New York
Brad Lander’s 2 Goals in N.Y.C. Mayor’s Race: Beat Cuomo and Win
Brad Lander, the New York City comptroller and self-described “tough nerd,” knows that for him to win the race for mayor of New York City, Andrew M. Cuomo must fall.
To make that more likely, Mr. Lander decided that his campaign strategy needed an overhaul. He would no longer focus his ire on the increasingly inconsequential mayor of New York City, Eric Adams, and his apparent alliance with the Trump administration.
Instead, Mr. Lander, the Park Slope father with the University of Chicago degree, would use his distinctive voice — a singsong lilt that his critics find grating — to try to take down Mr. Cuomo, the former governor leading in the polls.
During a Passover week meal of latkes and matzo ball soup at a restaurant on Montague Street in Brooklyn, Mr. Lander unspooled his indictment of Mr. Cuomo, allegation by allegation.
“I know he looks like a good leader, but actually, you know, he’s just a corrupt chaos agent with an abusive personality that has shown through in every position he’s been in, and that’s dangerous for New York City,” Mr. Lander said, stopping only to spread sour cream and apple sauce on his potato pancake, or to sip from his French 75, a cocktail he likes because it is fizzy.
New Yorkers, he said, deserved a stark alternative: “I am a decent person. Let’s just start there.”
In eight weeks, Democratic primary voters will choose a candidate for mayor, with the victor promptly becoming the favorite to win the November general election in a city where Democrats outnumber Republicans six to one.
What kind of person New Yorkers want as their mayor is the elemental question of this and any mayor’s race. Do they want someone who projects a muscle-car style of masculinity, like the former governor, who resigned in disgrace in 2021 after an investigation found he had sexually harassed 11 women? (Mr. Cuomo has denied wrongdoing.)
Would they rather a female politician adept at projecting an even-tempered self-confidence, like the City Council speaker, Adrienne Adams? Would they prefer a charismatic democratic socialist and son of a movie director from Queens with an age-appropriate aptitude for social media, like Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani, who is now polling in second place?
Or would they like Mr. Lander, an earnest-seeming policy wonk who read Antigone in the original Greek; a former member of the Democratic Socialists of America who in 2020 said he still considered himself a member, but whose spokeswoman now says hasn’t attended a D.S.A. meeting in decades; a critic of the city-backed financing of the Hudson Yards development on Manhattan’s West Side who has since come around; a reform Jew who considered becoming a rabbi, and who is also an anti-occupation Netanyahu critic who cursed Mr. Cuomo in Yiddish as he accused him of wielding antisemitism as a political weapon?
At the moment, it appears that New York City voters are looking elsewhere. Mr. Lander is polling at 6 percent among registered Democratic voters, well behind Mr. Mamdani, a liberal upstart who has energized much of Mr. Lander’s presumptive base. Twenty percent of voters remain undecided. Mayor Adams has opted out of the Democratic primary and will run as an independent in November instead.
Lander partisans note that it is early. At this point in 2021, Andrew Yang was still leading the polls, Mr. Adams was in second place, and Maya Wiley, a civil rights lawyer, and Kathryn Garcia, the former sanitation commissioner, were polling at 7 and 4 percent, according to a Spectrum News NY1/Ipsos poll from the time.
That June, Ms. Garcia lost to Mr. Adams by just 7,000 votes, Ms. Wiley finished third, and Mr. Yang finished fourth. And Mr. Lander won the Democratic primary for comptroller.
“What I did last time to win was build a coalition that had the Maya Wiley voters, like people that have a more progressive vision of a city that can deliver on affordability, and Kathryn Garcia voters, who just want a good manager who loves New York City,” Mr. Lander said.
“And I believe that coalition still exists and can be a majority of the Democratic primary electorate.”
But first, Mr. Lander said, Mr. Cuomo has to be “knocked down.”
To that end, Mr. Lander has bombarded the press with anti-Cuomo messaging, hoping that something, anything, will stick.
“Lander Demands Cuomo Release His Tax Returns After History of Shady Business and Lies About His Income,” read one news release. “In Addition to Shady Crypto Client, Who Else Has Cuomo Been Paid to Advise Since Resigning as Governor?” read another.
