General Discussion

A onetime ally falls out of the inner circle

Behind the scenes, Mamdani was complaining to one friend weeks ago that he didn’t know why everyone was on his case to have a transition plan mapped out already. With his closest aides, he was already compiling lists of potential appointments to top positions.

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[O]ver the summer, Mamdani would confide he wasn’t much impressed with Lander. Nice enough guy, but he didn’t seem particularly effective as comptroller, Mamdani said according to a person familiar with his comments. The two went weeks without talking, and though Lander would get defensive and blame overlapping post-election vacations, all his talk that he’d be the one really running the city next year had gotten back to Mamdani and not gone over well.

By the weekend before the election, Lander’s wife was telling friends at a party that Mamdani had called to tell the comptroller he would not have a job in the administration since he wasn’t getting the job he wanted. By the day before the election, Lander was reaching out to major donors to solicit commitments for a congressional run against Rep. Dan Goldman, according to a person familiar with the matter.