.

Yeah, and I mean, I would love it if that building was going to be 100% affordable. I think that…

The other concern that, and I’m just listening to people, I mean, I don’t, that’s also part of a public health approach is you actually just talk to people and you listen to people and you evolve your thinking based on data and evidence that you get. That doesn’t mean you change your mind. Housing is a human right. but how you get to that realization of that as a human right should be informed by data and evidence.

I was talking to an advocate at Manhattan Plaza, another subsidized housing building in our district, and one of the things that bothers them is that the financing isn’t transparent. Now, I haven’t looked at that, but they say, we don’t know what the ROI is. We have none of the numbers. It’s just like, hi, we’re going to subsidize this. We’re going to do market rate here. We’re going to subsidize here. Believe us.

So one of the things that they’re calling for is more transparency in the numbers. And for me, that goes across government. And I think that’s a role of Congress, because many of these projects are funded by federal dollars as well, and what are the actual numbers? What is the profit margin?

And we can pivot now to the pharmaceutical industry, because that’s something I’ve worked on a lot, is drug companies say, It takes $400 million to develop a new vaccine. And we’ve been saying for decades, okay, show us the numbers. Like, show us your actual numbers. How did you get to 400 million? How did you get to your ROI? Like, show us the numbers. No, It takes $400 million. And from what I heard these tenants associations saying over the last couple of weeks, they want to see the numbers on these buildings.

I would totally agree that there should be more transparency. I think that I might quibble with the idea that without significant additional resources from the government in some way, you can make the numbers work on that project or in a lot of projects. The tragedy is that we don’t have the money to just subsidize tons of housing on the Upper West Side. If what you’re telling me is that you’re going to go to Congress and you’re going to unlock tons more money and we’re going to get federal funding raining down on us, that sounds awesome. But I think a lot of these policy conversations happen in the context of assuming that’s not going to be the case.

The Trump administration spent $200 billion on the war in Iran. There is money there to be unlocked.

And there’s money for our subway systems, and we just went through the tunnel thing, Second Avenue Subway. There is money there that has already been appropriated by Congress and should be now allocated to our city.

Yeah. All right. So let’s jump to public health. This is your signature issue. You’ve worked on vaccine distribution. I imagine that this is something you could talk about forever.

My children prefer that I don’t, but I could.

At a different time, I would prefer that you do. But if you had to distill it down to maybe like 90 seconds, what is, this is captain obvious question, but what is wrong with what the federal government status quo is on public health right now? And I’m wondering if you could speak both to the problems that are Trump administration and RFK specific, and also the problems that you’ve observed your entire career across administrations.

They’re ignoring the evidence. That’s the number one problem. And they’re ignoring it… We talk about myths and disinformation in my field, and mis is just like you got it wrong, and dis is you’re actively promoting the wrong story. So they’re ignoring the evidence and they’re promoting disinformation about the evidence. They have defunded all of the systems that keep us safe, from the Centers for Disease Control, which as you know now doesn’t have a head, but people who run what’s called a level 5 biosecurity lab, which contains all of the scariest pathogens you’ve ever heard of, is understaffed or unstaffed. So from there to defunding basic research, cancer research, all the research which makes us healthy, they’ve destroyed it already. Basically, they gave Mr. Musk a delete key, and he just deleted our public health system.

Yeah, I mean, horrifying. Are there problems that have been going on for decades that you also think we’ve neglected for too long? Or do you see this as a singular sort of Trump issue, that things were mostly actually in pretty good shape in 2023 and then Trump came to power and ruined everything?

I think COVID exposed a number of problems with our public health system, which that it’s been chronically underfunded for decades. We have a lack of access to primary health care, which means basically people don’t have a family doctor anymore. And services are not as comprehensive as they should be. And I’m sure you’ve talked to older people who are on Medicare and don’t have access to glasses or dental. So there are some chronic problems that have been pervasive. But one of the things that has been done really, really well in the United States of America is control of infectious diseases. And that’s kind of what the federal government, that’s like a basic function. In fact, the CDC was founded around control of infectious diseases for immigrants coming to the US. And they just destroyed that. They get 100% credit.

Yeah.

I mean, we were talking the other day about, I was in Washington last week and I was on a panel with Tony Fauci and we had a discussion in advance of the panel about what was sort of bugging people. And one of the things one woman said is she said, we’re about to have the FIFA, the soccer tournament now. We have no public health system in place to control. We would normally have had for an Olympics, public health teams deployed everywhere so that if there was any sign of any suspicious fevers, there was an immediate alert system. That system is not in place. That is terrifying.

And our system was seen as the best in the world. I mean, the world relied on our Centers for Disease Control, not only for the work that they did here in the United States, but also for the support they gave to others in terms of controlling infectious diseases.

Yeah. What’s the playbook for rebuilding that? I mean, things are much easier to destroy than rebuild.

The playbook for rebuilding is to hire back up quickly. I mean, for good or for bad, a lot of people who were laid off have not yet found work and they’re still ready to come back. So that’s the first part of the playbook. But it’s not going to be easy. And every day it gets worse and harder. There has to be a strong statement from our federal government unequivocally about why we all need to be vaccinated, why that’s important, both for ourselves, for our children, for our neighbors and family members, and putting in place a strong, credible voice for science.

Yeah, the vaccine thing in particular is really scary. With that in mind, the two polls that I looked up in advance of this: in 2019, 84% of Americans said that it was either very important or extremely important for parents to get their children vaccinated. So 84 in 2019, in 2024, that’s down to 69, so 15% drop. Still above 50, so it’s still a popular proposition, but less so. Another scary poll is that in 2019, 73% of Americans said science has a mostly positive effect on America. In 2023, that number’s down to 57. How do you explain this sort of loss of trust that Americans have had in the systems that you’re describing?

Some of it is active disinformation campaigns, and we can see that when we go on YouTube or TikTok. There is just active disinformation. And one of those types of disinformation is if you were on TikTok or Instagram during covid vaccine and you are a young man, you may have seen an ad that says, take a cold shower. It’s just as good as being immunized. And that was pervasive. And that is, that requires rules and regulations to combat.

And the other part is that, and this is less about me running for Congress, but maybe it has an analogy, but in my field, we’ve had a lot of thinking about how people want information in a soundbite in two words, and issues are complicated. And it’s very hard to do that. And we’ve come to a place where yes, no, yes, no, as opposed to when it’s complicated, we’ve lost the plot on how to explain that to people. And one thing that we think a lot about in public health is how do you communicate uncertainty? It’s very hard to communicate uncertainty and risk. We think the weather people do a good job. Like there’s a 30% chance of rain and you’re like, I don’t really know if it’s gonna rain or not, but you kind of get what that means. And in public health, when we talk about there’s a 1% chance of X, Y, and Z. People don’t, it’s very hard to process. We have to be much more honest in public health about what we know and what we don’t know and just be able to be honest about the science and what’s certain and what’s not.

On healthcare, One of the things that I’d like to pass in Congress, when I’m in Congress, I will pass something called the National Health Security Act. because we have a lot of people in this district and around the country, but also in this district that they can’t get a doctor’s appointment and they can’t afford their drugs, their basic drugs. It’s like when I’m standing on the street canvassing, I hear that from everybody and it’s about them, their parents. It’s as critical as the housing issue. And when the cuts come from the big ugly bill in the fall, it will just get 10 times worse for people. 30% of people in our district rely on some sort of subsidized health care. So one is to lower the cost of drugs. And I have negotiated down the cost of cervical cancer vaccines by 65%. It is possible. And it’s about pushing the data to say, look guys, how much profit do you really need on this? It’s about data and evidence.

The second is making sure everybody has a primary health care doctor. We have a great system called community health centers. We have Ryan Health, there’s one in our neighborhood right down the street, where everybody can go get a checkup if they need it or call their doctor if their kid has a fever. It’s old school.

And the third is we have Medicaid, we have Medicare, and we have an increasingly unaffordable care act, but an affordable health care act. We need to protect those and expand those. And it’s all doable and it’s much less money than we’re about to spend on this war.

All right. Wrapping up a little bit. So I’ve heard you talk about how this field is you and four guys. Do you have a comment on what it’s been like running as basically…?

There is another woman still in the race, and she’s still very much in the race. I would say it’s bizarre. Like in my world, we call out these things called “manels”. Is that a word you guys know? It’s a big thing in my world. A manel is like a panel with only men. And we call it a manel. And there was a huge movement of like hashtag manel every time you saw a man.

I can’t believe that in New York 12, we are only paying attention to the guys. It’s crazy! So the New York Times has run stories on four of the guys and none of the women. And for a long time, when they listed other candidates in the race, they didn’t list any of the women. Now Laura and I wrote to the ethics editor of the Times, and now they seem to be at least listing the women. But it’s crazy. This is New York 12. Bella Abzug at one point was our representative. We are the feminist center of the universe here. And it’s crazy to me that it’s a boys’ club. I almost can’t get over it. A majority of our district is women. What the heck? What do you think? Why is that?

Well, on this particular program, you’re our first active candidate to come on. So we’re being the change we want to see. With that said, the four men you’re running against happen to be quite famous and prominent and have huge social media followings or have long records in elected office.

I mean, long records, not so long.

That’s a.. I mean, it’s interesting with Micah, because he has a long record of not being in elected office, but being behind the scenes for people that are.

That’s right.

You’re right that Alex is two terms, a little bit more fresh.

On the topic of viability and who’s getting what coverage and who’s being taken seriously, someone actually wrote to me and asked “why aren’t you writing more about Nina?” Which I took as a sign that you’re onto something because you have fans that are very excited about you.

And I wrote this person back and I said, you know, I’d love to have Nina on my podcast. And also, I think that it’s a tough road for her. Because as you say, it’s a insider-y club, specifically among the political elite community of this district.

And also because sort of downstream of that, you’re going to need volunteers. You’re going to need money, which we haven’t even talked about. But you’re going to need people who are not only excited about you, like ‘you seem really smart and great, and I agree with you,’ but ‘I need specifically Nina to win. And I need that so much that I am going to take out time for my day and knock on doors and hand out petitions.’

So make the case to someone who’s thinking about volunteering, why do they need to be focused on this, why do they need to devote time, to really start pounding the pavement for you?

Yeah, we’re changing democracy back to what it should be. We’re a volunteer-driven campaign. We have over 100 volunteers. We’ve collected all of our petitions through volunteers, no paid petitioners. And we’re talking to people about what they care about. And that’s the way democracy should work. I was going to run for Congress. I spoke to my cousin who ran for Congress on Long Island, and he lost. And I said, John, should I run Congress? And he’s like, Nina, if you have a passport and something to say, you can run for office. I was like, damn straight. I love that. And that’s true. Democracy shouldn’t have to cost $1,000,000 to run, and certainly not $5 million PACs and this and that. We should be able to do it through getting on the street and talking to people.

And that is what our campaign is about. And so far, it’s amazing. And what I love, we talked a little bit about, I stand on the street corner and people say like, I heard about you from my cousin, or I read about you in the West Side Rag, or now they’ll say, I heard you on Eli’s podcast. And that’s amazing. So this is old school. Friends and family get on the street. We want to show people that you cannot buy America. And $5 million PAC money, you know, that’s just crap. We got to get back to talking to people, figuring out what they want, and putting regular people in Congress.

Yeah. Well, that’s a great place to close it. Our last question, it’s a little bit different because you’re a candidate, but we’ve been asking everyone, ‘What’s one thing that we should ask to the candidates when they come on?’

I should say that we covered some of the things that we were asked to ask you. I mean, we could rifle through a few of them if you want. Someone wanted to know what everyone’s favorite local business was. Do you have a quick answer to that?

I don’t have quick answers to those questions. I’m way too like, I don’t know. What I love about New York is that it can change every day.

Yeah.

The question that I would ask is, if you were offered the role of president today, would you take it? Because I think a lot of these guys want to be president, and this is a stepping stone for them. So I would want to know, like, honestly speaking, if somebody said tomorrow you could be president of the United States, would you take the job? Is that really what you’re running for?

So let me ask you then, if you could take the job of United States president tomorrow, what would you… would you do it?

No, because I think it should be an elected process by the people, and I think it would be completely inappropriate for somebody to just become president.

That’s a great answer... wait, so is the question, do you want to be president tomorrow, or is the question, do you want to be president one day?

Well, that’s kind of the trick of the question.

I see. Do you have a comment on whether you’d want to be president one day?

I do not want to be president. I do not want to be president. I would like to be a member of Congress and make sure that we have checks and balances because if our Congress isn’t working, the whole system doesn’t work. And that to me is, you know, the chief executive comes and goes. But if the chief executive isn’t checked and balanced by the other two parts of government, something we all learned in civics class in 6th grade, and I think we all thought it was true, but now we see it’s not, is we have a court system, and we have a Congress, and we have a president, and they’re three different branches, and they hold each other in check. And unless and until we fix that, we don’t have a democracy. So for me, there’s nothing more important. And I’m definitely not qualified to be a Supreme Court judge.

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

Thank you very much, Eli. Thanks so much.

