Overview (Including DSA Membership) [1]

Brad Lander was born into a Reform Jewish family in Creve Coeur — a suburb of St. Louis, Missouri — on July 8, 1969. His parents were Carole and David Lander, the latter of whom was a bankruptcy attorney by profession.

From 1987-1991, Brad Lander attended the University of Chicago, where he joined the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) during the fall semester of his freshman year. He would remain a member of DSA for the next 36 years before distancing himself from the organization for reasons that are explained later in this profile.

After earning a bachelor’s degree in Fundamentals at the University of Chicago in 1991, Lander subsequently obtained a master’s degree in Anthropology from University College London (on a Marshall Scholarship) in 1993, followed by a master’s degree in Urban Planning from the New York-based Pratt Institute in 1998.

From 1993 to 2003, Lander was the executive director of the Fifth Avenue Committee (FAC), a Brooklyn-based nonprofit organization dedicated to the development and management of “affordable housing.”

In 1996 Lander married Meg Barnette, an attorney who would later serve as a high-ranking official and General Counsel at Planned Parenthood of Greater New York from 2011-2020.

From 2003 to 2009, Lander was a director of the university-based Pratt Center for Community Development, a community-planning organization that “works to build community power and ensure the equitable distribution of resources for low-income BIPOC people in New York City.”

In 2009, Lander, running on the Democratic Party and Working Families Party lines, was elected to represent the 39th District in the New York City Council. After completing his third four-year term ith the City Council in 2021, term-limit regulations barred him from running for re-election anymore.

At that point, Lander mounted a successful run for the office of New York City Comptroller, a position he went on to hold for four years, from January 1, 2022 to January 1, 2026.

Views on America’s “Systemic Racism”

In a January 2021 candidate survey for his New York City Comptroller campaign, Lander was asked to “[d]escribe your legislative and policy vision for combating systemic racism.” He answered:

“The inequities of the COVID-19 crisis and the murder of George Floyd by a police officer who crushed his neck for a literally breath-taking seven minutes have brought a moment of racial reckoning; but they also serve to remind us of how badly we have failed to rise to past moments. Floyd’s cries echoed those of Eric Garner and literally thousands of others, back through Emmett Till, and forward to today. Despite the years of mass protests and powerful organizing of Black Lives Matter, police killings of Black men continue at nearly the same rates as five years ago. And the ways in which systemic racism shows up in economic inequality, public health disparities, environmental racism, school and housing segregation, homelessness, food insecurity, and more remain firmly etched in our city and our nation. Committing to anti-racism means being honest and humble about, keeping a consistent focus on, and fighting constantly to undo those system injustices.

“I have tried to be an ally to my Black colleagues and friends, joining them in the streets to protest, supporting legislation to make our city a more fair and equal place, championing integration in our city schools, and promoting #BudgetJustice in the FY21 city budget. But the work of racial justice is also deeply internal. As a white man, that work starts by listening as honestly as I can to Black people about the anger and pain they are feeling, and the system of white supremacy and systemic racism it reflects. That is not easy — because it implicates me, because the anger is so deep, and because what it would take to change it is so big. But it must be the starting point. From deep listening, action-oriented solutions and genuine commitments should follow.”

That same candidate survey asked: “What is your position on removing the Christopher Columbus statue in Columbus Circle [in New York City] and if so, what should replace it? Lander replied:

“I support removing the Columbus statue in Columbus Circle, and replacing it with a monument that honors Native American histories, and tells the story of the colonization of America in an honest way. I would also support a monument elsewhere in NYC that celebrates the history and contributions of Italian Americans. I am also the lead sponsor of legislation to establish a new Historic and Cultural Marker program in NYC, to commemorate a more inclusive set of histories, communities, struggles, and sites.”

Distancing Himself from DSA

After spending 36 years as a member of DSA, Lander decided to distance himself from the organization after it failed to condemn the Islamic terror group Hamas for killing more than 1,200 innocent people in a series of barbaric attacks against Israel on October 7, 2023. In the wake of those atrocities, the New York City chapter of DSA held a rally in Times Square to show “solidarity with the Palestinian people and their right to resist 75 years of [Israeli] occupation and apartheid,” as the organization tweeted. It should be noted that while Lander did in fact make a tangible split from DSA, he continued to describe himself as an “ally” of the group.

Failed Run for NYC Mayor (2025)

In 2025 Lander ran a failed campaign for Mayor of New York City, placing third in the Democratic Party primary behind Zohran Mamdani and Andrew Cuomo.

Campaign for the U.S. House (2026)

On June 23, 2026, Lander won the Democratic Party primary for a U.S. House seat representing New York’s heavily Democratic 10th Congressional District, thrashing incumbent Daniel Goldman by a margin of 65.8% to 34.0%. Lander’scampaign was endorsed by such notables as Zohran Mamdani, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Jumaane Williams, Julia Salazar, Liz Holtzman, Ruth Messinger, and Sal Albanese. Organizational endorsers included, among others, the Working Families Party of New York, the United Auto Workers, the Service Employees International Union’s Local 32BJ, the Communications Workers of America, Make The Road New York, Indivisible, Unite HERE! (Local 100), the Sunrise Movement, Our Revolution, If Not Now, Emgage Action, Peace Action, and Citizen Action.

