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

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

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

I.

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

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

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

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

II.

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

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

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

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

III.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

David Siffert, thank you so much for being here.

Thank you for having me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What’s an example of a safety test?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Can you give us an example of someone…

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

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

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

We love long stories.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Talk to me more about the second part.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thanks for having me.

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

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

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

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

1. Giant influx of aid from state government

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

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

2. Relaxation of upcoming obligations

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

3. Accounting magic!

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

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

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

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

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

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

II.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Were there literally golf games on Tuesday?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yeah, I stand by that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I was going to offer that advice also,

But it’s either that or online chess.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He was polling ahead of Zohran Mandani too.

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

The mothership. 12.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

II.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

III.

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

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

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

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

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

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

IV.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.