Mr. Lander’s first real political encounter with Mr. Cuomo happened in 2017, when Mr. Lander was the city councilman representing Park Slope, Brooklyn, and Mr. Cuomo was still governor.
Mr. Cuomo effectively killed a New York City law imposing a 5-cent fee on plastic bags that Mr. Lander had sponsored, acting right before it was set to begin. “Plastic bags won,” Mr. Lander said at the time.
Four years after Mr. Lander’s bill passed the City Council, a plastic bag ban signed by Mr. Cuomo went into effect.
“We call that 40 billion plastic bags later,” Mr. Lander said.
More damning, Mr. Lander argues, were the Cuomo administration’s choices during the height of the Covid pandemic, when it directed nursing homes to accept infected patients, and then failed to publicly account for the deaths of more than 4,000 nursing home residents, according to an audit by the state comptroller, Thomas P. DiNapoli.
Mr. Lander has also tried to highlight the estimated $61 million New York has spent on legal representation related to issues surrounding Mr. Cuomo’s tenure.
“In every relationship, he views it as like, how could I manipulate this other party to my benefit?” Mr. Lander said. “And I really think that’s how he thinks about New York City.”
And so, inevitably, more than an hour into a pro-migrant, pro-trans-rights, pro-Mr. Lander event at a Unitarian church in Brooklyn Heights, Mr. Lander turned to Mr. Cuomo.
He pinned Mr. Cuomo’s polling status on “name recognition in a time of Trumpian distraction” and “pandemic memory repression.” He invoked a former Syracuse mayor, Stephanie Miner, who recently described Mr. Cuomo’s kissing her against her will as a power play. He brought up Covid and the $5 million book deal on which Mr. Cuomo used government resources. He noted that Mr. Cuomo’s lawyer had sought the gynecological records of a woman who had accused him of harassment.
“This is an abusive, corrupt person who is running for his own revenge tour,” Mr. Lander said. “He is not looking to solve the problems of New York City, where he hasn’t lived in 25 years.”
Then Mr. Lander asked the room to sing “Happy Birthday” to his 81-year-old mother, whose celebration he was missing while on the campaign trail. The audience happily complied.
In a statement, Esther Jensen, a spokeswoman for Mr. Cuomo, described Mr. Lander’s strategy as “bizarre.”
“New Yorkers aren’t naïve,” she said. “They know Governor Cuomo is the only person in this race with the proven record of accomplishment, and leadership necessary to effectively confront the very serious challenges we face, and take on President Trump, which is why these repeated gutter attacks from Brad Lander, a career politician, with no meaningful record or vision of his own, are not only not working, but backfiring.”
Mr. Lander, the 55-year-old son of a St. Louis lawyer and guidance counselor, met his wife at the University of Chicago and moved to New York City in 1992, so she could attend N.Y.U. law school. He found work running a community development corporation and then the Pratt Center for Community Development, both in Brooklyn.
After Mr. Lander announced he would run for mayor, he began tacking toward the center, renouncing the defund the police movement he had once supported and giving a pro-growth speech at a prominent civic association.
The speech won the respect of Dan Doctoroff, a former deputy mayor under Michael R. Bloomberg and a driving force behind New York City’s economic development. “The most important thing is he’s adopted my vision of the pro-growth cycle,” Mr. Doctoroff said of Mr. Lander.
It was a strategy seemingly predicated on the idea that moderates seeking competent governance would coalesce with left-leaning voters behind Mr. Lander.
He has cast himself as a liberal with managerial chops, and a housing expert who promises to end the mental health crisis on city streets and to build apartments on public golf courses. But the left seems more enamored of Mr. Mamdani these days.
In this city of shifting political loyalties, the pendulum may still swing in unexpected ways.
At this point in 2021, Ms. Garcia, who was running on her managerial competence, was a political afterthought. Then she surged forward, winning the endorsements of The New York Times and The Daily News.
Many voters still “want someone who is going to be a good manager,” said Basil Smikle, a Democratic strategist who formerly led the state party. He added that voters were also looking for someone who could stand up to Mr. Trump.
“Brad Lander has a chance if he can make the case that he can do all of those things,” Mr. Smikle said.
