In the summer of 2022, I texted two of my friends with an urgent question. They had both moved to Manhattan only a year earlier, after growing up in suburban Maryland and going to college with me in rural western Massachusetts, and now they lived together with two other roommates in a four-bedroom apartment on the Upper East Side. “You guys voted for Nadler, right?” I asked. “Yup” they both replied immediately. “It was the Schumer endorsement that finally swayed me to Jerrold of course,” one of them clarified. “I would have been at sea without that.”
The race in question pitted longtime Upper East Side congresswoman Carolyn Maloney against even longer-time Upper West Side congressman Jerrold Nadler, in a battle for the Democratic nomination for the newly and chaotically redrawn Twelfth Congressional District (redrawn unfavorably to Democrats thanks to our former governor’s penchant for appointing Republican-aligned conservatives to the state’s highest court). On one level, the outcome of the race had almost no effect on the makeup of the 118th Congress. Either way, the winner of this D+33 district would be a reliable Democrat and would vote with the party no matter what. To the extent that the two had policy differences, they were symbolic and expressive, not impactful. Nadler opposed the Iraq War in 2003, while Maloney staunchly supported it. In 2001, Maloney gave an ill-advised speech on the House floor while wearing a burqa to emphasize the plight of Afghani women. Nadler voted against the Patriot Act. Maloney voted against President Obama’s 2015 Iran nuclear deal. Most saliently, Maloney had spent some of the 2010s dabbling in vaccine skepticism, something that had become completely unacceptable with the Democratic coalition post-covid. For the most part, though, the two Representatives had spent the previous two decades in sync. They voted with the party more than 90% of the time, they both chaired prestigious committees, and they both co-sponsored the Green New Deal.
Nevertheless, I wanted Nadler to win and was eager to make sure my transplant friends were on the same page. I had political reasons for caring; Nadler was ever-so-slightly more aligned with me and my progressive friends than Maloney, the vaccine stuff was genuinely concerning, Nadler had been a steadfast champion of public transit. But really, I cared because I was from the Upper West Side, and Nadler was my guy. He’d represented us in Congress for my entire life. He brought Zabar’s babka to Trump’s impeachment hearing. When pressed by a reporter, he could not name a single restaurant on the Upper East Side. I didn’t want a Park Avenue investment bank widow who called the bagel place on 86th and Amsterdam “Greenroots” to replace him.
And I wasn’t alone. Over his three decades in Congress, Nadler’s grip on all the powerful political institutions in the area had become ironclad. Every local political club (and the Upper West Side has many), every labor union, every nonprofit, every synagogue, every group had a deep relationship with Nadler. My ninety-year old grandfather told me he would be voting for Nadler because he had been a supporter of Symphony Space, the performing arts center on Broadway and 95th that my grandfather co-founded, since 1980, when he was in the State Assembly. Anyone who had any civic activity in the area in the previous forty years had a similar connection to Nadler. Consequently, he had not faced a serious primary challenge in decades. There would have been no point. As current Assemblyman and former Nadler staffer Micah Lasher (more on him in a moment) put it, “Jerry has godlike status in the district.”
And his powerful institutional grip worked its way up the chain as well as down. Upper West Side dominance was no longer sufficient in a district that had been redrawn to be 60% East Side, Maloney’s former turf. But that’s where the statewide and national party connections came in. My friend was probably joking when he said that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer’s endorsement sealed the deal for him, but it can’t have hurt, especially when accompanied by that of Elizabeth Warren and the omnipotent-at-the-time New York Times Editorial Board.
There were rumors that Nadler’s health was floundering, that he wasn’t as sharp as he used to be. He did absolutely nothing to dispel those rumors in the two-hour debate on NY1, where he stumbled through his opening statement (“I impeached Bush twice”), spoke in a halting stammer that Democrats would soon become all too familiar with, and did not generate a single memorable moment for his team to re-share online. None of it mattered. The endorsements, and the array of institutions that they represented, had spoken. Nadler received more than 45,000 votes, while Maloney barely cleared 20,000 (the remaining 15,000 went to an ambitious but coalitionally adrift lawyer named Suraj Patel).
Two years later, the then-77 year old Nadler ran unopposed. His “godlike status” remained. And last week, when he announced that he would finally retire at the end of this term, his seventeenth, Upper West Siders made it clear that it still remains, and would have likely carried him to an eighteenth term if he had sought it. “I just like the idea of Nadler there,” one local pedestrian told Times reporter Nicholas Fandos outside of Zabar’s.