Lander On The Issues

Following is an overview of Lander’s positions on an array of key issues, as well as the elements of his 2026 congressional campaign platform:

• Abolish ICE: Lander’s 2026 congressional campaign website stated that he has been to committed to “abolishing ICE [the U.S. Immigration & Customs Enforcement agency] since 2018, when [President] Trump first deployed them to illegally kidnap our neighbors.”
• Protect Voting Rights: Lander and his 2026 congressional campaign supported the For the People Act and the John Lewis Voting Right Act to “restore voting rights protections that have been eviscerated by the MAGA Supreme Court.” He also vowed to advocate on behalf of the Freedom to Vote Act, “to establish national standards for early voting, automatic voter registration, and same-day registration.”
• Get Money Out of Politics: Lander and his 2026 congressional campaign pledged to “work to establish a voluntary public matching funds program for federal office, modeled on New York City’s successful matching funds program.”
• Expand the Supreme Court and Establish Term Limits: Asserting that President Trump had “packed” the “The Supreme Court and federal judiciary” with “radical, right-wing MAGA justices” who “are now serving as rubber stamps for this administration’s lawlessness,” Lander and his 2026 congressional campaign asserted that Congress must “wor[k] with the next Democratic President” to “balance the scales in the nation’s highest court by expanding it to 13 justices.”
• Build More Housing: Lander and his 2026 congressional campaign vowed to “work with Senator Elizabeth Warren to promote the 21st Century Road to Housing Act, “designed to boost [housing] supply, lower costs, and restrict private equity ownership.”
• Create Street-to-Home Vouchers: Lander and his 2026 congressional campaign pledged to “push for approximately 2,500 Street-to-Home Vouchers” — targeted housing subsidies designed to rapidly move chronically homeless people directly off the streets and into permanent housing — in New York City, and 70,000 such vouchers nationwide.
• Support Public Housing: Lander and his 2026 congressional campaign “proudly suppor[ted] the Green New Deal for Public Housing, which would finally reinvest federal dollars in social housing” – an arrangement where homes are publicly financed and are owned by governments, non-profits, or community land trusts, rather than private investors or landlords.
• Protect Abortion Rights: Complaining that “the MAGA Supreme Court decimated reproductive health care in red states across the country through the Dobbs decision,” Lander and his 2026 congressional campaign aimed to help make abortion “available to anyone who needs it” and “repeal the Hyde Amendment.”
• Defend Americans’ Civil Liberties: Pledging to “address the heavy legacy of systemic racism in our criminal justice system,” Lander and his 2026 congressional campaign vowed to help pass “the Mercy in Reentry Act to ensure that our social programs are accessible to the formerly incarcerated, as well as the People’s Justice Guarantee to end mandatory minimums and abolish the death penalty.”
• Stand up for LGBTQ+ & Trans New Yorkers: “Dedicated to protecting gender affirming care for transgender youth,”[2]  Lander and his 2026 congressional campaign vowed to “take on federal officials pushing ‘Don’t Say Trans’ bills to cut funding to schools that educate students about gender identity.
• Tax the Rich: Proclaiming that “we must boldly confront wealth inequality if we are going to bring relief to working families from a relentless affordability crisis,” Lander and his 2026 congressional campaign supported Senator Elizabeth Warren’s Ultra-Millionaire Tax Act to tax the net wealth of households with over $50 million in wealth,” and “an even more aggressive ultra-wealth tax on fortunes over $1 billion.”
• Support Labor Organizing: Lander and his 2026 congressional campaign stated that in Congress, they “will support the Protect the Right to Organize (PRO) Act to “make it easier to unionize.” Lander also said he would “continue to join workers on picket lines and protests” in cases where he deemed such actions advisable.
• Medicare for All: Lander and his 2026 congressional campaign pledged to “champion Medicare for All” — i.e., a government-run, universal health care system. Lander’s stance on this issue remained consistent with his 2021 declaration that said: “I am a strong supporter of Medicare for All that would ensure that health care is a fundamental human right, provided to everyone, regardless of employment or [immigration] status.”
• Invest in Education: Lander’s 2026 congressional campaign website said that he: (a) would “fight like hell to oppose Trump’s efforts to cut funding for public schools, to privatize public education, and to censor curriculum in our schools”; and (b) supported the cancellation of student debt for anyone who had attended a college or university.
• Take on Climate Change: Lander’s 2026 congressional campaign website said: “Urgent, robust action is required now to end our reliance on fossil fuels and implement a Green New Deal to transition rapidly to renewables.”
• Israel & the Palestinians: Lander’s 2026 congressional campaign website said that for more than 30 years, he: (a) had “called for an end to Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza and the removal of Israeli settlements”; (b) “believes that Israel’s destruction of Gaza was a genocide”; and (c) believes that “the U.S. should stop providing military aid to Israel while it violates international law and Palestinian human rights.”These positions were consistent with Lander’s assertion in a March 2023 op-ed wherein he: (a) condemned former President Trump and “his Republican enablers” for having “helped pave the way for [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu’s authoritarianism through their contempt for democracy and support for racist extremism”; and (b) exhorted President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken to stop providing a “blank check” to Israel’s “increasingly authoritarian” government.With similar disdain for the Jewish state, Lander, in a December 2025 interview with Zeteo, said that if he were to be elected to Congress, he would: (a) vote in favor of the U.S. recognizing a Palestinian state, and (b) oppose the sale of American-made offensive weapons to Israel.

