Liz Krueger endorses Brad Lander No. 1 as he aims for Kathryn Garcia voters

The question of who will get Kathryn Garcia’s votes in this year’s mayoral election may still be unanswered, but one of her prominent endorsers in 2021 is going with Comptroller Brad Lander.

State Sen. Liz Krueger, is throwing her support behind Lander as her No. 1 choice, she exclusively told City & State. She and Lander are holding a press conference Friday morning. Krueger previously committed to ranking Lander and state Sen. Zellnor Myrie either first or second in this year’s Democratic primary.

In choosing a mayor, you want someone knowledgeable about the city, its issues and its bureaucracy, open to hearing out diverse perspectives, and capable of finding the best people to delegate to, said Krueger, a respected longtime state senator who represents midtown Manhattan and the Upper East Side. “I think that Brad Lander has shown that he checks more of those boxes, for me, than the other candidates,” she told City & State. 

Lander, who has come in third or fourth in recent Democratic primary polls, performed best in his home turf in Brooklyn in a recent Marist poll – winning 12% of respondents’ first-choice support in the borough. (Overall, Lander still trails Assembly Member Zohran Mamdani in polls.) In that Marist poll, Lander won 10% of respondents’ support in Manhattan, where his team hopes to grow their coalition, particularly among the liberal but not too lefty parts of the borough where Garcia performed well. 

How helpful Krueger’s endorsement – or that of any elected official – will be with that remains to be seen. But Krueger said that she sees commonalities between Garcia and Lander. “Brad hasn’t run city agencies, but he has had oversight as a council member, and perhaps most importantly as a comptroller who has done audits and evaluated what’s working and not working in city agencies,” Krueger said. 

Plus, she said, he’s a nice guy. “I know nobody actually seems to give a damn about that in politics given some of the, I don’t know, testosterone-poisoned people we seem to elect in this country,” she said. “But he is actually a very decent human being.”

This is not the first not-too-surprising endorsement that Lander has touted with a press conference – Lander also held a press conference to announce Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso’s first-choice ranked endorsement late last month after Reynoso already said months prior that  Lander would be on his slate.  

But it’s crunch time for lagging candidates like Lander to make a break in the crowded race. So far, former Gov. Andrew Cuomo has garnered the most major endorsements – from Reps. Adriano Espaillat and Greg Meeks to Assembly Member Rodneyse Bichotte Hermelyn and the influential Hotel and Gaming Trades Council. 

Krueger’s relationship with Lander goes back before either was in elected office, to when both worked in anti-poverty organizations. Krueger said she’s unsure if she would endorse other candidates in a ranked slate just yet – though she’s still a fan of Myrie. One thing’s for sure: She won’t be ranking current front-runner Cuomo. “We want the strongest candidate we can to beat him and to be our next mayor, and I believe that that is Brad Lander,” she said.