What happens when a god loses his status? What happens to a thirty-year old political institution, an intricate solar system of coalitions, organizations, and relationships, when it loses its sun? Does the vacuum necessarily invite a bloody succession battle, with contenders tearing off pieces of the machine and wielding them against each other? Or can an heir be selected and crowned so quickly and seamlessly that he inherits the godlike status, and picks up right where his predecessor left off?
We are nine months away from the primary election that will decide who replaces Nadler. But much will be decided in the next few weeks. In fact, there’s a good chance that by the end of this month, one man will have the whole thing locked up.
I.
That man is Micah Lasher, State Assemblymember to the 69th Assembly District of New York. Some geography here; AD-69 is one of six Assembly Districts that significantly overlaps with the Twelfth Congressional District. It extends from 81st to 125th on the West Side, albeit with a jagged chunk lopped off south of 93rd street and west of Broadway. For what it’s worth, this is where I (and Zohran Mamdani!) grew up, and where my parents (and his!) still live. The Twelfth Congressional District also significantly overlaps with five City Council districts, and three State Senate Districts, so Lasher’s status as a sitting elected official, on its own, does not distinguish him much.
His resume does, though. This guy’s done everything. By age 16, Lasher had already risen up the ranks in his local neighborhood Democratic club, and had become, inexplicably, a key advisor to multiple high-profile candidates, including Deborah Glick and Scott Stringer. I have spent some time in these circles and I have genuinely no idea how that is possible. When a teenager walks into a campaign office or political club, they are handed a script and a list of numbers to call. If they’ve put in enough hours there, they are handed a stack of leaflets and told to stand on a corner handing them out until they run out. If they’re very very good at handing out those leaflets, they might eventually graduate to a glamorous task like soliciting signatures, or drafting a social media post announcing the next leaflet-passing opportunity for other volunteers. At no point in my experience do they get to speak to candidates, let alone offer them advice!!! Teenage Micah was either a true political genius, an obsessed freak who stalked candidates around shouting tips about media strategy while they got into their cars, or both. Almost certainly both.
He did this while a student at Stuyvesant High School, famously one of the grindiest and most academically rigorous schools in the country. You can learn a lot about politicians from how they sought and wielded democratic power while under the yoke of their authoritarian high school. Zohran Mamdani ran for student body president of Bronx Science High School by promising to give students free juice every day. He didn’t win, but even then, he was capturing the imagination of a disaffected electorate (in my experience, almost no one who isn’t directly involved cares who wins student council president) with outside-the-box, flashy freebies. Lasher, by contrast, mobilized his Stuy class into active rebellion against the administration after they censored and indefinitely suspended his school newspaper. Within a week of the suspension, Lasher had circulated a petition for reinstatement that had more than a thousand student signatures, and had put together a package of high-powered external First Amendment experts, including the dean of the Columbia Journalism School, to publicly criticize the school’s administration in a New York Times article. Here, too, we get a preview of his political identity; Lasher was measured, reasonable, operating within the system as it existed (he did not attempt to publish the newspaper illegally while it was suspended, or chain himself to his locker), but he was also incredibly stubborn, relentless, and ruthlessly effective.
Having graduated from high school with already more political experience than many professionals in their thirties, Lasher spent his time as an undergrad at NYU holed up in his dorm room, founding the powerhouse political consulting firm SKD Knickerbocker (now SKDK). After a few wildly successful years, Lasher left the consulting world to join Congressman Nadler’s office full time as a “Special Assistant.” He then spent two years as the Director of External Affairs (i.e. communications and strategy) for the city’s Department of Education, before Mayor Bloomberg called him up to be, at age 28, his primary negotiator with the State Legislature in Albany. (It was at this point that the Times ran a colorful profile of Lasher cursing into his Blackberry as a few holdouts in the State Senate threatened the passage of a charter school expansion that Bloomberg desperately wanted). Lasher then directed the technocratic, pro-charter, UFT-skeptical education policy advocacy group StudentsFirstNY, before returning to the fray as chief of staff to Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, then campaign manager to Scott Stringer’s 2021 bid for mayor, and then, most recently, Director of Policy to Governor Kathy Hochul. This is a person who knows absolutely everyone.
