10 Questions With Brad Lander
Brad Lander took a risk last summer when he entered the New York City mayor’s race instead of running for a second term as comptroller.
But he was worried then, he says, about the city’s future under the leadership of Mayor Eric Adams — and later about the possibility that former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo would join the race, as he did.
He has run as an earnest technocrat with a stack of progressive plans. But he has not had the same momentum as Zohran Mamdani, who has risen in the polls and received the first-choice endorsement of Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. (She ranked Mr. Lander third.)
Ahead of the June 24 primary, the leading Democrats in the race visited The New York Times for interviews. We are publishing excerpts from those interviews, and this is the sixth in the series; our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.