The Race For Congress In New York's 10th District: Dumb And Dumber

I know that you readers are all hungry for some information on the race for Congress in New York’s 10th District. So I am here to fulfill your wishes.

NY-10 is the home District of the Manhattan Contrarian. It is a very prominent District, encompassing Lower Manhattan (from about 14th Street south) and a large piece of Northwest Brooklyn. Neighborhoods in this District that you may have heard of include Greenwich Village, Soho and Tribeca in Manhattan, and Brooklyn Heights and Park Slope in Brooklyn. And then there is the Financial District/Wall Street area — the heart of the financial system of the U.S., if not the world — which is also in this District. The District’s population includes large numbers of highly-educated and high income people. This 2024 study at SmartAsset.com found that the District ranked 12th wealthiest in the country as measured by percent of households earning more than $200,000 per year, with more than 103,000 such households. The District’s business community includes many prominent entities. As examples, the headquarters of Goldman Sachs and of Citigroup are in this District, plus major operations of companies like Google, Disney and Meta.

You probably already know that this District leans heavily Democratic, and particularly toward the elite and “progressive” factions of that Party. What you may not fully realize is what that actually means in practice in today’s bizarro world. In practice, the key to winning in this District is to promise to act as vigorously as humanly possible against the interests of the District’s residents.

Don’t believe me? As evidence, I’ll offer information from a debate between the two leading candidates for the congressional seat that took place Monday night (June 1) on the local Spectrum cable network.

There is a Democratic primary in this District set to occur on June 23 (with 10 days of prior early voting). There are two main Democratic candidates for Congress: incumbent Dan Goldman, and challenger Brad Lander. After its boundaries were completely re-drawn in 2022, the District was left without an incumbent. Goldman, a Lower Manhattan resident, won a wide-open primary in 2022, and went on to get elected that year and again in 2024. He is a wealthy heir to the Levi-Strauss blue jeans money, with some prior experience as a federal prosecutor. Challenger Lander hails from the Park Slope area of Brooklyn. He got his start as a community housing advocate, then got elected to the City Council in 2009 (where he served for 12 years and founded the “Progressive Caucus”), and finally won the office of City Comptroller in 2021. In 2025 he chose to skip seeking re-election as Comptroller in order to run for Mayor; but he finished third in the mayoral primary behind Zohran Mamdani.

On the political spectrum, these guys are Left and Lefter. In his time in Congress, Goldman has made himself known as one of the loudest and most annoying members for mindlessly mouthing Democratic Party talking points of the day. He has become particularly notorious at congressional hearings for getting into repeated shouting matches with administration officials ranging from Kash Patel to Kristi Noem to Todd Lyons. Meanwhile Lander is running as far as he can to Goldman’s left, if that is even possible. Among major campaign themes, he is known for pushing things like “labor equity” and Medicare for all. As City Comptroller he used his position as trustee of the City’s massive pension funds to try to push large corporations to adopt de-carbonization plans, and financial institutions to stop investing in fossil fuel producers. And perhaps most famously, he has been highly critical of Israel, including accusing it of conducting a “genocide” in Gaza. (By the way, Lander, like Goldman, is Jewish.). People who have endorsed Lander include a who’s who of the far left, from Mayor Mamdani to Bernie Sanders to Elizabeth Warren.

So with that background, we come to Monday night’s debate. The whole thing is an hour long, and you can watch all of it at this link (not recommended). Here is a still, with Lander on the left and Goldman on the right:

When I tuned in, moderator Courtney Gross was beginning a question to Goldman, which went like this (paraphrase): You have said that you favor increasing taxes on the rich. But do you favor increased taxes only on the super-rich, or also on just the regular rich?

Goldman of course failed to answer the question directly, but basically said that during his time in Congress he had supported every bill trying to increase taxes on the wealthy (never distinguishing between the “super rich” and the “regular rich” as the questioner had asked). This, from a guy who represents a far disproportionate number of these “rich,” whether “super” or “regular.”

Note that the moderator did not take the opportunity to ask Goldman how any of these tax increases on “the rich” would affect him — someone with a net worth in the hundreds of millions of dollars, but without any large amounts of current income subject to income tax. Had he ever favored a bill that would actually impose a significant tax increase on someone in his own position? Unfortunately the moderator blew right past that one.

And then came Lander’s turn to jump in. He claimed to be a leader of the movement to increase taxes on the rich. He bragged about how, unlike Goldman, he had travelled to Albany to prod the legislature to enact Mayor Mamdani’s plan for increased taxes on the rich. And, said Lander, even though Mamdani’s proposal for increased marginal income tax rates for high earners had not passed, Lander had been instrumental with Mamdani in getting the so-called “pied-à-terre” tax enacted. That tax, said Lander, was going to help fund the coming universal childcare regime soon to arrive in the City.

In other words, despite running to represent a constituency with one of the highest concentrations of high-earning people in the country, constituting about a third or more of the households in the district, these two are in a bidding war as to which one will seek to raise the taxes on these people the most.

And then Lander threw in a bonus claim. He said (not in response to a pending question) that he had been a leader in the successful fight against an initiative by prior Mayor Eric Adams to cut the budget of the New York City Schools by $400 million. Readers of some of my recent posts (for example, this one from April 30) will recognize that $400 million represents less than 1% of the wildly bloated $42+ billion budget of the New York City pre-K to 12 schools. That budget comes to more than $40,000 per student, more than double national spending norms, and could easily be cut by a third without anybody noticing the difference. The biggest benefit for the voters in this district that any elected official could do would be to find a way to reduce the bloated school budget to something in the normal range. Instead, Lander brags that he fought to preserve every dollar of the bloat. And Goldman did not challenge him on this issue, undoubtedly because Goldman thinks these voters actually want to be fleeced mercilessly by the insatiable teachers’ unions.

That was about all of the debate that I could stomach in the live version. However, I submit that even this short excerpt easily shows the extent to which the competition in this district is for which candidate will promise to act most adversely to the interests of the district’s residents. We’re dealing with a big cohort of voters, those with the $200,000+ annual incomes, who are wracked with guilt over their success, and looking for political representatives who will promise to punish them for their sins; and with another cohort, as big or bigger, of voters in percents 2 and 3 or the income distribution, who, although extremely affluent by any rational standard, are consumed with jealousy for those in percent 1. What kind of crazy dynamic is this?

According to Ballotpedia here, there is a Republican candidate running in this district by the name of Jennifer Moore. However, I can’t find any active website for her campaign. If it ends up that no Republican actually competes in the race, it would be far from the first time that that has happened during the time I have lived here.