Programming Note: The next three episodes of my NY-12 podcast series District Twelve are out now. If you’re interested in this blog, I think you’ll really like them. You can find my conversation with political strategist Chris Sosa here, with campaign finance reform researcher Grady Yuthok Short here, and with YIMBY advocate Sam Deutsch here.

“A primary is hard to forecast with a model, but it’s just as hard to forecast without a model, [because] a model gives you discipline,” Nate Silver wrote in the Spring of 2016, in his mea culpa on why he failed to predict Trump’s overwhelming victory in the Republican primary. “And discipline is a valuable resource when everyone is losing their mind in the midst of a campaign.”

Like Silver in the 2016 Republican presidential primary, I do not have a statistical model to forecast the NY-12 race. It’s not that I’m too lazy, or don’t know how to make one.1 There’s just not enough polling data. When Nate Silver builds his general election presidential forecast model, he gets five to ten new public-facing polls a week to feed into his number-crunching machine. Local elections nerds like Michael Lange do not have that luxury. Even in an extremely well-funded city-wide mayoral primary, there were maybe ten high-quality polls over the course of the entire race. Lange’s famous block-by-block prediction did not rely on a polling model, just a spreadsheet of every precinct’s demographics, past local election results, and Lange’s personal, artisanal sense of the vibes. And that was a city-wide race. For a congressional district with only a few hundred thousand voters, I assumed I’d have to rely on vibes alone, at least until May. I’d have to find the discipline that Silver described somewhere else.

Instead, this week, we got three different polls. They are all internals, which means they were commissioned by a campaign or interest group, and probably skewed their methodology to boost their side a bit. But they are all from well-respected pollsters, and contrary to what I sarcastically tweeted last week, everyone I’ve talked to agrees that none of them are “fake.” And their results are shocking.

The Conway campaign’s internal, from the pollster GQR, has Schlossberg with 25%, Conway with 16%, Bores and Lasher tied at 11%, and 33% undecided. Bores’s internal, from Public Policy Polling, shows a virtual three-way tie, with Bores at 20%, Lasher at 19%, Schlossberg at 18%, and Conway at 13%, with 30% “not sure.” And Schoen Cooperman, working for the anti-Bores AI supervillain PAC Leading the Future, has Schlossberg with 23%, ten whole points over Conway at 13%, Bores at 11%, and Lasher (!) at 6%.

“Discipline is a valuable resource in the midst of a campaign when everyone is losing their minds,” Silver said. If you want discipline, check out the Kalshi market for this race. On March second, before any of these polls came out, Kalshi gave Lasher a 55% of winning, Bores 24%, and Schlossberg 12%. Yesterday morning, when I started writing this, it was Lasher at 54%, Bores 22% and Schlossberg 25%. According to the smart money, essentially nothing of note has happened in the past two weeks.

But if you want to hear from someone who is losing their mind, read this blog. Right around March second, I confidently told AMNY reporter Adam Daly that I believed Lasher had about a 70% chance, Bores had a 25% chance and Schlossberg had maybe 2%. At one point he asked me straight up: “can you tell me what it would take for Jack to win?” I thought about it for fifteen seconds and then smugly replied: “No, I really don’t see a path.”

Yesterday, after these polls, I told someone that I think Jack is the favorite, and might be more likely to win than everyone else combined. I have no discipline and I am losing my mind.

In fairness, it’s not just me. On Thursday, the Lasher campaign rolled out its Mike Bloomberg endorsement package, which included posts from both Bloomberg and Lasher’s accounts, and a full-length Nicholas Fandos piece in the Times, where Fandos reported that Bloomberg would personally contribute $5 million to a Lasher-aligned SuperPAC. Superficially, this is a display of strength. Bloomberg is easily the most popular living mayor among NY-12 residents, he still has plenty of connections among NYC politics powerbrokers, and most importantly, he has billions of dollars and no compunction about shoveling millions of them into campaigns he likes.

But Bloomberg’s support was always a virtual guarantee for Lasher, who served as the former mayor’s lead state policy negotiator in Albany fifteen years ago, and has remained close ever since. Lasher likely could have announced this endorsement the day he launched his campaign if he’d wanted to. He didn’t, probably because he would like to keep himself open to as many different voters as possible for as long as he can, and allying with a polarizing figure like Bloomberg so firmly will turn off more than a few people. In a now deleted Tweet, mayoral candidate, anti-Mamdani stalwart, and former guest of the Ghost Runner extended podcast universe Whitney Tilson wrote that he was excited to endorse Lasher as well, and that he was excited about electing leaders like Lasher and Dan Goldman to Congress. “If Bloomberg and Tilson are backing Micah Lasher, it’s official Alex Bores o’clock for me” responded popular progressive strategist Adam Carlson. By the end of the day, both Schlossberg and Bores issued fiery statements about how they were proud not to be funded by shady billionaires.

To be clear, a Bloomberg endorsement probably wins more voters than it turns off in this district. But still, this is an entirely predictable backlash that Lasher would have liked to delay if possible. Last year, for example, Cuomo’s campaign did not announce Bloomberg’s endorsement (and accompanying infusion of ten million dollars into his affiliate super PAC) until a few weeks before Election Day. The fact that Lasher’s team decided not to delay any further, that they wanted the endorsement boost (and cash) now even if it came with some blowback, indicates that I am not alone in losing my mind about these polls. They are acting like they also believe that Schlossberg might be in position to win this thing, and they are adjusting their strategy accordingly.

How is this possible? For months now, I’ve told you that local community connections win these elections, that Lasher is dominating the battle for endorsements, that inexperienced outsiders have an extremely narrow path to victory here because these local groups are so popular and so entrenched, and that Jack Schlossberg in particular has neither the technical skills nor the local connections to walk that narrow path.

These polls have forced me to reexamine all of these arguments. And while I’m not ready to go full Nate Silver mea culpa “How I Missed Trump” yet, I do think there are a few points where my reasoning has been a bit sloppy. If you break it down, I’ve been saying two different things: First, that Schlossberg practically does not have the ability to win over voters in this district, and second (lurking in the background), that I think he’s an unserious candidate who would be a bad Congressman, that I find his candidacy so vapid it’s kind of insulting.

I’ve blurred these arguments together, using anecdotes of him flubbing an answer at a candidate forum or being unable to speak coherently for more than ten minutes at an event I attended, as evidence that voters won’t find him compelling. But those anecdotes are really evidence that I personally don’t find him compelling. And I only vote once.

And, if I’m honest, these anecdotes are not really the core of why I am not a fan. I’m not a figure-skating judge. I’m interested in this race because I think it matters a lot, because our next congressperson will have a lot of power, and because I have strong opinions on how they should wield it. Jack Schlossberg could be a much stronger public speaker (and it seems like he has gotten better over the course of this campaign), and I’d still believe that he would wield power extremely poorly.

Your mileage may vary, though. “Politics is about making the community feel heard,” local political strategist Chris Sosa told me in our conversation this week. I was thinking about this quote when I watched Sosa interview Schlossberg at an event at Inspir Carnegie Hill, an assisted living facility on Second Avenue. “I want a future where people believe in something again.” Schlossberg told the crowd. “In the past, people believed in government. People believed in the federal government’s ability to solve problems, that Congress was confident, that the government cared about them.” He then discussed his connection to this past, describing the legacy of his grandfather, who “fought communism” and “fought for civil rights,” his mother’s (relatively recent) work as a diplomat, and how the two of them took a trip last year to a small island in the South Pacific (he went into a lot of detail about this, and about how they had to take three different planes to get there), where his grandfather had fought heroically in World War II.

This is basically Schlossberg’s pitch. You can watch the rest of the interview if you want, but I promise you will not find a more coherent distillation of his political identity and agenda in there. He does not mention a key issue that he’s passionate about, or a subgroup of constituents that he wants to lift up and advocate for, or any other overarching theme to his campaign. He’s running because he wants you to believe in something again. That’s his slogan. “Believe in Something Again.” It doesn’t make me feel heard.

For one thing, it doesn’t make me feel heard because as a policy nerd, I’m annoyed by the vagueness. Believe in what, exactly? That vagueness is particularly concerning in this race, because parachuting into local politics with no prior experience (or seemingly, prior interest) has made him an exceptionally easy mark. I do not believe that past experience as an elected official is always necessary, or even good, for a politician, but one thing it does train you in (if you’re serious about it), is the ability to calibrate, or even tune out, the loud voices of a well-organized, highly-concentrated interest group that claims to speak for everyone, even though they make up a tiny minority of your constituency.

Schlossberg does not have this ability. In his first foray into local politics, he has forcefully sided with Layla Law-Gisiko’s movement to resist the NYCHA RAD-PACT redevelopment of the Fulton Elliot Chelsea complex. I got into the weeds on this on this project in my conversation with Sam Deutsch this week (and there are a lot of weeds), but the rough shape of it is that NYCHA wants to demolish and rebuild a public housing complex in Chelsea, build all the current tenants brand-new apartments, and pack a lot of new affordable and market rate housing into the complex to cross-subsidize the whole project. Law-Gisiko (who is not a NYCHA resident), and a minority of current residents, oppose this, and believe that NYCHA should repair the existing buildings and not build anything else. NYCHA would love to do that, but they have a $78 billion, and steadily growing, backlog of capital repairs, and absolutely no line of sight on that money. The federal government is really the only possible solution for a need of that size. NYCHA has asked for federal help for decades, and one HUD director after another has essentially spat in their faces. So they’ve been forced to get creative, and this project is a tangible way to give current residents the modern, livable housing they deserve, while also unlocking excess value for the neighborhood and the city. Law-Gisiko and co would prefer that they do not do this, and instead figure out a different plan for current tenants, later, maybe.

To Schlossberg (and Alex Bores, who won Law-Gisiko’s Chelsea Reform Democrats Club endorsement last month) this is a story of a downtrodden group of tenants fighting the good fight against the evil forces of extractive capitalism. To Micah Lasher, who told the Chelsea Reform Democrats Club that he supports the project because there is no other viable option, this is a story about tradeoffs, and about not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. Bores probably made a calculation that he could win the endorsement with some light sympathetic signaling, and hasn’t talked about it since. Schlossberg lost the endorsement, but has made this the core local issue of his campaign anyway. Going all in on the first well-organized constituency group that knocks on your door, to the detriment of all your other constituents, is (to me) almost the definition of a “rookie mistake.”

Schlossberg has developed an eclectic mix of other policies that he believes set him apart in this race. They are, almost without exception, tax cuts! He wants renters to be able to deduct rent from their taxes, something that would be nice for me, but even nicer for someone who pays three times as much as me in rent. He wants actors to be able to deduct their representation expenses from their taxes. If you come to him with a sympathetic interest group, he’ll probably find a way to cut your taxes too. This isn’t just a Schlossberg thing, in fairness, there are lots of Democrats trying to jump onto the affordability wave with proposals for sweeping, progressive-sounding tax cuts right now, including Cory Booker, Chris Van Hollen, and Katie Porter. We have a $2 trillion deficit, along with a weakened dollar that makes debt financing increasingly expensive, and as a progressive who actually does “believe in government” and who actually does want the social welfare state to be able to fund things like, for example, renovations to public housing stock, I find this really dispiriting. There is a whole political party dedicated to winning votes by offering voters personalized tax cuts. They’re called Republicans, and if Schlossberg (and Porter, and the others) want to do politics this way, I’m sure the GOP would be happy to have them. This, again, is a pitfall of a candidate who wants to believe in something, and doesn’t care much what that something is.

But the “something” is not the important word in Schlossberg’s slogan. It’s “Again,” a word that, not coincidentally, is also the final word of a different, extremely popular political slogan. “Wouldn’t it be nice if everything was basically the same, except things were a bit calmer and we didn’t have to deal with this angry Trump guy?” Schlossberg seems to offer. Or, to put it more bluntly, “Wouldn’t it be nice if it was the 1960s again?”

Who does this make feel heard? Certainly not me. I have absolutely no nostalgia for that time, when the Vietnam War was beginning, there was still not enough political support in Congress for the Civil Rights Act, and the median American family’s income was less than $50k in today’s dollars. As a former criminal justice reform researcher and advocate, I have a hard time having nostalgia even for 2015, when the Obama administration eagerly deported hundreds of thousands of people and New York City’s bail laws let Black teenagers like Kalief Browder languish in Rikers for years if they were accused of stealing a backpack.

So that’s me. But who else might feel heard? Not the tens of thousands of Gen Z influencers who follow Schlossberg’s cringy social media content out of morbid fascination. They don’t have any more nostalgia for the 1960s than I do. And not the many members of the hyper-organized local political organizational machine, who resoundingly rejected Schlossberg at every single political club forum. “We want our Representative to be a scholar.” Daniel Marks Cohen of the Three Parks Independent Democrats told me last month. “We require depth.”

