NYC politician mounts left-flank challenge to Eric Adams’ reelection bid

NEW YORK — City Comptroller Brad Lander announced his bid for mayor on Tuesday, confirming one of the worst-kept secrets in New York political circles and formalizing a serious challenge to New York City Mayor Eric Adams’ reelection prospects.

Lander rolled out his plans, reported by POLITICO more than six weeks ago, in a pre-recorded video focused on affordability and public safety.

“Nothing can replace New York City,” he said in the video spot. “But we can replace a leader when they fail the basic tests of the job: To be honest with us. To keep our families safe. To make sure our kids learn. The basic things New Yorkers need their government to do.”

Lander’s intentions have been known for weeks and place him in a pack of challengers planning to attack Adams from the left — a group that includes former Comptroller Scott Stringer and state Sen. Zellnor Myrie.

As comptroller, Lander has a bully pulpit in the nation’s biggest media market and a taxpayer-funded office replete with communications, community relations and events staff. He also controls a vast unit to audit city agencies, allowing him to jab the mayor over operational deficiencies.

Those trappings were on display in June when Lander convened transit, environmental and disability advocates intent on reversing Gov. Kathy Hochul’s cancellation of congestion pricing. Lander — a co-founder of the City Council’s Progressive Caucus during his time representing Brooklyn’s Park Slope — was able to form a group intent on challenging Hochul in the courts, with the potential to parlay that energy into a broader political force.

Yet for all the built-in advantages he enjoys, the former Council member has been far less aggressive in criticizing City Hall than his recent predecessors — a restraint not reciprocated by Adams, who has made his distaste for Lander known in sometimes dramatic fashion .

And as a white progressive from a wealthy corner of Brooklyn, Lander is the exact foil Adams wants. The mayor and his surrogates will almost certainly raise the specter of racism to rebut challenges.

Other obstacles loom.

While he is a prominent citywide official, Lander is not the automatic frontrunner of the progressive field.

He had less than $160,000 on hand as of the latest campaign filing, and had a relatively weak haul for the first half of the year compared with Myrie and Stringer — though he will likely be eligible for around $2.4 million in public matching funds.

New York’s left, which failed to unite behind a single candidate during the 2021 Democratic primary, has been fractured anew by the Israel-Hamas conflict, pitting more traditional liberals who support Israel against groups farther to the left like the Democratic Socialists of America. That division, should the war last through next year, will make coalition building more difficult for the likes of Lander , who himself is Jewish.

And some of the issues that have previously mobilized the left, like defunding the police, are now widely considered out of step with the city’s electorate.

In fact, Myrie — who represents a piece of Adams’ moderate Black base in Brooklyn, yet was backed by the left-leaning Working Families Party — has been critiquing the mayor based on competence in governing, rather than tossing red meat to the left. That line of attack dovetails with concerns from voters captured in a December Quinnipiac University poll that found the mayor with a record-low job approval rating.

Adams has serious advantages of his own.

The mayoral bully pulpit, for one, dwarfs that of the comptroller. And Adams enjoys all the other advantages of incumbency with a massive city bureaucracy at his disposal.

The mayor is on track to claiming crime fell under his watch — his main campaign promise from 2021. And he also continues to raise money at a clip: The latest filings released July 16 found Adams has roughly $3 million on hand. When expected matching funds are factored in, he is already approaching the $7.3 million spending limit for the primary.

In addition, Adams boasts a formidable multi-ethnic coalition anchored by middle-class Black and Latino communities concentrated outside the city’s more affluent core. And even with simmering discontent, his voters are generally moderates who would be hard-pressed to support a more progressive candidate like Lander.

That still leaves a vast and vote-rich swath of the city up for grabs.

Brownstone Brooklyn, the Upper West Side and western Queens comprise some of the highest-turnout areas in the city. And because residents there tend to vote for more liberal or progressive candidates, they constitute a bloc separate and distinct from the mayor’s base. In the 2021 primary, for example, these neighborhoods helped propel the second-place finisher, Kathryn Garcia, to within one percent of Adams.

In that same primary, Lander won many of these areas in the first round of ranked-choice voting, according to election returns mapped out by the CUNY Graduate Center.

In Assembly District 52 — an area encompassing Brooklyn Heights and Park Slope that is often the highest-turnout district in the city — Lander won 63 percent of the first-round vote, according to the CUNY map. By the last round, that share increased to nearly 80 percent.

And with multiple candidates lining up to the left of the mayor, Lander could be the beneficiary of ranked-choice voting, which is likely to anoint one of the more progressive candidates as the main challenger to Adams.

In a press release unveiling the video and a new campaign website , Lander touted some of his accomplishments as comptroller: Raising concerns about a pricey migrant services contract, highlighting what he deemed an inadequate preparation for extreme weather and his opposition to budget cuts proposed for libraries and CUNY.

“I can’t wait to roll up my sleeves and bring my positive vision for change to New Yorkers all across the five boroughs, so that together we can write the next great chapter for New York City," Lander said in a statement.