Knowing everyone doesn’t always mean being liked by everyone, however, and Lasher also has experience with something his mentor Jerrold Nadler never knew much about: losing. In 2016, with Schneiderman’s blessing, Lasher ran for State Senate, and lost a bruising three-way race by fewer than 300 votes. Partly, this was because his opponent, the vile IDC-aligned Marisol Alcantara, had made a deal with the devil (Jeff Stein and Andrew Cuomo) and had the full weight of the state party behind her, but Lasher also suffered broadside attacks from UFT, the teacher’s union, which had not forgotten his pro-charter, pro-reform advocacy during the Bloomberg years. Eight years later, he suffered similar attacks in the race for his current State Assembly seat, from former public defender Eli Northrup. This time, the attack was broader; Lasher was a Bloomberg-aligned, Hochul-aligned moderate technocrat, Northrup alleged, and the progressive Upper West Side deserved an advocate who was firmly aligned with the left. Lasher prevailed only after calling in a favor from Nadler, who not only enthusiastically endorsed him, but sent around a mailer vouching for his “progressive values, and effectiveness in translating those values into action and results.”
I was skeptical of how progressive someone with Lasher’s resume could really be, but I will admit that his short stint in the State Assembly has impressed me. In his first session, he’s introduced (and successfully passed) bills to speed up tax assessments on wind and solar projects, a boring process that had caused years of delays and court battles, eliminate the “100 Foot Rule” that forced utilities to perform natural gas hookups without billing the gas company or homeowner, and strengthen protections for tenants in rent-stabilized units. He’s also led the legislature’s effort to “Trump-proof” the state, by giving the state critical government functions like consumer protections and financial regulation that the federal government has abandoned, anticipating and addressing newly created funding gaps, and expanding state-level protections for immigrants and other vulnerable groups. And he’s done it all while maintaining his personal Substack “Into The Weeds,” which I enjoy both as a constituent who appreciates government transparency and as a comrade in the struggle to write blogs for tiny audiences despite having a full-time job.
“Into The Weeds” does reveal the one area where Lasher is dead wrong, which is on criminal justice reform. While he tries to walk a middle path (hedging with qualified language, airing both sides in a kind of Socratic dialogue with himself, stressing the uncertainty), he is entirely too credulous of the narrative that the city’s post-covid crime wave, which closely matched a national trend, was nevertheless caused by local bail and discovery reforms of 2019, and that its swift descent was due to the brilliance of NYPD’s fearless Jessica Tisch. He employs a creative kind of magical thinking on the latter point, arguing that “it’s reasonable to think that anyone almost anywhere within the NYPD who had been giving less than their all would read the press release announcing the new Police Commissioner and begin to sweat — or shift into higher gear.” I like my supposedly data-driven, analytical, Bloombergian technocrats to make policy assessments based on something a little more rigorous than the imagined sweat of rank-and-file cops, but that’s just me.
Truthfully, I think it might just be me; with crime continuing to fall and progressives everywhere retreating from their most most incendiary criminal justice reform rhetoric, bail and discovery reform rollbacks do not seem like front-of-mind issues, especially in a race for a spot in Federal government without much direct relevance to that debate. Instead, Lasher’s Trump-proofing record will likely impress the district’s many MSNBC viewers, who will want a pugnacious Trump-fighter above all else.
And many voters may not inspect his record or past writings very closely at all. That’s because Lasher enters the race with the barely-tacit endorsement of Nadler, whose Chief of Staff, Rob Gottheim, has already accepted a key role on Lasher’s campaign. Less subtly, the Times’s Nicholas Fandos reported last week that “a person familiar with his thinking said Mr. Nadler planned to support a loyal former aide, Micah Lasher.” As always, there’s only one person who can be truly familiar with Mr. Nadler’s thinking.
If Nadler makes that endorsement explicit, that’s probably game-set-match. Until then, there’s a window of daylight for other candidates to make their pitch. How narrow that window is, how effectively Lasher consolidates support among key interest groups and power brokers, will determine how many of those candidates decide to take the plunge. I’ve assembled a list of credible challengers, and sorted them into four categories, which I plan to explain further in a future post. If two to three of the following people enter the race in the next month (especially if any of them are ‘Insiders’), then Lasher has work to do. If not, then it might be time for our political prodigy to start checking out Georgetown townhouses.
Contenders
Credible Insiders: Alex Bores, Keith Powers, Erik Bottcher
Blasts-from-the-Past: Scott Stringer, Carolyn Maloney, Mondaire Jones, Cynthia Nixon
Hyper-Connected, But Somewhat Delusional Outsiders: Liam Elkind, Jack Schlossberg, Whitney Tilson
Brooklyn Carpetbaggers: Brad Lander, Dan Goldman