No, the demographic that Schlossberg’s campaign is laser-focused on is old people. Not the ones who follow local politics obsessively, go to political club meetings, and pass out literature on the street. But the others, the tens of thousands of Baby Boomers in this district who aren’t that locked in on a local level, but who watch MSNBC for hours every day, read every word that Heather Cox Richardson writes, freely donate to national Democratic campaigns, and most importantly, turnout to vote more than any other demographic. Crucially, this is the group of people that believes Schlossberg when he talks about how his social media presence gives him the experience and skills to fight the right in the modern age. People my age can be disabused of this claim with a quick perusal of his instagram content, or his disjointed, off-putting, vaguely Trumpy tweeting style. But the older voters of this district are more susceptible, not because they are inherently more gullible, but because they don’t use social media. If he says he’s a good poster, they’re more likely to shrug and take his word for it.

Politics is a spectator sport for most of these people (and I’m grateful for that, because many of you choose to spectate by reading my blog!) Not all! Some might have specific policy priorities, and on the Upper West Side especially, many have a long history of engaging meaningfully in local progressive politics. But for many others, in their heart of hearts, the sum of their political ambitions is that they would like the news that they watch and read every day to seem a little less scary. A nice, handsome young man with a connection to a politician they loved is offering them exactly that, and nothing more.

I have deep empathy for these people. The news has, in fact, gotten quite scary. They, like everyone else, deserve an elected official who makes them feel heard. I sincerely hope that another candidate gets in there and makes them feel that way too. They have a little more than three months to pull it off, but so far, there’s not a lot of evidence, polling or otherwise, that they will have more success than Schlossberg.

Correction: A previous version of this blog reported that George Conway had received 30% of the vote in the Bores internal poll. He only received 13% in that poll. I regret the error, and sincerely appreciate the many people who reached out to me today to correct it. In the old Ghost Runner days, it would take weeks before anyone noticed my egregious typos.

If you want to reach out to us, our email is ghostrunner@substack.com.

If you want to reach out to us, our email is ghostrunner@substack.com.

If you want to reach out to us, our email is ghostrunner@substack.com.

Programming Note: I’m launching a new podcast series about the NY-12 race. It’s called District Twelve, and the first three episodes are out now. If you enjoy this blog, I hope you check them out, I think you’ll really like them. I spoke to the West Side Rag’s Gus Saltonstall, the Three Parks Independent Democrats’s Daniel Marks Cohen, and Four Freedoms Democrats’s Jaime Berman.

“You have a bunch of wonderful candidates up here who would all make great members of Congress,” Alex Bores told the crowd at a candidate forum a few weeks ago. “I want to emphasize that we’re going to vote the same way 90 to 95% of the time. You’re hearing that in the debate today.” He was right; the nine candidates for New York’s twelfth congressional district had spent the past two hours agreeing with each other on almost every issue. With few exceptions, they all supported Medicare For All, emphasized the need for more affordable housing in the district, called for the abolition of ICE, and expressed righteous fury and disgust about the Trump Administration. Bores was responding to moderator Michael Lange’s closing question on what it was about each candidate that they believed made them stand out from the field. It wasn’t his policy positions, Bores emphasized. “What will make the difference is, can you be effective as a legislator?” he argued. Micah Lasher had made the same point in his opening statement: “We all feel passionately about fighting back against Donald Trump. What distinguishes me is a legislative record on issue after issue of how we use the law to protect New Yorkers, our values, and our programs.” For opposing candidates in an increasingly fierce race, Lasher and Bores are incredibly aligned. So aligned, in fact, that they are aligned on how aligned they are, and aligned on how to communicate that alignment to voters at a candidate forum.

This can be incredibly frustrating for the policy-obsessed voter. I’ve had many conversations with political junkies in the district with strongly held, highly specific political beliefs, who are desperate to learn which candidate is “better” on their favorite issues and are grasping at straws as they try to figure it out. They’ve resorted to dissecting the word choices in their identical Working Families Party questionnaire responses for hidden meaning, combing through each candidate’s Linkedin page (“Lasher worked for Bloomberg,” “Bores worked for Palantir,”) and monitoring social media accounts with a stopwatch in hand (“Lasher tweeted his statement of disapproval at NYU-Langone’s decision to stop providing gender-affirming care within an hour, while Bores didn’t tweet out his equally condemnatory statement until 90 minutes later”).

This dynamic is not exclusive to NY-12. Across the East River, Claire Valdez and Antonio Reynoso are battling it out in the heart of the Commie Corridor, in North Brooklyn and Western Queens’s NY-07, while agreeing on absolutely everything. There is a similar alignment in the hottest race in the country, this Tuesday’s Texas Senate Primary that pits former schoolteacher-turned-minister, current State Senator, and Mamdani-tier digital media communicator James Talarico against MSNBC-Resistance-Lib firebrand US Representative Jasmine Crockett. Everyone writing about that race acknowledges that the differences between these two candidates are not ideological, from the New Yorker’s Tad Friend, (“Crockett and Talarico take similar positions on most issues; it’s everything else about them that forms a contrast,”) to the Atlantic’s Elaine Godfrey, (“Rather than policy, [voters’] preferences came down to style—and not much else”), and even to editorials from local newspapers like the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, which have endorsed Talarico nearly unanimously: (“With two major candidates to choose from and not a lot of distance between them on the issues, Democrats are better off with James Talarico at the top of the ticket than Jasmine Crockett”).

Why are Democrats in such an agreeable mood? The first reason is structural, and has to do with the nature of the job of an elected legislator. This person will be a coalition-builder, a committee member, maybe a co-sponsor if they’re lucky. They will not, on their own, drive policy priorities. Their greatest formal power is their vote, and they will almost always wield it as their caucus leaders instruct them to. As long as they are not secretly opposed to major party priorities (see Sinema, Kristen), their personal policy positions do not matter very much.

This isn’t to say that you shouldn’t care who you and your neighbors end up electing to Congress. What a terrible, self-sabotaging conclusion that would be from a blogger writing obsessively about congressional primaries! “Read my nine-part-series (and listen to my podcast!) about this Congressional race that has no actual stakes, because your legislators are just impotent puppets and everything will be the same no matter who they are.” Your legislators are incredibly powerful! Elected representatives can bend legislation to better accommodate their constituents’ needs. They can use their oversight roles to hold private industry leaders and other branches of government accountable for their misdeeds. And they can use their informal but significant local “clout” to influence key local policy issues, even if those issues technically have nothing to do with their job description in the federal government.

All of which is to say, a candidate’s “effectiveness as a legislator” does probably matter more than the minutiae of their policy opinions. Their prioritization of issues, the local elites and interest groups that they choose to form the closest alliances with, and their overarching worldview all matter more too.

And so NY-07 is a race about differing worldviews, about whether the problems facing working people in Brooklyn and Queens should be solved through a partnership with local nonprofit service providers, networks of advocacy organizations, and a “rainbow coalition” of ethnic groups standing together in resistance with the Trump Administration, or whether they should be solved through collective bargaining, with workers and tenants organizing to seize as much of the pie from their landlords and employers as they can. NY-12 is a race about establishing trust and proving competence, about which candidate possesses the technical skills to execute at the high level that the educated elites of this district demand. The Texas Senate is race about different communication strategies, and about whether Democrats need to bring in a whole new bloc of disaffected, low-information voters in order to flip the state, or whether they get over the top just by feeding red meat to the base, and juicing turnout among the loyal diehards who show up every cycle. None of these races are about ideology, and maybe that’s fine, because a legislator’s ideology doesn’t matter that much.

But that shouldn’t be overstated. Primary candidates do usually disagree at least a little bit. That they aren’t this cycle to this extent speaks to the insecurity at the heart of the Democratic Party right now. Democrats are still shook. They are traumatized by the collapse of the Biden coalition, and the ensuing, catastrophic loss of 2024. They have no idea how it happened, and still find it too raw and traumatic to investigate. They’d rather not think about it. And though Democrats have benefited from a swift reversal of fortune, as thermostatic backlash to the increasingly unpopular Trump Administration lifts them into a dominant position in the polls for this cycle (they might actually win Texas!), they don’t know why that’s happening either. It’s not like they’ve done anything differently since 2024, besides writing endless memos and books and Twitter threads about how they probably should try to do something differently.

They remain stunned, and they lack the confidence to disagree with each other publicly. It seems too risky. They spent so much time and energy disagreeing in the run-up to 2024, on Gaza, on whether Biden should seek a second term, on which 2020-era progressive positions needed to be jettisoned to appease the swing voters that were fleeing their coalition. These internal squabbles were incredibly painful for everyone, and they feel pointless now that Trump won. Who cares which faction of the Democratic Party should predominate if the Democrats have no power?

Democrats do, of course, still have lots of power, and the real-world stakes of many factional disputes of the 2024 cycle remain as urgent now as they were then. But candidates no longer have the will to relitigate these disputes.

Nowhere is this dynamic more glaring than in South Brooklyn and Lower Manhattan’s NY-10 race, between Brad Lander, the ex-Comptroller, Park Slope dad, and inveterate avatar for the city’s progressive advocacy nonprofit industrial complex, and Dan Goldman, the current incumbent, former federal prosecutor, heir to a blue-jeans-based fortune, and ringleader of the completely-failed-and-wildly-unpopular-but-for-some-reason-still-fondly-remembered-on-MSNBC “Russia-gate” impeachment hearings. These guys are polar opposites. Goldman is a creature of DC (born and raised, went to Sidwell Friends, the whole deal), who settled in Lower Manhattan for his prestigious federal prosecutor job at the Southern District of New York after graduating from Stanford Law. Lander moved from the midwest to attend urban planning school at Pratt, then settled in Park Slope in the 1990s (where he probably was able to buy a nice home at a vomit-inducingly low price), led a nonprofit affordable housing provider, and then ran for city council. Goldman is most comfortable when he’s wearing an impeccably tailored suit that probably costs more than your car, at a lectern in a wood–panled room with impressive government seals and American flags everywhere, in a white, neoclassical building that is at least two hundred years old, crafting an elaborate, ten-part question to a witness that will expose some tiny discrepancy, or exploiting a procedural loophole that allows his side to stall for another week. Lander feels most at home at a makeshift podium on a street corner or at the entrance to a park, in a blue Oxford shirt that he hopefully hasn’t completely sweated through yet, standing in front of a small crowd of organizers and advocates wearing branded T-shirts and holding garishly colored signs with agitating slogans on them, as he gives brief but impassioned remarks on how important this cause is, how grateful he is to the relevant union leaders and advocates for inviting him, and how when they all speak together in a forum like this (a street corner with a few dozen people and hopefully like five reporters), the powers that be cannot ignore their righteous voices. Goldman refused to support Mamdani, the Democratic nominee, in the general election of last year’s mayoral race (and wrote in Zellnor Myrie instead). Lander enthusiastically endorsed Mamdani even before he dropped out himself, and became one of his most active surrogates in the general election. These two guys are polar opposites.

And yet they agree! They agree on everything! “I would ask [Lander] to point to specific policies that he supports that I don’t,” Goldman told journalist Ben Max last month, desperately refuting the widely held perception that Lander is challenging Goldman “from the left.” “I don’t think he’ll find any. My voting record is one of the most progressive in Congress.” Max interviewed Lander that same week, and asked whether Lander agreed with this characterization. “On [fighting Trump], I really think it’s about orientation and how you do it… I’m out there with the elected officials who believe this is a moment for getting out in the streets. Yes, you want people who are good on the inside, and I know how to do that… but you also want people who aren’t just introducing a new piece of legislation that people know isn’t going to pass, but finding new tools and avenues and ways of organizing.” A stylistic critique, not an ideological one. Later on, Lander tried to make a more ideological argument. “Let’s just state this: Zohran won 75% of this district. It’s a progressive district. Its median voter has a political point of view closer to mine than to his… I will be better aligned with the progressive values of the district.”

He did not spell out the specific policy positions that distinguished his political point of view from Goldman’s. Except one. “I was one of the few Jewish elected officials to cry out against the occupation in Gaza, and say aid should be conditioned on human rights observation,” Lander told Max. “Six weeks after the war began, I was out there calling for a ceasefire. I’m not sure that Congressman Goldman ever got to calling for a ceasefire… and I do believe what Israel is perpetrating in Gaza is a genocide.”

Goldman did, in fact, call for a ceasefire, in February of 2024. (Brad beat him by two months.) And while he is clearly the pro-Israel candidate in the race (bearing the poisoned chalice of an AIPAC endorsement), I would not be shocked if he puts out a bland statement in support of adding some vague conditions to Israel aid at some point in this campaign. He has proven adaptable already, adding the slogan “Abolish ICE” to his latest slew of TV ads.

Lander could tack further left in response, and dare Goldman to follow him (is Dan Goldman ready to support a wealth tax, for example?). Or he could get more specific about his own aid-conditioning policy proposal, accentuate their differences, and really make Israel the front-and-center issue of this campaign. So far, Lander has been unwilling to take it to this level. I imagine this is partly because the forces that are influencing Democrats across the city and country into agreement have an effect on Lander as well. Disagreeing with fellow Democrats is so unpleasant, especially when it’s about Israel. It’s much nicer to win on “orientation and how you do it.”

