In the immediate aftermath of Zohran Mamdani’s shocking upset in the Democratic mayoral primary, there was a thirst for more fresh blood, more primary challenges, and one man’s name came up over and over again: New York City Comptroller Brad Lander. Should he challenge Rep. Dan Goldman in Manhattan? Should he wait until 2028 and go for Chuck Schumer? Lander’s cross-endorsement and passionate support for Mamdani at the end of the race was earning him credibility to become the next dragonslayer in New York politics.
I don’t expect everyone to read the Prospect (though you should), but we actually reported on Lander’s next job, should Mamdani vanquish every billionaire puppet that the city’s elite will throw up against him in the general election. “The word on the street is that if Mamdani wins, he will appoint Lander first deputy mayor, the equivalent to the city’s chief operating officer,” wrote Robert Kuttner on June 16. I have since gotten soft confirmation of this—Lander pretty much said it himself in an interview—and while nobody wants to make things too explicit with more than four months before the general election, I think that this is pretty much expected at this point.
That could be perhaps the greatest achievement to come out of last week’s primary victory. For a decade, the progressive left has had separate factions, one gravitating to bold ideas and another to the block-and-tackle work required to manifest them. Mamdani and Lander appear to have fused the two, recognizing both that the delivery of tangible improvements for people is how you build trust in a party that has too often toxified itself with broken promises, and that you can’t offer people warm gruel and expect them to treat it like caviar. Finding policies that people are enthusiastic about is a critical part of politics, and so is getting those policies enacted.
To simplify wildly, Mamdani has brought together the Sanders and Warren wings of the party, something that could have happened much sooner but didn’t. Both are vital for success, and if Mamdani pulls it off, it’s a model that even the establishment could, and should, adopt.
(If you want this set of ideas more as audio than the written word, on my podcast Organized Money, I talked about it with my co-host Matt Stoller and prominent Mamdani supporter Zephyr Teachout.)
I was in Washington in the immediate aftermath of Mamdani’s victory, and in talking to people I saw elation, undoubtedly, but also a certain ineffable guardedness. Inevitably the conversation would turn to Lander, and how people just knew him far more. Lander was active in the Local Progress network, which identifies and mentors local lawmakers, many of whom do eventually end up in Congress.
Lander, on New York’s City Council and as comptroller, was instrumental in many progressive advances: paid sick leave, consistent scheduling for fast-food workers, integration of Brooklyn-area schools, etc. Ezra Klein chose him as the technocrats’ favorite, and while his praise for Lander’s redevelopment of the area around the Gowanus Canal, with its affordable housing mandate, public access to the waterfront, and set-asides for artists, was interesting coming from someone who literally invented the term “everything bagel liberalism” to decry infrastructure projects serving multiple uses, it spoke to how Lander is expert at moving the right levers of power to get things done in a sprawling city with a clunky democratic structure, where progress is a real achievement.
Lander’s plans in his mayoral campaign reflect this penchant for equitable growth and an emphasis on details. Read this document about reform of the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) and I defy your eyes not to glaze over, but it’s really important stuff: a path for making low-income public housing decent enough to actually live in for its 517,000 residents. (It involves, for instance, a “Yelp for Repairs” setup to identify the best vendors.)
As deputy mayor, Lander’s goals may be different, folded into Mamdani’s big-ticket items on affordability like free and fast buses, public groceries, rent freezes, and free universal child care. Mamdani simply had a better way to inspire people, with boldness over competence. But he absolutely recognizes that bold ideas are doomed without competent execution.
The famous halal cart video, a stellar example of bringing the “More Perfect Union” type of media techniques into a political campaign, is on a surface level about why the price of lamb over rice is going up. It’s a great hook: cheaper street food! But beneath that, it’s about a dysfunctional bureaucracy in New York City where it’s so impossible for small businesspeople to get licensed that they must buy an existing one, often for thousands of dollars. That inefficiency is a huge expense in a low-margin industry, and addressing it might get halal down to $8 a plate instead of $10.
As Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) told me a couple days after Mamdani’s victory, the mayor in her state’s largest city of Boston, Michelle Wu, literally got her start as a college intern for the then-mayor working to get food trucks licensed. Mamdani’s early advocacy involved debt relief for taxi medallion holders. My colleague Moe Tkacik has labeled this trend “small business socialism,” facilitating entrepreneurial ideas and giving people their coveted economic liberty. This is a deeply empowering notion, and as John Ganz points out, it aligns the working class and the middle class around a shared goal of thriving. The shared enemy is big business; it’s telling that one of the big companies that unsuccessfully poured in money to stop Mamdani’s rise was Doordash, which exploits its rideshare workers but also makes it tough on those halal cart guys, who pay through the nose for delivery app orders.
But it’s also a competence story, about dedicating governance to efficiency and results. “It’s this notion of progressive mayors who are deeply committed not just to fancy speeches but to actually delivering for people every day,” Warren said. There’s a name for this, and I know because I helped come up with it: “deliverism,” the notion that politicians have a short window to match their inspirational rhetoric with tangible benefits. As I said then: “You cannot talk about the same popular items, fail to deliver on them, and expect the voting public to keep listening to you. There are diminishing returns to parties that never get results.”
Mamdani understands this intuitively, and that’s why Lander was brought into the fold, outside of the political realities of ranked-choice voting. Someone with experience inside New York City government is critical to the project of not just winning on progressive populism, but building a legacy that makes future promises credible.
That is an exciting prospect, fusing the poetry of campaigning and the prose of governing, with the reality always in mind that the two are actually inseparable and need to be fully aligned. The public is tired of bait and switches, where the 30 days before an election look nothing like the two to four years after.
Lander has called this a politics of hope and cooperation. That’s right, but it won’t be fully realized until after the balloons are swept away. It’s incredible that governing has become so divorced from the point of politics, but the Mamdani election (if it happens) could become the beginning of a new era.
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David Dayen is the Prospect’s executive editor. His work has appeared in The Intercept, The New Republic, HuffPost, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and more. His most recent book is ‘Monopolized: Life in the Age of Corporate Power.’