A suicide note purported to be written by the sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein while he was in jail in 2019 uses language that in some cases echoes his past writings to friends and family.
One phrase found in the apparent suicide note — “No Fun” — also appears on a handwritten page found in Mr. Epstein’s jail cell at the time of his death, as well as in emails he sent over the years.
And another saying in the suicide note — “watcha want me to do — bust out cryin!!” — appears in emails that Mr. Epstein had written to people close to him.
A cellmate claimed that Mr. Epstein left the suicide note before he was found unresponsive in their cell weeks before his death. The New York Times reported on the note last week and successfully asked a federal judge to unseal it.
If authentic, the note gives a view into Mr. Epstein’s mind-set before he was found dead at age 66 in August 2019. The New York City medical examiner ruled his death a suicide.
‘NO FUN’
A different handwritten note was found in Mr. Epstein’s cell when he died, and investigators believed it was written by him. In that document, Mr. Epstein complained about jail conditions — burned food, giant bugs and being kept in a locked shower. He concluded it with the underlined phrase, “NO FUN!!”
Mr. Epstein also used the phrase in emails when describing things he was unhappy about, or situations that had not gone his way.
‘watcha want me to do — bust out cryin’
Mr. Epstein used the phrase “watcha want me to do — bust out cryin” with friends, and in messages to his brother, Mark Epstein.
Like the note released by the judge, Mr. Epstein’s emails were often short, with staccato phrases and erratic punctuation. The emails were contained in millions of pages of documents the Justice Department released in response to a law passed last year requiring disclosure of records pertaining to Mr. Epstein.
It has become an article of faith in the New York State Capitol that when Gov. Kathy Hochul enters the Red Room on the building’s second floor to announce a budget agreement, the deal is actually far from sealed.
This year was no different.
Despite declaring that “today is the day” to announce an agreement on a $268 billion state budget, Ms. Hochul on Thursday acknowledged that several key initiatives — including a new tax surcharge on multimillion-dollar second homes in New York City — had been agreed on in principle, but that the details still needed work.
Even the top-line figure had not been finalized.
Lawmakers are fond of saying that the devil is in the details. But in the absence of the lengthy budget bills that include those details, which have yet to be printed and voted on, a host of unanswered questions remain.
Here are five of them:
Why did Hochul announce a deal when one hadn’t really been made yet?
New York’s opaque budget process, which starts in January with the State of the State address and is supposed to be completed by April 1, has become far more than a negotiation over a fiscal document.
Governors have tended to use the budget to wedge in legislative priorities, wielding their leverage over billions of dollars to get their way.
Ms. Hochul has embraced this practice. And, in a re-election year, she wanted to convey to voters that she intended to stand up to President Trump’s immigration crackdown, help out New York City and lower costs for everyday New Yorkers.
She made that case on Thursday at a news conference flanked by several of her top aides. Notably missing were the leaders of the State Assembly and Senate.
When will the budget actually be passed?
Not this week. The Assembly speaker, Carl E. Heastie, said on Thursday that it was “very premature” of the governor to say a deal had been reached. He would not even say that the Legislature had agreed to the $268 billion figure.
He complained about Ms. Hochul’s penchant for jamming nonfiscal policies into the budget and said he would not discuss such matters with his members until he had a better sense of the total amount the state would be spending.
As he spoke, members of the Senate and Assembly, who are currently not being paid, were wrapping up their legislative business for the week in a rush to return to their districts. They will be back in Albany on Monday; it is unclear what bill language, if any, will have been printed and distributed by then.
Did Zohran Mamdani get what he wanted?
Mr. Mamdani, the mayor of New York City, campaigned on wresting more than $10 billion in tax increases from the state to pay for his ambitious agenda. That will not happen this year.
Ms. Hochul did accede to a new tax on second homes that targets the city’s richest property owners whose primary residences are outside New York City. The goal is to raise $500 million each year, which will go toward closing the city’s estimated $5.4 billion budget deficit.
But she spurned the mayor’s request to make changes to a tax credit called the Pass Through Entity Tax that is used by some business owners. Mr. Mamdani had said that the measure, which was also backed by the City Council speaker, Julie Menin, could raise up to $1 billion a year in tax revenue.