There’s another reason Lander hasn’t gone full tilt on Goldman yet. After a surprise court victory, Democrats have won the right to redraw the boundaries of NY-11 (Staten Island and South Brooklyn, R+29), fuse it with NY-10 (D+67), and create two districts that Democrats could win safely. If this occurs, Dan Goldman will likely switch races and run in the new NY-11, which would combine Goldman’s Lower Manhattan with Staten Island, against Republican incumbent and enthusiastic Trump ally Nicole Malliotakis

This has created an even goofier dynamic than the incessant agreeing of NY-12. Lander has a strong incentive not to disagree with Goldman too intensely, or in a way that might do real damage, because he wants him to be able to win the redrawn NY-11. But Goldman has no such incentive to go easy on Lander. If the maps are redrawn, Lander would win NY-10 virtually unopposed (it would probably end up around D+40), so there’s no downside. As Lander told City and State Magazine last week, “Goldman is ‘no holds barred’ against me, but I’m ‘holds barred’ against him.”

One wonders how long Lander can endure this asymmetric, self-imposed holds barring. Goldman’s lead spokesman, Simone Kanter, has been absolutely vicious to Lander on Twitter, finding new, disingenuous ways to attack his record as Comptroller, accuse him of being secretly corrupted by corporate influences, and mock his “sputtering campaign,” sometimes with assistance from Lander’s predecessor, former Comptroller Scott Stringer. Lander is keeping his spokespeople muzzled for now, and is content to just sit there and absorb blow after blow. Perhaps he’s confident that the new maps will come into effect imminently. Perhaps he thinks (probably correctly) that he has such a big lead on Goldman that he can coast to victory without getting his hands dirtier than he wants to. Or perhaps he’s comforted by the knowledge out of all the barbs Goldman’s camp throws at him, none of them involve a substantive policy disagreement. Even in this one-sided, no-holds-barred onslaught, actually disagreeing is a bridge too far.

If you want to reach out to us, our email is ghostrunner@substack.com.

A quick note: we recorded this conversation in January, so some things may now be a bit out of date, but I think most of it has aged very well.

If you want to reach out to us, our email is ghostrunner@substack.com.

A quick note: we recorded this conversation in January, so some things may now be a bit out of date, but I think most of it has aged very well.

If you want to reach out to us, our email is ghostrunner@substack.com.

Last week, the race for the Democratic nomination for New York’s Twelfth Congressional District kicked into gear with three huge endorsements from three high-profile senior citizens. For Alex Bores, former Rep. Carolyn Maloney, who represented the Upper East Side in Congress from 1993 to 2023. For Micah Lasher, Jerry Nadler, the current incumbent who has represented the Upper West Side in Congress since 1992. And for Jack Schlossberg, Nancy Pelosi, who has represented San Francisco in Congress since 1987, and who (it feels dumb to type this) led the House Democratic Caucus for twenty years, including two stints as House Speaker.

Endorsements can give you a decent snapshot of the state of a primary race. But that’s not their main purpose. It would be hilarious if it was, if campaigns and elected officials and unions and political clubs went through this elaborate courtship process all to provide impatient politics nerds a tool to analyze and forecast a race without waiting for polling. “Eli needs something to write about this week,” Jerry Nadler might have thought to himself before telling his comms team to prepare a statement in support of Lasher.

In reality, Nadler endorsed Lasher because he wanted to give a boost to the Lasher campaign, and endorsements provide immense value. They do so in a few ways:

1. Personal Recommendation:

At the most basic level, an endorsement tells voters that a specific person thought about the election, carefully considered the candidates, and decided that this one was the best. If voters trust the endorser’s judgement on other matters, they might decide to do so on this one.

This is how we all make decisions all the time. I’m more likely to check out a new taco place in the neighborhood if my friend tells me it’s good, to watch One Battle After Another and Andor if my favorite Ringer podcasters put them on their “Best of 2025” lists, or to buy sneakers if Lebron James’s initials are stitched onto the heel. We’d like to think that every voter pays close attention to their local politics, and carefully selects the candidate who best matches their policy preferences, but who has time for that? Most people are content to ask someone else who they plan to vote for, and trust their judgment.

Okay, but that someone else is usually a friend, a relative, or a colleague, not a politician they have likely never met. I wrote last month that it was a big deal when Brad Hoylman-Sigal, former West Side State Senator and current Manhattan Borough President, endorsed Micah Lasher. But I sincerely doubt that there were a significant number of NY-12 voters who saw that endorsement and said, “well if he’s good enough for Brad, he’s good enough for me.” Hoylman-Sigal is well-respected, and won his Borough President race easily last fall, but most people have still never heard of him, and even the ones that have probably do not feel that level of devotion.

Nadler, Maloney, and Pelosi are all much more famous and prominent than Hoylman-Sigal, and there probably are a few voters who will pick a candidate based on one of their endorsements alone (more will do so based on Nadler’s endorsement than the other two.) But while Democrats in this district likely have vaguely positive impressions of all three Representatives, most will not have blind faith in any of them. For an endorsement to sway a significant chunk of voters directly, you need someone like Zohran Mamdani, AOC, or Barack Obama, a personality cult leader with thousands of obsessed superfans who would follow their leader anywhere.

2. Positive Attention

Most primary candidates start their campaigns with near-zero name recognition, especially in a race for a local office. They need to get in front of as many eyeballs as possible, and they do not have enough money to do it with advertising alone. Endorsements are helpful because they generate attention. It’s not just what the endorser says, but how they say it, and who they say it to.

If an elected official endorses you, they will probably post a picture of you on their social media feeds, which likely have many more followers than yours do. Perhaps they’ll accompany that post with a bland written statement, where they describe you as a “fighter,” and “exactly what this district needs right now.” That alone is quite good for you; your name and face have now reached a whole new audience, which will expand as local journalists inevitably reshare the post.

Depending on the prominence of the elected official, and on how enthusiastic they really are about you, they could decide to give you a lot more. They could, for example, hold an in-person press conference, encouraging journalists to write full stories about the endorsement, which they can adorn with new pictures of the two of you warmly embracing in front of a podium. They could also bypass the journalists entirely, and write their own op-ed in a publication with its own large, built-in audience and distribution network. And they could even make a vertical video for you. Zohran Mamdani probably will not endorse in this race. But if he does, the lucky recipient will get a homemade, free viral video from one of the most successful video communicators of our time, just like the ones he gave to Astoria DSA comrades AD-36 candidate Diana Moreno and and NY-7 candidate Claire Valdez.

This is not something you get when Congressional stalwarts in their seventies and eighties endorse you. The Lasher campaign tried their best with Nadler’s endorsement video, but could not get the Congressman to actually appear with Lasher in-person, on-camera, and had to settle for a voiceover recording of Nadler reading out the same press release he had posted earlier that weekend, set over a stirring slideshow of images from his three decades in office. The video has fewer than a thousand views on YouTube, fewer than 100 likes and reposts on Twitter, and has not even been posted on Instagram. Still, it’s more than Bores or Schlossberg got, as neither Maloney nor Pelosi even bothered to announce their endorsements at all. No tweets, no press release, nothing. Both politicians could have done more if they had felt like it, and the fact that they didn’t sends a strong signal that Nadler cares about this much more than Maloney or Pelosi, something voters might or might not pick up on. Either way, none of these endorsements helped their candidates gain much new or useful attention.

3. Momentum/Fundraising

Liberals like to think that they are on the side of the underdog, but primary campaigns turn them and everyone else into shameless bandwagoners. The structural incentives are just too strong. If you run a labor union or another interest group, you want to have a good relationship with your elected officials to get your members the best policy treatment possible, that’s a lot easier if you endorsed them early, and a lot harder if you endorsed their opponent. If you’re a donor (even the least transactional, most purely altruistic donor imaginable, which let’s be honest, you probably aren’t) then you want to donate to someone who has a shot at winning, so you don’t feel like you are wasting your money. And if you’re a voter, you similarly want your vote to count. In a first-past-the-post election with more than two candidates, voting for your favorite candidate is essentially the same as not voting if they have no chance of winning. You basically have to figure out which two are the most viable, and then pick the one you hate less.

Endorsements tell people which candidates are and are not viable. They help a campaign demonstrate momentum, which can be self-reinforcing. People might see the endorsement, see how viable it makes a candidate seem, and decide to jump on the bandwagon while they still can.

And if you get the right elected official to endorse you, then this kind of indirect signaling process won’t be the only way they can help you get more endorsements and donations. Nancy Pelosi, for example, has a Rolodex full of wealthy New Yorkers who like to donate to Democratic campaigns. Alex Bores’s campaign currently leads the race in fundraising with a little over $2 million, but if Pelosi decided to work the phones herself, she could probably raise that much for Schlossberg in a single afternoon. Nadler could similarly pick up the phone and get every West Side elected official to endorse Lasher, except that they all already did months ago. Well-connected endorsers can get you momentum through an endorsement’s signalling effect, and they can also use their connections directly to speed up that process.

4. Political/Ideological Commitment

When someone endorses a candidate, they’ll do their best to make it seem like they’re doing it out of the goodness of their heart, because they love the district, and they’re just so overcome with enthusiasm for this person that they simply have to tell everyone about it. This might be true every once in a while. But most of the time, when a party elite gets up and says “this is the best person for the job,” what they mean is “this person and I have reached a deal where they have agreed to give me all sorts of things that I want when they’re in office, and in exchange, I have agreed to compliment them in public.” Sometimes, an endorser messes up and says this part out loud. Kathy Hochul’s New York Times Op-Ed endorsement of Zohran Mamdani, for example, mentioned that she had “urged him to ensure that there is strong leadership at the helm of the N.Y.P.D. — and he agreed,” a pretty brazen admission that he had promised to keep Jessica Tisch on as Police Commissioner in exchange for Hochul’s endorsement.

Even when endorsers don’t spell out the terms of their deal like this, voters understand the subtext. A public sector union leader’s endorsement tells members which candidate offered them the most favorable deal terms. An elected official’s endorsement tells constituents which candidate will best use their power to support that official’s policy agenda (or reappoint that official’s chosen bureaucrats, in Hochul’s case). And even if there is no direct quid pro quo, endorsements create alliances that publicly commit people to one another, because if you gush about how wonderful someone is, it’s awkward and embarrassing if you have to turn around six months later and diss them (unless you are Donald Trump or Elon Musk, in which case you are immune to embarrassment so you can do whatever you want.) An endorsement tells voters that the candidate and the endorser plan to work together and make an earnest effort to get along.

(Obviously, none of this applies if the endorser is retired from politics, as Maloney, Pelosi, and Nadler all will be when the winner of the NY-12 primary takes office next January).

5. Volunteer Recruiting

A campaign starts out as a relatively small operation. A campaign manager, a comms person, a few people for fundraising, and maybe a few more to run social media. At some point between the launch day and election day, the campaign must transform into a massive machine, with an organizational structure to recruit and support hundreds of volunteers, so they can spend thousands of hours knocking on doors, handing out palm cards, and calling up every registered voter in the phone book. Elected officials who have won previous campaigns did so by building this machine for themselves, and can build it again on behalf of the candidates they endorse, using the same email lists and networks. Labor unions have a standing army of members who will show up in droves to canvas for their preferred candidate. And in Manhattan, political junkies who belong to no interest group but nonetheless have a deep-seated urge to knock on doors and hand out literature to strangers on the street organize themselves into local political clubs, which essentially give their endorsed candidate an entire pre-built campaign apparatus.

Micah Lasher has received endorsements from two of the three big West Side clubs, the West Side Democrats and the Three Parks Independent Democrats (he will almost certainly get the Broadway Democrats too). South of the park, he also has the Village Independent Democrats in the West Village, and both the Eleanor Roosevelt Independent Democrats and the Tilden Democrats, the two clubs that cover the 74th Assembly District (Midtown East, Stuy-Town, Gramercy Park). So far, Bores has the two main Upper East Side clubs: the Lexington Democrats and Four Freedoms Democratic Club. He might also pick up the Chelsea Reform Democratic Club sometime this week, but that’s probably going to be it. Well over half of the electorate lives in neighborhoods covered by clubs that endorsed Lasher, so he’ll start with a significant ground game advantage. Bores’s path to victory will depend on making up for that somehow, either by building his own volunteer network from scratch, by dominating on social media, or some combination of both.

No club has endorsed Jack Schlossberg, and I would be shocked if any of them do.

II.

Last month, I broke down the utterly vapid Schlossberg campaign. “There’s no shame in it,” I wrote, “But electoral politics is just not something he is any good at, and his pedigree alone is not worth enough anymore to make up for it.” Since then, he has in successive candidate forums committed himself to conflicting positions on Israel/Palestine, irritating voters on both sides and confusing everyone with his incoherence in the process. In a short piece for the Atlantic last week, Jonathan Chait skewered Schlossberg’s journalistic output from his time as a political correspondent for Vogue Magazine, writing that “it was utterly banal, but at least there wasn’t much of it. He wrote just seven short, insight-free columns.” Chait noted that this was Schlossberg’s most significant professional credential, and concluded that “to suggest that he has failed upward would give him too much credit because failing requires having been entrusted with some responsibility in the first place.”