Additional Issues

Criminal Justice

In March 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic was first becoming a major public concern across the United States, Lander, in an effort to minimize the type of prison crowding that might exacerbate the spread of the coronavirus, called for the NYPD to suspend criminal arrests, summonses, warrant enforcements, and parole-violation penalties for low-level offenders. He also advocated for the release of most of the 900+ inmates incarcerated at Rikers Island who were over 50 years of age — on the premise that older people were the most likely to suffer serious effects from the coronavirus.

In December 2020, Lander called for the disbandment of the NYPD’s Vice Unit, which was tasked with investigating and combating offenses like human trafficking, prostitution, and Internet crimes against children.

In January 2021, Lander spoke out in favor of the decriminalization of prostitution.

That same month, Lander indicated that he would “advocate for the Governor to review sentences of incarcerated individuals over the age 55 who have served in excess of 15 years to determine if they warrant release.”

Lander further stated that, if elected, he would “affirmatively seek to hire formerly incarcerated individuals.”

Defunding & Disrespecting the Police

In 2020, Lander expressed his support for defunding the New York City police force by way of a $1 billion budget cut. On June 10, 2020, he published a “My Commitment to Working to Defund the NYPD,” an open letter “to the tens of thousands of people” who allegedly had contacted his office urging the City Council to cut police funding. Some key excerpts:

• “In response to the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, I am inspired by the outpouring of calls and emails (more than 42,000 by last count!), by all the people who have lobbied me while marching in the streets over the past two weeks…. I am fighting for $1 billion in cuts to the NYPD this year, and I am committed to voting no on a budget that does not make significant cuts to the NYPD.”
• “I will also be voting yes on several pieces of police reform legislation coming before the Council next week (to make chokeholds illegal, strengthen the requirement that officers not cover up their name and badge number, adopt a police disciplinary matrix, establish an early intervention system for officer misconduct, and codify people’s right-to-record interactions with police).”
• “Emergency mental health responders, not armed police, should be the ones to respond to people in distress. Speed cameras that don’t racially profile or escalate confrontations should do traffic enforcement. Social workers and nurses should be in the halls of our schools providing support and care, rather than uniformed officers. Trained survivors and advocates with experience helping people get out of unsafe relationships should respond to domestic violence calls.”

NYC as a Sanctuary City

In the aforementioned 2021 candidate survey, Lander was asked: “What proposals will you advocate for to protect immigrants and further New York as a Sanctuary City?” He responded, in part: “To ensure New York City is not only a safe and welcoming place for immigrants but a place where immigrants can truly thrive, I support expanding the right to vote in municipal elections to immigrants and raising revenue in Albany to fund undocumented/excluded workers who have been left out of all federal stimulus packages.”

Looking Ahead with Confidence

After winning the June 23, 2026 Democratic Party primary for the 10th Congressional District seat in the U.S. House, Lander was all but assured of victory in the subsequent general election in November – given that Democrats far outnumbered Republicans in that district. His first priorities as a Member of Congress, he announced, would be to “vanquish Trump’s fascism” and abolish ICE.

Because a pair of additional DSA-affiliated congressional candidates — Darializa Avila Chevalier and Claire Valdez — likewise won their respective Democratic Party primaries on June 23, the DSA boasted that its rapidly rising influence represented an unstoppable trend that was destined to continue gaining momentum. As Osman Chaudhary, co-chair of the New York City DSA Electoral Working Group, put it: “We have a Democratic socialist mandate in New York City.” To anyone contemplating the possibility of mounting a challenge against the DSA’s preferred candidates, Chaudhary said: “Don’t even try it. We control these areas; we won by massive margins.”

Footnotes:

[1]  https://www.linkedin.com/in/bradlander/
https://ballotpedia.org/Brad_Lander
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brad_Lander

[2] The Daily Wire explains: “Gender-affirming care is a phrase used by transgender activists and media to mask the more grisly sounding transgender top and bottom surgeries, including removing a biological woman’s breasts, removing a biological man’s genitals, sculpting a fake penis on a biological woman, and more. Social affirmation, puberty blockers, and hormones also fall under the ‘gender-affirming care’ umbrella.” According to DoNoHarmMedicine.org, “gender-affirming” care is “based on the dangerous premise that any child who has distress that he or she thinks is related to their sex should automatically be treated with social transition to the sex of their choice followed by hormonal interventions and then possibly surgery to remove healthy body parts,” while “underlying mental health problems are usually not addressed.”