Aside from tax increases, Mr. Mamdani’s overarching priority has been expanding child care in the city. Ms. Hochul’s budget does just that, with $4.5 billion allotted for child care and prekindergarten programs across the state.
It’s not the whole loaf, or even half. But Mr. Mamdani can point to that funding and say that he is advancing toward his goal of providing free child care for every New York City child under 5. And while the governor rejected his efforts to fund a program to make buses free, she directed more than $1 billion in additional aid to the city that, combined with revenue from the second-home tax and other proposed measures like delays in pension payments, could help Mr. Mamdani work to close its budget gap.
How will the tax on pieds-à-terre work?
State lawmakers — and just about everyone else — are scratching their heads about the details of this tax surcharge, which Ms. Hochul proposed with great fanfare last month. The New York Times previously reported that one proposal being discussed would apply one tax rate to pieds-à-terre with values between $5 million and $15 million; a higher rate for ones valued between $15 million and $25 million; and an even higher rate for properties valued at $25 million or more, according to three people familiar with the matter.
How much the property owners would pay is still up in the air. Ms. Hochul said on Thursday that more details would be coming in the near future and that the tax would apply to units worth $5 million or more.
Also being sorted out is how, exactly, the value of each co-op or apartment would be determined.
“It’s going to take some time to get to the right number to assess that,” the governor said, noting the city’s complex system for calculating a property’s assessed value.
“We’re looking at the difference between what is currently assessed but what is market value,” she added. “We’re working it out with the city. We have had some really good conversations.”
How will pensions change for state workers?
Facing pressure from the state’s largest public unions, Ms. Hochul has been trying to determine how to restore certain pension benefits that had been cut for public employees hired after 2012.
Any changes could end up costing the state hundreds of millions of dollars, while also saddling local municipalities and school districts with increased spending burdens. Several of the labor groups have prioritized lowering the minimum retirement age to 55 from 63.
Ms. Hochul said on Thursday that the particulars were still being negotiated, but stressed that the cost to the state and local governments would be less than the $1.5 billion that has been requested by the unions.
“We are willing to look at this and make changes, but a much more scaled-back monetary proposal,” she said.
“We will release these numbers as soon as it’s absolutely done,” she added.
Cornell University’s trustees announced on Thursday that they would investigate an April 30 incident in which the president, Michael Kotlikoff, bumped into students with his car after a debate over the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians.
A small group of students confronted Dr. Kotlikoff after he had spoken at the university event about free speech and the Middle East conflict. They posed questions about the suspension of pro-Palestinian student demonstrators in previous years, walking with him to his vehicle, a black Cadillac SUV.
After the students surrounded his vehicle, Dr. Kotlikoff got in, reversed and bumped one student. Another student said that his foot was run over. Emergency medical technicians arrived and checked the foot of that student, who was not seriously injured.
In an email to the campus on Thursday, the university said that an “ad hoc special committee” had been established to oversee the investigation of the events of that night. It said that Dr. Kotlikoff had recused himself from the investigation and “any related university decisions connected to the matter.”
The statement said that the trustees are “committed to ensuring a fair and thorough review guided by adherence to university policies and the best interests of the Cornell community.”
The event highlighted the lingering tensions on college campuses over the Israel-Hamas war, even as the large-scale protests from the spring of 2024 have dissipated.
Some student groups at Cornell have said that the university had unfairly disciplined pro-Palestinian students involved in the demonstrations.
One of the disciplined students was Momodou Taal, a Ph.D. student in Africana studies and a leader of the movement to establish protest encampments on the Ithaca, N.Y., campus. The Trump administration had sought to deport him and students at other universities whom it accused of spreading antisemitism.
Last week’s event, billed as a debate between supporters of the Palestinian cause and Israel, also featured Norman Finkelstein, a political scientist and author who spoke about Israel’s response to the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas-led attacks on Israel.
The day after last week’s incident, Dr. Kotlikoff framed himself as the victim, asserting that students had harassed him and banged on his car. The students denied doing that, and video of the incident that the students supplied did not show them hitting the vehicle.
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