I can’t write barbs like Chait can, but I’ll add one personal anecdote. I got a chance to see Schlossberg speak at an event a few weeks ago. Because of the peculiarities of 501(c)(3) rules, he was forbidden from talking openly about his candidacy at the event, but was invited instead to give his perspective on the state of the Democratic Party, the direction it should go in, and what policy and strategy steps it should take to get there. He was the event’s sole guest, and he spoke for about seven minutes about what the dynamics are like when his great-uncle comes to family gatherings, then added a few platitudes about how Trump is a threat to democracy, and was out of things to say almost immediately afterward. After some awkward silences, the event ended fifteen minutes early. I have no idea how he expects to convince people to vote for him if he cannot fill time at a podium in front of a large audience of potential voters.

And this is why it’s so bizarre that Nancy Pelosi has decided to endorse Schlossberg. Using the framework above, it’s pretty unhelpful. She has not done anything to get Schlossberg more followers or eyeballs (Positive Attention), and as the candidate with by far the largest social media following already, he does not need her to. Her endorsement does not signify any sort of policy deal (Political/Ideological Commitment), because Pelosi is retiring and has no policy agenda to advance anymore. She has no local political infrastructure in Manhattan, and will not be helpful in recruiting Upper West Siders (Volunteer Recruiting) to knock on doors on his behalf. And as a Personal Recommendation, she is utterly unconvincing to anyone paying attention, because Schlossberg has shown absolutely nothing to recommend, and she does not have enough of a personality cult to inspire much blind faith. All she can do is help him raise money and give his campaign an ephemeral burst of momentum (Momentum/Fundraising), presumably as a favor to his mother, who she has known for decades.

Democrats believe that they are the party of safeguarding democracy from the threat of Trump’s nakedly autocratic, corrupt impulses. Voters have shown in polls and elections that they are skeptical. It’s not hard to see why, when Democratic elites like Pelosi use their power to boost undeserving, but well-connected insiders (and to issue an obviously dishonest, borderline-Orwellian statement about how we need leaders like Schlossberg “who understand the stakes and how to deliver for the people they serve.”).

Thankfully, Pelosi is the wrong kind of endorsement to make Schlossberg a competitive candidate. In a way, that makes it more embarrassing for her. If you’re going to incinerate your credibility for personal reasons, you should at least make sure it’s actually going to have any impact first.

“I was so nothing,” Mike Birbiglia complained about being a new father of a newborn baby in his 2019 Netflix special The New One. “I was this pudgy, milkless vice-president of the family. Huge title, no power. Also oversees Congress. My whole job was to be around and have no opinions.”

Call up current New York State Lieutenant Governor Antonio Delgado and you may hear a similar complaint. His job is just to be around (and not even necessarily around Governor Hochul, who kicked him out of his offices in the state Capitol and had not spoken to him “in months” as of last summer) and have no opinions. And he’s sick of it.

Running mate is a tough job no matter what. The structural incentives are awful. The boss has all the power, both because that’s what the law says and because everyone likes them more than you. Maybe they just beat you in a primary, and if so, they probably still remember all the rude things you said about them on the campaign trail. During the general election, all will be forgiven, and their team will gush about you, what a natural leader you are, how good of a fit you are going to be “on the team,” what a privilege it is to get to work with someone with so much talent, leadership experience, and political sway over a demographic that they poll poorly with (they probably won’t say this last part out loud).

But as soon as you come into office, they will immediately pivot, because you are now a popular, charismatic elected official, and therefore a huge threat. They will give you the worst, least sexy assignments (“root causes of migration”), keep you far away from anything important, and will relentlessly leak anonymous quotes about how badly you are doing, how they keep trying to give you opportunities and you keep screwing up, and how utterly unprepared you’d be to take over for them. Your best move is to grin and bear it, wait your turn for your boss to be term-limited, and in the meantime, try not to be too open about your private, all-consuming wish for their untimely demise. But it’s a hard road, and not everyone has the patience for it.

Governor Hochul tapped Delgado in April of 2022 after her first Lt. Governor, the Harlem-based former State Senator Brian Benjamin, was indicted for allegedly awarding a grant to a local nonprofit in exchange for straw donations to his campaign (charges were dropped last year after the key witness died). At the time, Delgado was a rising star in the state Democratic Party. A former Rhodes Scholar, Harvard Law graduate, successful corporate lawyer, and amateur “socially conscious” rapper under the name “AD the Voice”, Delgado in 2018 successfully wrested the purple 19th Congressional District (which at the time combined the swanky Hudson Valley counties Columbia and Dutchess with the more rural Otsego and Delaware further west) from two-term incumbent Republican John Faso. As a Congressman, Delgado kept a low profile and maintained one of the most moderate voting records in the Democratic caucus. But still, he was a handsome, charismatic Rhodes Scholar holding down a swing district in upstate New York and raising almost $10 million a cycle. He seemed in good position for a run for Senate if a seat ever opened up.

Nearly four years later, Delgado is screwed. Austin C Jefferson of City and State Magazine gave a great account last year of how his relationship with Hochul deteriorated so badly, and points to two core problems. First, Delgado imagined that his job description would be more than just “be around,” telling reporters that he “envisioned himself as a federal liaison with a specific focus on economic development.” By contrast, Hochul, who had spent seven long years toiling away as LG herself while her boss tormented and ignored her, believed that Delgado should suffer a similar fate, the way a frat bro believes the new pledges should be hazed just as he was. And second, Delgado imagined that he would be allowed to have opinions, and that he would be allowed to express them, even when they differed from Hochul’s: Delgado refused to show support for Hector Lasalle (a conservative judge who Hochul nominated for the state’s highest court in 2022), he publicly called for Biden to drop out of the race after the June 2024 debate (Hochul remained silent until the end), and he urged Eric Adams to resign in February of 2025 (Hochul decided not to remove him from office even after her hand-picked deputy mayors all quit.)

It does not matter that Delgado happened to go three-for-three on accuracy here. The Lieutenant Governor is not allowed to disagree with the Governor. Delgado announced that he would not support Hochul’s re-election in February of 2025, and in return, she stripped him of his office and staff. Four months later, he announced his bid to run against her, and has aggressively courted the left ever since, trying to build a coalition that can outflank her in this summer’s Democratic primary.

It would have been a difficult task no matter what, but Delgado has suffered awful timing. Hochul has become significantly more popular, including with the left of the party, since Trump became President, and now has a tenuous alliance with New York City’s new left-wing mayor, an alliance that absolutely no one on the left wants to mess up by supporting a no-hope primary challenge. Delgado’s sole elected endorsement, Brooklyn State Senator Jabari Brisport, was punished immediately for it. In a hilarious act of pettiness, Hochul’s team insisted that Brisport leave a press conference on a new piece of legislation last week so that they would not accidentally give him positive publicity. No one else on the left wants to stick their neck out and receive this kind of backlash from the Governor’s office. Nor should they, for a guy like Delgado who has no progressive credentials whatsoever, and was very recently one of the most conservative Democrats in Congress.

Hilariously, Delgado has spent almost an entire year (and has another one to go) in limbo, with no office, staff, official responsibilities, or contact with his boss, actively running against her, and yet still, on paper, the Lieutenant Governor of the state, and next in line in an emergency. He’s there because Hochul legally cannot fire him: unlike the Vice President, LGs are elected on a separate ballot line in New York, which gives their aimless grazing around in their pasture an “electoral mandate.” In the eyes of the State Constitution, voters care deeply about who holds this ceremonial role, they’ve expressed their preference, and the Governor of New York could not undermine their will and fire their LG any more than they could fire the Governor of Hawaii or the President of France.

In practice, the New York State Constitution can be amended pretty easily, and Hochul could probably figure out a way to remove Delgado if she cared. The fact that she has not done so is a good encapsulation of how insignificant this role truly is. She would not tolerate having an unambiguous enemy, actively trying to undermine her at every turn, if he occupied a role that contained any power or significance whatsoever.

II.

So it’s not entirely surprising that she seems to be struggling to fill this role. NY1’s Bernadette Hogan reported last week that Queens Borough President Donovan Richards and Bronx State Senator Jamaal Bailey both turned down offers from Hochul. She has to name someone by the end of this week, so that they can receive the official party endorsement alongside her at the State Democratic Party Convention in Syracuse this Friday.

Based on her past selections, and on current reporting, Hochul’s team seems to care about “balancing the ticket” demographically, if not ideologically. Specifically, she wants to pair herself, a moderate white woman from Buffalo, with a moderate Black or Hispanic guy from the city. There’s absolutely no electoral reason to do this. Maybe among this vast state’s eight million voters, there exists a swing voter who is ambivalent about Hochul, but who likes her LG pick (on purely identitarian grounds?) enough to sway them in the Governor’s race (which, again, is a separate election; there’s nothing stopping this hypothetical voter from voting for the LG and not Hochul). There cannot possibly be enough such people to justify such rigid selection criteria. She could pick anyone and it would have the same effect on her race: none.

Nevertheless, there is consensus among Hogan, the City and State’s Rebecca Lewis, and the rest of the Albany press corps that there are three remaining contenders, and they are all men of color from Brooklyn: current Brooklyn Assemblymember Brian Cunningham, current Secretary of State and former Brooklyn Assemblymember Walter Mosley, and Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez.

While the others play it coy, Cunningham has actively sought the position. A relatively low-profile two-term Assemblymember, Cunningham would likely not be on Hochul’s radar, except that he is practicing a brazen, Travis Kelce-esque speak-your-overambitious-dreams-into-existence strategy, recently telling NY1 (unprompted) that “if the governor asked [about LG], obviously, I think an opportunity to serve the state is something I would always say yes to.” He later told Rebecca Lewis that he believed himself to be “still in the mix.” There’s something equal parts pathetic, hilarious, and awesome about wanting such a lame job so openly. Sadly, this weekend, Cunningham told the Capitol Pressroom’s David Lombardo that he had not yet even been vetted by Hochul’s team, a sign that they are not taking his overtures too seriously.

Lombardo reports that Mosley is a much more likely choice. Hakeem Jeffries’s handpicked successor, Walter Mosley was first elected to represent the 57th Assembly District (Bed-Stuy) in 2012, when Jeffries left to run for Congress. He won three more terms easily, and as Jeffries established himself as the dominant force among the city’s Black outer borough Democrats, their alliance grew more valuable to Mosley. Then, in 2020, the NYC-DSA, having established itself as a formidable power in Astoria, flexed their muscle by riding the G-train into Bed-Stuy and busting up Jeffries’s machine. When the dust had settled, DSA-endorsed public school teacher Jabari Brisport had won the neighborhood’s State Senate seat, and DSA organizer and former nurse Phara Souffrant Forrest had beaten Mosley by nearly ten points. Humbled, Mosley founded a comms and lobbying firm and waited patiently for four years. Then, in 2024, Hochul appointed him to his current sinecure as Secretary of State, which is, Wikipedia tells me, responsible for administering state-issued professional licenses and managing the state’s athletic commission. It is the rare job in New York State politics from which Lieutenant Governor would be an unambiguous upgrade.

Mosley seems like a nice enough guy. He has never been federally indicted, which is a concerningly rare distinction among Brooklyn Democrats these days. But readers interested in advancing progressive policy goals should hope that Hochul chooses Gonzalez instead. It’s not because of Mosley’s politics, which are staunchly moderate, but no more than Hochul’s (and as previously mentioned, completely irrelevant, as he will be forbidden from expressing them.) Rather, progressives should be excited by the unique, generational opportunity that Gonzalez’s vacancy would present the city’s criminal legal reform movement.

Mayors get all the media attention, but when it comes to protecting and serving our city’s most vulnerable, at-risk populations, the District Attorneys wield power far more directly. While the mayor is busy negotiating budget minutiae with City Council and begging Albany to give him the authority to make tiny, incremental reforms, the city’s five DAs oversee an army of more than a hundred prosecutors, each empowered to decide, virtually unilaterally, the fate of the thousands of New Yorkers who are arrested every day. DA’s have tremendous sway over any legislation that involves crime, policing, and public health. And they have massive community outreach budgets, which can be used to launch a run for another elected office when their term is up.

Despite its deep-blue bent and its wealth of local justice advocacy organizations, New York City has never elected a truly progressive, reform-oriented prosecutor in the mold of Philadelphia’s Larry Krasner or Austin’s Jose Garza. Gonzalez and Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg have both branded themselves as reformers when it suits them (ie in the 2021 election but not in 2025), and have taken cautious steps towards deprioritizing certain drug offenses, expanding access to diversion programs for specific types of offenders, and creating Conviction Integrity Units to review the egregious mistakes of their predecessors and free some wrongly accused people. But they are also fierce law-and-order reactionaries when they want to be, seeking barbaric sentences (Gonzalez’s ADA’s are still authorized to seek life without parole), selectively cracking down on certain offenses (drug distribution, gun possession) that are ten times likelier to involve a Black defendant than a White one, and advocating for and then mercilessly exploiting loopholes in the state’s recent bail and discovery reforms to coerce defendants into unfavorable plea deals.

Of course, there’s no guarantee that Gonzalez’s successor would be more progressive than he is, and there’s a risk that they could be significantly worse. But the race comes at a good time for New York City’s criminal legal reform movement, which has suffered major narrative losses since its 2020-era heyday, due in large part to a spike in crime in 2021 and 2022. While this spike mirrored national trends, tough-on-crime conservatives successfully convinced a significant share of the electorate that the state’s reforms were responsible, and that progressives could not be trusted on crime. Zohran Mamdani, a longtime ally of the reform movement, was forced to virtually abandon his criminal justice agenda in the general election in order to focus on issues of greater perceived strength like housing affordability and universal childcare. Ending mass incarceration and fighting for racial justice have been firmly labelled political losers, even in Zohran’s NYC.

As the city’s violent crime rate falls to record lows, this election cycle would be a great time to fight back and rebuild support. In 2026, a savvy, strategic candidate could build on the DSA’s dominance in Brooklyn, message strategically to harness the party’s new burst of outrage about the carceral state’s high salience abuses (there has never been a better time to convince normie Democrats of the importance of due process rights), and win on a proudly pro-justice, anti-mass-incarceration platform. If they pull it off, it could send a strong signal to Mamdani and the rest of the city that criminal legal reform is politically viable here. And more importantly, it would substantively improve the lives of tens of thousands of at-risk Brooklynites who would be less likely to suffer the inhumane horrors of Rikers Island.

Kathy Hochul is no ally to the criminal legal reform movement. Let’s hope that she unwittingly assists it anyway, by selecting Eric Gonzalez to be her next Lieutenant Governor so that someone better can replace him. Please do not send her this blog.

This is part V, the last installment (for now) of an ongoing series on the June 2026 Democratic primary for New York’s 12th Congressional District. You can check out part I here (Micah Lasher), part II here (Alex Bores), part III here (why insurgent outsiders will struggle in this race), and part IV here (Cam Kasky). I published the Kasky piece on January 13th. On January 14th, he dropped out. It’s a shame, I spent a lot of time writing that piece, but so it goes.

This is the last entry (for now) in my series on the upcoming primary for New York’s Twelfth Congressional District. I’ve been lucky enough to have some new subscribers come onboard during this project, and some of them may be wondering why this blog is called Ghost Runner. The answer is that this is a blog about ghosts. Ghosts are everywhere. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. The past is never dead, it isn’t even past. You did not fall out of a coconut tree.

Sometimes, it is helpful to identify a ghost directly, by name, in the hopes that you or someone else might exorcise it. I tried this with the Yankees and the ghost that haunts their shortstops a few years ago (Volpe’s career has only gotten spookier since then), or with the looming specter of Jessica Tisch. Other times, I worry that this approach gets too confusing, so I just stick to describing the past and how it’s relevant, without resorting to spectral metaphors. Tisch aside, I have used the latter strategy for most of my NYC politics coverage here (unlike the New Yorker’s Eric Lach, for example).

But it is completely impossible to describe Jack Schlossberg’s family without resorting to supernatural metaphors. The Kennedys are cursed. You don’t need me to tell you, this is some of the most famous paranormal activity in American history, but just to recap: Schlossberg’s grandfather was assassinated, his great-uncle was also assassinated, two of his grandmother’s children died as infants, his uncle died in a plane crash, his other great uncle narrowly survived a different plane crash, and also survived a car crash (his passenger was not so lucky), and most recently, his older sister just died of leukemia at age 35 last week. The mind cannot rationally comprehend this much tragedy. It demands an irrational, superstitious explanation.

When Jack Schlossberg’s other great-uncle, Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy, died at age 77 in 2009, newly elected President Barack Obama gave a eulogy at his funeral. It is one of his very best public speeches. In it, Obama frames the personal tragedies that Ted suffered not as a curse, but as evidence of Ted’s resilience and strength of spirit:

“It’s a string of events that would have broken a lesser man. And it would have been easy for Ted to let himself become bitter and hardened; to surrender to self-pity and regret; to retreat from public life and live out his years in peaceful quiet. No one would have blamed him for that. But that was not Ted Kennedy. Through his own suffering, Ted Kennedy became more alive to the plight and the suffering of others.”

This can be an incredibly potent message for a politician. It was, for example, the fundamental engine of Joe Biden’s career, and the main reason he was elected President in 2020. He had lost his first wife and daughter in a car crash, and then his eldest son to cancer, and through this suffering, he could perform grief to a COVID-stricken, grieving nation, in a way that felt authentic and not calculated. It made him seem fundamentally sympathetic.

Jack Schlossberg is not running that playbook with his sister’s death. I don’t blame him. It’s very difficult to pull off without seeming opportunistic (I remember thinking even Biden was a little opportunistic at times during his presidential campaign in the summer of 2019, finding ways to bring up Beau on a debate stage no matter what he was asked). And it must be extraordinarily painful to go around telling strangers about your grieving process. I can’t imagine what Schlossberg is going through right now, and if he doesn’t want to talk about it publicly, that’s his business.

The playbook he has selected instead, however, is a brutal watch. Schlossberg wants you to vote for him because he’s a Kennedy, and because you, a Democrat, might look back nostalgically to a time when you voted for Kennedys and things were good. That’s it. It’s not a compelling pitch, and no one, not even Schlossberg himself, seems compelled.

I mean, take a look at this vertical video he posted a couple weeks ago, a collaboration with NYC-based travel influencer Johnny Murtaugh. It’s an odd choice for a crossover post during a congressional campaign, both because Schlossberg already has more followers than Murtaugh, and because Murtaugh’s target audience is prospective NYC tourists. Actual NY-12 voters don’t follow this guy, because we are not prospective NYC tourists. We don’t need to learn more about the Statue of Liberty or the Empire State Building.

“Did you know that Grand Central Station was almost completely destroyed but Jackie Kennedy stepped in to save it?” Murtaugh asks in a classic sped-up hyperactive TikTok voice, standing outside Grand Central with Schlossberg. “That’s right, she led a public pressure campaign to stop its demolition!” Schlossberg replies, with all of the canned enthusiasm of a hostage reading out his kidnappers’ demands at gunpoint. The entire ninety-second reel is like this. Murtaugh and Schlossberg wander around Grand Central, filming ten second clips where they recount the saga of Jackie and Grand Central, a saga that they had already captured in full with the opening two sentences. Schlossberg is clearly reading from a script, and has been given enough public speaking training that he knows to annunciate, and to place emphasis on specific key words, but he looks bored out of his mind. Whenever it isn’t his turn to speak, you see his gaze wander off, even though it is never not his turn to speak for more than five seconds.

In fairness, I’m not sure a generational vertical video talent like Zohran could have done much better with this material, which is incredibly dry, and completely devoid of details that might give it texture or character. The message seems to be that Jack’s grandmother had excellent taste in architecture, and that it was a good thing that we had unelected elder stateswomen like her back in the 1970s to keep the ruffian bureaucrats in check. To the extent that this saga has any relevance in current NYC politics, it’s a negative one. Well-connected rich people with purportedly good taste in architecture are a big reason that we have a massive housing crisis. But putting that part aside, are we meant to believe that Schlossberg has inherited his grandmother’s good taste? And that this is why he’s a better candidate for Congress than the two guys who’ve been in the trenches of local politics for decades? The subliminal message of this video, and of all of Schlossberg’s content, is that he’s a Kennedy, and that this should be enough for you.

Bewilderingly, Democrats did use to just hand coveted elected offices to Kennedys, sight unseen. As just one of the many examples: in 2009, a vacancy opened up in New York’s US Senate delegation, after Hillary Rodham Clinton, another relative of a former President, left the Senate to become Secretary of State. New York Governor David Paterson, a Democrat, was empowered to appoint an interim replacement before a special election in 2010, and Caroline Kennedy, JFK’s daughter and Schlossberg’s mother, raised her hand. Though she had no experience in public office, she immediately secured endorsements from NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg, former Mayor Ed Koch, and a slew of state legislators, and her bid fell apart only because it quickly became clear that she was not ready for primetime, bombing a string of interviews, including one with NY1 where she said “you know” 168 times in 30 minutes. Instead, she accepted ambassadorships to Japan, and then Australia, as a consolation prize. But in 2009, the Kennedy family still had such a grip over the Democratic Party, that a boring, mediocre, not-actively-humiliating performance in these interviews would have been enough to secure Caroline a gift-wrapped Senate seat as a kind of birthright.

This power has dissipated since Ted’s death. These days, the Kennedys cannot even keep their own brethren in line. In a New York Magazine feature last summer, reporter Reeves Wiedeman described the state of the sprawling family, as dozens of Kennedys across four generations with varying levels of access and control inside the Democratic party all watched helplessly while Robert F Kennedy Jr. hijacked their brand and used it to support vaccine skepticism, anti-science conspiracy theories, and eventually, Trump. “They confronted him in texts, on family Zooms, and when they saw him in Hyannis.” Wiedman writes. “They published op-eds with headlines like “Ignore My Brother Bobby.” They appeared on MSNBC and CNN; they tweeted and Instagrammed… What’s humbling for all the other Kennedys is that none of their efforts to stop Bobby worked.”

The family name still has some juice, or Schlossberg wouldn’t have been able to even launch his campaign. Everyone knows and likes his mother, and that must be helpful for things like fundraising (Biden White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain recently hosted a fundraiser for Schlossberg at his home in DC, for example). But isn’t this kind of embarrassing?

Our world is run by nepo babies these days. Our president rose to prominence because he inherited his father’s real estate empire, promptly ran it into the ground, and then somehow parlayed that into a popular network television show. Until recently, the most powerful man in the state was the first-born son of a widely beloved governor. JFK himself was a nepo baby: he rose up within the Democratic party only because his father, one of the richest men in the country at the time, had deep ties within the Roosevelt-era Democratic Party, and brazenly used them to anoint his sons to various levels of government.

It’s frustrating to see others handed things, when normal people spend years working tirelessly for even a slim chance to earn them. It gives the lie to the myth of meritocracy, a foundational tenet of our capitalist social order. But the proper response to a nepo baby is not envy, it is pity. They will never be able to escape the shadow of his parents, no matter how badly they want to, or how hard they try. No one will ever believe that they could have gotten there on their own, and there’s nothing they can do to prove it besides quit the family business and become a doctor.

We have far too many examples of the psychological damage that this kind of burden can cause, both in real life, and in popular fiction. The television show for which this series of blogs is named has explored this dynamic with far more specificity and depth than I ever could. In the 2019 film Knives Out, the best-selling author patriarch fires his adult son from his in-house publishing company right before his demise, telling him: “I’ve done you a terrible disservice. All these years, I’ve kept you from building something of your own.”

In the eulogy, Obama claims that Ted Kennedy escaped the shadow of his relatives, and did build something of his own: “The greatest expectations were placed upon Ted Kennedy’s shoulders because of who he was, but he surpassed them all because of who he became. We do not weep for him today because of the prestige attached to his name or his office. We weep because we loved this kind and tender hero who persevered through pain and tragedy.”

I hope that Jack Schlossberg can find something of his own to build as well, something that allows him to surpass his family members in some way. Based on the outpouring of grief and admiration that her death engendered, it’s clear that his older sister pulled it off. But this congressional race will not be part of that journey for him. There’s no shame in it, but electoral politics is just not something he is any good at, and his pedigree alone is not worth enough anymore to make up for it.

Bonus Round: George Conway

George Conway is the ex-husband of Kellyanne Conway, the Republican operative who led Trump’s 2016 campaign. They met after he saw a picture of her on the cover of a magazine, and asked mutual friend Ann Coulter for an introduction. He knew Coulter from their work together on Paula Jones’s 1994 lawsuit against President Bill Clinton. Before meeting Kellyanne, he dated Laura Ingraham. The point here is that “former Republican” greatly understates Conway’s past. He was not a moderate, normal guy who happened to vote for John McCain and Mitt Romney because he liked McCain’s hawkish foreign policy or Romney’s lust for cutting healthcare benefits for the elderly. He was on the frontlines of the culture war. The only reason he did not have a show on Fox News was that he was too busy making millions of dollars as a litigator for Wachtell.

Conway has been on a journey since then. In 2019, he co-founded the Lincoln Project, a political operation of anti-Trump Republicans that aims to restore the Republican Party to its pre-Trump glory, and shame Republican voters into supporting someone else, someone who respects the rule of law, will abide by the results of fair and free elections, and who can shred the social safety net with more gravitas and decorum. The Lincoln Project has been about as successful as you’d expect it to be. Turns out Republican voters really like this Trump guy, no matter what clever tweets Conway and co throw at them.

I’m maybe being a bit too harsh. It is important that there are people building the infrastructure for Republicans to abandon ship, for whatever fraction of Republicans there are that still might. More recently, Conway has contributed content to Tim Miller’s publication the Bulwark, which has been home to some of the clearest anti-Trump voices of his second term (interestingly, Cameron Kasky also made content for the Bulwark, co-hosting a podcast with Tim Miller for a few months last year.) Conway also helped represent E. Jean Carroll’s successful sexual assault suit against Trump. In 2023, he announced that he and Kellyanne had divorced. He has apparently changed his registration and become a Democrat. People change, and I applaud Conway for his directionally-correct mid-life crisis.

But there’s just no way Manhattan liberals are going to be at all interested in this guy. I mean come on! “Democratic voters are not about to elect the former president of Yale’s chapter of the Federalist Society to succeed Rep. Jerry Nadler,” political strategist Chris Sosa told the New York Post after Conway announced his candidacy two weeks ago. I don’t have much to add there. Conway has no chance of winning this race, and I would be surprised if he gets more than 5% of the vote.

And there is something vaguely annoying (to me, anyway) about the tone Conway uses to call out Trump, even though all the words are good and true and correct. His specific variety of outrage implies a degree of shock. “We have a demented, criminal president running the country like a mob operation—government by the boss, for the boss,” Conway captioned his announcement video. “You may find it hard to believe,” he tells us in the video. “But it’s happening.” My guy, this is year ten! We don’t find it that hard to believe anymore.

Eight years ago, two years into Trump’s first term, John Mulaney recorded his special Kid Gorgeous at Radio City Music Hall, and compared Trump to a horse loose in a hospital. Even then, everyone was kind of sick of the person in their lives who would get really worked up about whatever crazy thing Trump had just done. It was boring, and showed a kind of naiveté. “And then you go to brunch with people,” Mulaney joked. “And they’re like ‘There shouldn’t be a horse in the hospital!!!’ and it’s like ‘We’re well past that.’”

I do credit Conway for realizing that there shouldn’t be a horse in the hospital. But everyone else has been saying this for a while, including all the other candidates in this race. That opinion alone won’t get you very far here. We’re well past that.

Correction: A previous version of this piece included a sentence about Micah Lasher’s mother's involvement with the West Side Democrats club, and how that helped Lasher get his start in UWS politics. I got the order wrong, Lasher’s mother joined West Side Democrats after Lasher had already begun his career. I regret the error.

This is part IV of an ongoing series on the June 2026 Democratic primary for New York’s 12th Congressional District. You can check out part I here (Micah Lasher), part II here (Alex Bores), and part III here (why insurgent outsiders will struggle in this race.)

Of the insurgent outsiders running, 25-year old gun-control activist Cameron Kasky is the one who could actually win the primary for New York’s Twelfth Congressional District this summer. You can watch him explain how he’s going to do it in one of his recent vertical videos. “People tell me a hard left agenda can’t win in my district,” he tells us. “But guess what: I have a million people running to the right of me.” He then compares the situation to the NY-10 primary in 2022, where moderate Dan Goldman edged out multiple left-wing opponents, winning just over 25% of the vote in a six-way race. “When you look at how many people there are in this primary, you’re not going to need a high percentage to win… so donate to my campaign to help the left wing movement pull a Reverse-Goldman.”

It’s a compelling analogy, especially for NYC politics nerds who were infuriated by Goldman’s election in 2022. But I think it fails on two levels. Firstly, the 2022 NY-10 race was distinguished not by its unusually large number of candidates, (all open primaries have tons of candidates, everyone wants to run for Congress) but by its unusual lack of a clear front-runner. There were six different public servants with credible resumes (plus Bill de Blasio, briefly), and none of them ever generated any real momentum until, at the last second, the Times Editorial Board endorsed Goldman. After the race, progressives in Brooklyn and lower Manhattan blamed candidates like Carlina Rivera and Mondaire Jones for not dropping out and supporting progressive State Assemblywoman Yuh-Line Niou. But Rivera, Jones, and Niou all had different policy priorities and very different constituencies, and anyway, in real time it was completely unclear which of the three had the best chance of winning if they coalesced, or whether Goldman would win if they didn’t. This race has no such vacuum at the top: Lasher is a clear frontrunner. If Kasky starts surging in polls, and a plurality of moderate voters decide he is too left-wing for the district, they will coalesce behind Lasher easily. Perhaps this will change; perhaps Bores will gain some steam, and then moderate candidates will not know which one to unite behind, or perhaps their sparring will become so vicious that both will refuse to endorse the other out of pride, clearing the way for Kasky. I find this scenario extremely unlikely (neither Bores nor Lasher has said a single negative thing about the other one so far, and they are actively running against each other), but, you know, it could happen.

But even then, Kasky has a second problem: Is he even the left-wing candidate? Because there’s room for one in this race. In the June 2025 primary, 77,310 registered Democrats in NY-12 ranked Mamdani above Cuomo, (that’s 45.3%) compared with 77,348 who ranked Cuomo above Mamdani (also 45.3%, the remaining 9.4% did not rank either one). A candidate who wins a big chunk of the Mamdani-over-Cuomo voters will be in a very good position.

Are those voters really Kasky’s to lose? To answer that question, we need to learn a little more about who this 25 year-old prodigy actually is.

II.

On February 14th, 2018, 19-year old Nikolas Cruz brought an AR-15 to his former high school, Marjory Stoneman Douglas in Parkland, Florida, and opened fire, killing seventeen people. It remains the deadliest mass shooting at a high school in American history. Seven days later, CNN hosted a town hall in nearby Sunrise, with Florida Senator Marco Rubio. There, CNN gave a seventeen year-old Stoneman Douglas student named Cameron Kasky five minutes of airtime to confront Rubio directly. Pacing back and forth on the small stage with a hand-held microphone, Kasky stared into the middle distance with an intense, haunted look, his voice quivering slightly with nerves, adolescent voice cracks, and, most of all, barely-suppressed rage. After introducing himself, Kasky turned to face Rubio. “Senator Rubio, can you tell me right now that you will not accept a single donation from the NRA?”

The entire audience immediately erupted into a standing ovation, lasting almost thirty full seconds, an eternity on live television. Rubio tried to respond, but kept getting cut off by boos and heckles from the irate crowd. Finally they relented, and Rubio robotically rattled off his talking points; he supported raising the minimum age of gun ownership to twenty-one, and he disagreed with President Trump’s suggestion to arm teachers, but he believed in the Second Amendment, and always had. Kasky then doubled down on the NRA donations. “In the name of seventeen people, you cannot ask the NRA to keep their money out of your campaign? As a matter of fact, I bet we can get people in here to give you exactly as much money as the NRA would. I’ll do it, I’ve raised quite a bit of money so far.”

At this point, Rubio finally found some semblance of footing. “You’re right about that, there’s money on both sides of every issue in America, and where that leaves us in policymaking is to look at the issues and make a decision based on what we think is right… The influence of these groups comes not from money, but from millions of people who agree with this agenda.” Kasky got one last barb in: “I knew that was going to happen- NRA, please just keep the money out of Rubio,” to another wave of cheers. It was a clever high school debate-kid tactic. Rubio hadn’t budged from his underlying position, but in the process, he had implied that the donations were somewhat irrelevant, a dubious claim that Kasky could then exaggerate and mock.

This moment immediately went completely viral. I do not watch CNN, and was not following politics particularly closely in 2018, but I remember seeing it multiple times. Kasky’s performance would have been impressive for a professional Senate candidate, let alone a seventeen year-old who had just survived a mass shooting a week earlier. And it was incredible symbolism: the righteous fury of the younger generation swallowing up the feeble equivocating of their corrupt, irresponsible elders. In the following months, Kasky and his father would found the Families vs. Assault Rifles PAC, which raised more than $200,000 for gun-control candidates in the 2018 election cycle. “We have one focus,” Kasky’s father told Politico: passing a nationwide assault weapons ban.

The energy in the town hall clip and in the ensuing coverage had an air of inevitability to it. Every other peer country had a similar ban, it was clearly necessary, and the costs of refusing to enact it were so devastating and spectacularly obvious. The only reason the US hadn’t yet was because corrupt politicians like Marco Rubio were too beholden to deep-pocketed special interests like the NRA. With enough organizing (and fundraising), the many would inevitably defeat the money (or the good guys with more money would defeat the bad guys with less). This particular brand of gun-control politics reached its fever pitch a year later, when presidential candidate Beto O’Rourke announced on a primary debate stage that, after a mass shooting at a Walmart in his district in El Paso, “Hell yes, we are going to take your AR-15.”

We do not have a national assault weapons ban today. Gun control measures still poll well on their own, but as Nate Cohn argued a few years ago, “issue polling,” i.e. asking people where they stand on a particular issue, has a notoriously bad record of predicting actual voter behavior. “Which party do you trust?”-type tracking questions have fared much better, and they show a grim picture for Democrats on gun control. David Shor’s Blue Rose Research ran detailed, rigorous tracking surveys throughout the 2024 election cycle, and they found that guns did not rank in the top ten most salient issues for 2024 voters. Worse yet, when voters do consider guns, and are asked which party they trust more on that issue, Republicans lead Democrats by about five points. And all this in a cycle where the NRA barely participated at all, after falling into grave financial trouble because of their alleged misuse of donations. It turns out that Rubio was, unfortunately, correct. The money was not the only thing driving his priorities. There was money on both sides. And there were millions of people who agreed with his agenda, and that’s what actually had influence over him and the other Senate Republicans.

III.

There is a lively debate in Democratic Party circles about what to do about issues like this, where data shows that their position is less popular than the Republican position. The most extreme answer, often championed by moderate agitators like Matthew Yglesias, is that Democrats should simply change their position. (Yglesias often makes this argument about climate issues, he’s more ambivalent on gun control.) This is incredibly frustrating on an issue like gun control, where liberals (like myself) feel strongly that we are just clearly correct, that regular people obviously shouldn’t be allowed to have AR-15s, and that saying anything else is stupid and dangerous. “The Civil Rights Movement wasn’t popular either,” goes the most common retort.

However, it’s reasonable to expect Democrats to be aware of their position’s relative unpopularity, and to change tactics accordingly. Either they should work to lower the salience of the issue, win on other issues that they are stronger on, and then implement their agenda quickly and quietly once they win. Or they should have a targeted strategy for persuasion. Jonathan V. Last broke down what this could look like for USAID in a blog for the Bulwark last year. He argued that while USAID was generally unpopular, Democrats could make progress opposing Elon Musk’s catastrophic cuts if they could highlight individual stories of worthy programs that had to be shut down, and if they carefully picked weak opponents (like targeting Musk instead of Trump). Tactical, disciplined, strategic messaging can help you persuade people and make your position slightly less unpopular, which eventually gives you more room to make the broader, less strategic case.

Activists like Kasky hate this. They prefer to name and shame. They want to get out a big megaphone and say “hey look at this idiot! Look how wrong he is! Let me think of a clever attention-generating way to illustrate his wrongness. A protest outside his office, maybe, or a savage quote tweet. Or a charismatic, righteous takedown at a town hall on national television.” This works very well if most people agree that the person in question is wrong, but wouldn’t have necessarily found out about it otherwise. There are many issues where Republicans have unpopular views that need to be named and shamed. Medicaid. Social Security. Abortion. Gun control turned out not to be one of them in 2018, and it wouldn’t be one now either. Eight years later, gun control is no longer Kasky’s flagship issue (the pillars of his platform are “Stop Funding Genocide,” “Medicare for All,” and “Abolish ICE”). But he uses the same activist tactics he showed when he was still a junior in high school.

He owns people online. He is by far the best poster of the field, writing on Twitter with a conversational clarity that reads as “normal person having an interesting or funny thought” and not “I am Very Outraged, here’s a press release my comms team wrote about it.” Unlike his elder millennial opponents, he does not overuse the phrase “Let’s be clear:” or append custom hashtags as if it were still 2011. He regularly retweets low-follower accounts he agrees with, and (more concerningly) quote-tweets or replies to the low-follower accounts he disagrees with. He occasionally pokes fun at himself. “I don’t understand why people who hate me feel compelled to blatantly lie to make me look bad when I publicly make myself look bad with verifiable proof on a daily basis,” he wrote as a caption to a recent image post. “How tall is he?,” a user with fewer than a thousand followers commented. “5’10 but like 5’8 1/2 with my Bernie Sanders posture.” Kasky responded within forty-five minutes.

But while he has the self-deprecating humor of a seasoned poster, Kasky’s most comfortable mode remains righteous fury. He visited the West Bank last December, and wrote tweet after tweet about the settler violence that he witnessed. A week before that, he released a vertical video where he walked in Central Park and read aloud texts that children sent to their parents during recent school shootings. After an ICE agent murdered Renee Good in Minneapolis last week, Kasky quote-tweeted an outraged tweet from the official Democrats account, and replied “Correct, what’s your plan?” The next day, he outlined his own plan, again addressed to his fellow Democrats: “In case this isn’t clear enough, Democrats: ICE abolition is the new standard. There is no reforming this. There is no moderate version of fascism.”

Alex Bores and Micah Lasher quickly fell in line, forcefully calling for the abolishing of ICE. And this is Kasky’s problem. On the maximally progressive stances that are already popular among NY-12 voters (abolishing ICE, legalizing abortion nationwide, fighting the Trump administration generally), Bores and Lasher are on the same page and he will struggle to distinguish himself from them. On the ones that are less popular (Israel/Palestine), he may turn off more people than he attracts.

IV.

If you ask a Lasher (or Bores) supporter, they will tell you that Lasher (or Bores) is every bit the progressive champion that Kasky claims to be, that they agree on everything and that the only difference is that Lasher (or Bores) has a proven record of actually getting things done. I’m not sure if this is precisely true, and it’s difficult to say for sure because while Kasky has published detailed policy positions on his website, Lasher and Bores have not at this time. But if there are issues that Lasher and Bores could become out of step with the electorate on, they are local ones. Someone could attack either candidate for failing to advocate for affordable housing construction vigorously enough (they would both say they’ve tried their best), or for Lasher’s past antagonistic posture towards the city’s teacher’s union. Kasky has no experience with local Manhattan neighborhood politics, is not running with strong takes on any local issue, and would not have much credibility if he did.

Zohran Mamdani could have bashed Cuomo over and over for his ties to Trump-aligned Republicans, but instead, he was incredibly disciplined in keeping his message local: rent control, free buses, city-run grocery stores on your block. This was fitting for a race for mayor, a local office, but it turned out to be a good coalition-building strategy as well. Kasky doesn’t have this option, so he has to focus on national politics, and hope the national vibes are shifting left faster than the pros realize.

Kasky has one other major difference from the successfully insurgent, left-wing mayor: Zohran spent his entire campaign smiling. “I don’t think I’ve seen this man frown,” Pablo Torre told Lina Khan when introducing Mamdani on his podcast last fall. He has a great smile, one that takes up his entire face, and he wore it twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, for basically the entire year of 2025. I think this was an underrated part of the appeal. He looked like he was having fun, even when he was discussing serious issues, and it both endeared skeptics and made fans want to get more involved.

Kasky has a nice smile too, but his default is a haunted, pained, withering grimace, the same one that we saw eight years ago when he eviscerated Rubio. The emotional state he presents constantly is outraged, but he also seems genuinely sad. The scale of the treachery of the Trump administration, and the feebleness of establishment Democrats, all of it seems to weigh incredibly heavily on this poor 25-year old.

A few weeks ago, his campaign posted my favorite ad of this race so far. It’s a video compilation of Kasky sitting at a table, calling Democratic donors and mostly getting hung up on, for hours. “Can we order pizza?” his campaign staffer asks at one point. “You can, I’m busy begging for money,” Kasky quips. The video is fun, with light-hearted sections from the Nutcracker playing in the background (it’s a holiday video). The joke is supposed to be that campaigning is awful, but that our hero is charismatic and funny enough to have a good attitude throughout. They almost pull it off, but at least for me, there’s one problem: Kasky looks genuinely miserable.

This is part III of an ongoing series on the June 2026 Democratic primary for New York’s 12th Congressional District. You can check out part I here and part II here.

There are three serious candidates running for New York’s 12th congressional district who have never held political office in Manhattan (or anywhere else): Cameron Kasky, Jack Schlossberg, and George Conway. They are all quite famous, in three completely different ways. All three have high-profile personal stories that inform their political journeys. Kasky survived the 2018 Stoneman Douglas school shooting in Parkland, Florida, and organized the March for Our Lives in response to advocate for a nationwide assault rifle ban. Conway dramatically split up with his wife, Kellyanne, Trump’s 2016 campaign manager, over their political differences, and became a leader of the anti-Trump Republican organization The Lincoln Project. Schlossberg is the grandson of JFK, and is trying to rebrand himself as the nation’s First Family’s palatable, electable heir after many years of… not being that. All three will generate plenty of national media coverage, and the Times, not immune to the attraction of shiny objects, may join them against the urging of their more seasoned metro desk reporters.

I too am not immune, so I plan to write about each one next week. But before I do, I feel that I should warn you not to get too attached to any of them. None have much of a shot. To illustrate why, let’s take a detour downtown to another hotly contested congressional primary.

This week, Brad Lander posted his campaign’s first video ad in his bid to unseat two-term congressman Dan Goldman in New York’s 10th congressional district. “I knew Brad before he came into political office,” Michael Schweinsburg tells the camera, “because I heard about this guy way out in Brooklyn, building supportive housing before it was cool. This was decades ago.”

Though he is introduced in the video’s caption only as “Michael, a great neighbor,” Schweinsburg is the president of the 504 Democratic Club, the city’s leading disability rights advocacy organization. Based on the Lower East Side, 504 is a formidable influencer in local Democratic politics. They send out surveys to candidates running for all elected offices on their stances on key disability issues, surveys that all candidates know to respond to carefully if they are interested in the club’s coveted endorsement. And once in office, Schweinsburg and his club-mates hold their endorsed candidates to account. They are prolific lobbyists, organizing events, testifying in committee hearings, and speaking at press conferences in support of their legislative agenda. In an interview he gave to the City and State in 2022, Schweinsburg reported that 20 different pieces of legislation that 504 had advocated for had passed through the State Legislature in their Spring 2022 session. Since then, they fought to delay the closure of the East Village hospital Beth Israel (which finally did close last spring), and have been vocal supporters of the MTA’s court-mandated efforts to install working elevators at enough stations to come into ADA compliance.

In July of 2024, Dan Goldman honored Schweinsburg’s 25th anniversary of advocacy with an official congressional proclamation from the House floor: “For two decades, Mike has been an integral part of the 504 Democratic Club, the Nation’s first and largest club advocating for the civil rights of people with disabilities. I am truly honored and blessed to work alongside him to ensure that everyone in New York City and our country gets the proper representation they deserve.”

As we learn in this video, all has not been well in the Goldman-Schweinsburg relationship behind the scenes. “Brad’s opponent asked me to put together a roundtable for him… I brought a bunch of community leaders, and they poured their hearts out.” Schweinsburg tells us. “We never heard anything from that guy. But at Brad’s roundtables, he puts the staff to work on what he hears the community talk about.” Schweinsburg then describes his experience marching down 5th Avenue at a No Kings event last year with Lander, and about how he spent the entire time guiding one of their fellow advocates, a blind woman.

Brad Lander is a heavy favorite to defeat Goldman in the NY-10 primary, and this is why in a nutshell. Though he is not the incumbent, he has better relationships with local political clubs and advocacy groups. These groups usually wield their power through sheer physical might. They have email lists, and on the other end of those lists there are bodies who will knock on doors, pass out leaflets, call up every registered voter on your target list, collect signatures, and otherwise “pound the pavement” and help with “ground game.” They do not traditionally wield power through social media. Schweinsburg has fewer than 200 followers on Twitter, and double digits on Instagram. But that’s not the point. Politicians seek out endorsements from high-profile celebrities like Bad Bunny and Jason Aldean in part to gain access to their massive audiences, but those celebrities usually don’t have much sway over the door-knockers. Politicians seek out endorsements from high profile government officials (Kathy Hochul, AOC, Zohran) because they can deliver both access to a massive audience, and specific connections to door-knockers. The 504 Democrats Club is the opposite of Bad Bunny (at least in this one respect).

Kasky, Schlossberg, and Conway are all pretty famous, though not nearly as famous as Bad Bunny. That fame will help them get media attention and social media traffic, which they hope will translate to campaign donations (Two of the three will have no trouble raising millions of dollars even without this; the third is allegedly struggling.) They also hope their fame will generally help them get their message out to persuadable voters. What it definitely will not do is impress Michael Schweinsburg and his door-knocking ilk.

Political activists and organizers are, almost by definition, dissatisfied with the status quo political system, and as a result, deeply skeptical of anyone in it. They do not trust easily. If they have been doing this for a while, they likely have many experiences with elected officials who solicit their input, listen to their concerns, and then never follow up. They have very few experiences with officials who take their concerns seriously, amplify them, and then deliver solutions. When they develop a relationship with someone who can do this, they become fiercely protective of this relationship, and loyal to this official. There’s absolutely no reason to window-shop. Chances are, the new guy will not be anywhere near as responsive. They’ll have to start from scratch.

Traditionally, successful elected officials cultivate this kind of relationship with as many organizations as they can. The ones that stick around for decades, like Nadler, do so because they have relationships with every single organization, and carefully manage and nurture each one. If, at any point in the last thirty years, a well-organized Upper West Side disability advocacy organization came to Nadler’s office with a request or complaint, he knew to respond as quickly as possible.

There are benefits to this system. We want elected officials to be responsive to the needs of their well-organized constituents. On the other hand, not all groups are as sympathetic as the 504 Democrats Club. Swap out “disability rights advocates groups” with “the business community” or “real estate developers” and this kind of hyper-responsive constituent service starts to look like corruption. And even the 504 Democrats Club might occasionally want something objectionable; in 2022, for example, they successfully advocated against year-round outdoor dining because of concerns about street accessibility during snowstorms. Your mileage may vary on that one; COVID-era outdoor dining was a huge social and economic benefit to the city, the City Council’s seasonal policy essentially killed it, and, I don’t know, snowstorms have become pretty rare around here.1

Either way, this positive feedback loop–where the incumbent is responsive to specific groups, who then endorse him for re-election, which encourages other groups to develop relationships with the incumbent, who then must take care to be responsive to them as well– this is why incumbents have a huge advantage in local elections, even if a challenger may be more aligned with the views of a district’s voters on a pure left-right spectrum.

Or do they? In his 2015 paper “It’s Nothing Personal,” UCSD political science professor Gary Jacobson assembles survey data and election results from all levels of federal, state, and local government that show the incumbency advantage consistently declining year-over-year from the 1970s to the 2010s. This trend has likely accelerated since then, punctuated by the rise of three New York City political outsiders who built grassroots movements that defeated lifelong machine standard-bearers against all odds: Trump, AOC, and now Mamdani. “Everything is national now,” longtime political operatives like to complain. As union membership declines, local newspapers collapse, and local political and civic groups of all kinds become less central to the daily lives of most Americans, voters are increasingly focused on the same high-profile national issues, which they learn about from the same national media (MSNBC, CNN, and the Times for Democrats), no matter where they live. Lander’s decision to turn Schweinsburg’s endorsement into a social media ad is a sign of this trend. In the old days, a local activist endorsement is an end in and of itself, because of the connections and influence he has on door-knockers and other officials. Today, Lander needs it to create a viral moment on Twitter, and maybe even generate some news coverage if he’s lucky. Maybe in this new neoliberal order, where individuals matter more and groups matter less, social media dominance is paramount, and a connection to a local political club, or an endorsement from a city councilor, isn’t worth as much.

The outsiders running in NY-12 will hope this is the case. But don’t bet on it. Though Goldman is the more familiar face in national media, mostly because of all the MSNBC airtime he got during Trump’s first impeachment as lead counsel, Lander is universally viewed as the favorite in NY-10. In New York, Mamdani and AOC are relative outliers; the “Squad” has only five members, and the vast majority of state legislators in New York get reelected easily. And while both are regularly described as superficial, social media phenomena (“Twitter isn’t real life”), they are both absolutely obsessed with local retail politics. These days, AOC wins re-election by double digits every cycle not because she is perfectly aligned with her district’s median voter on a left-right spectrum (plenty of her 2024 supporters voted for Trump on the same ballot), but because her local organizing arm Team AOC is deeply enmeshed in the community, running mutual aid programs, attending every county board meeting, and even offering free one-on-one tutoring at the height of COVID. Mamdani may not have had support from the classic Democratic clubs of Manhattan and Brownstone Brooklyn, but by 2025, there was already a different, well-oiled political machine ready for him in the Astoria-based DSA. In January of 2025, when he was still polling below 5%, Mamdani was by far the most prominent candidate on my feed and in my neighborhood, not because his videos were especially entrancing (that came later), but because so many different people in my life knew him personally; they’d gone to protests with him, or knocked on doors for Tiffany Caban on a canvassing shift that he led.

AOC and Mamdani (and Trump) had one further advantage: the machines they ran against were incredibly unpopular. Cuomo’s favorability ratings were extremely negative, even when he led the race by double digits,. Joe Crowley and the Queens Democratic party had, in 2018, become hopelessly out of touch with the western neighborhoods that had undergone a rapid demographic shift, and were now teeming with young, college-educated socialists. Republicans in 2016 were fed up with their Bush-era leaders. This can be easier to spot in retrospect, plenty of commentators confidently predicted that Cuomo, Crowley, and Jeb Bush (!) would prevail.

But NY-12 outsiders face a tougher climb than the successful insurgents in any of those races, because the Manhattan Democratic Party machine is widely beloved. Gale Brewer, Mark Levine, and most of all, Jerry Nadler, are not seen as out-of-touch self-serving bureaucrats. They’re familiar neighborhood mascots who have impressive records of accomplishments. There’s no polling on this, so perhaps there’s a subterranean vein of populist rage that an outsider can tap into. Or perhaps the national party, which Democratic voters do hate with increasing fervor, is so toxic that the local party will become tainted by association, and a challenger can score some points out of Nadler’s close friendship with the now-despised Chuck Schumer.

This week, I’ll cover each of the three serious outsiders who will try to pull this off. They’ve all got a long way to go.