Eli and Whitney
Thoughts on My Conversation with Mayoral Candidate Whitney Tilson
Today, we’re posting the second episode of my new podcast Primary School. You can follow us on Instagram here, on Spotify here, on YouTube here, and on your Apple podcast app here.
Our guest for this episode is mayoral candidate Whitney Tilson, a former hedge fund manager, philanthropist, and cofounder of many nonprofits including Teach for America. Tilson has never held public office before, and frames this as the core strength of his campaign. He believes this city needs the mayor to be a change agent, not another career politician. He also believes this city has gone too far to the left, and in his opening remarks you’ll hear him praise Michael Bloomberg, decry the local political establishment for pivoting too far to the left on crime and quality of life issues, urge voters to be more grateful for the richest 1% of city residents, and express outrage that the city was not “pro-growth” enough for Amazon to keep their offices here. While Tilson wants to position himself as, in his words, “a middle of the road pragmatic, get things done, Democrat,” if you listen to his elevator pitch and stop there, there’s a good chance you’ll walk away with the same conclusion I did, which is that this guy might be running in the wrong primary. As of yesterday, our current mayor has decided to leave the Democratic ticket and run as an independent, and on rhetoric alone, it’s not hard to imagine Tilson making the same decision.
But after researching and then interviewing him, I walked away with a slightly different view. For one thing, he’s intensely critical of Adams, whom he sees as the embodiment of machine politics run amok, with career politicians enriching themselves and their special interests at the expense of everyday voters. For another, many of his policy proposals go further left the deeper you delve into them.
He brags about being the only candidate willing to make street homelessness illegal, but if you probe, you learn that he doesn’t actually want anyone to go to jail, that he finds the Adams administration’s periodic park raids cruel, ineffective, and wasteful, and that he supports a housing-first approach, paired with an expansion of supportive services and long term psychiatric beds. Sounds a lot like Brad Lander’s proposal!
On housing, he gives the standard YIMBY line about how we need to build as much as possible in order to address the supply shortage and lower rents. There’s a bit of a stylistic difference between the way he and the progressives talk about this issue; he emphasizes growth, free markets, and cutting bureaucratic red tape, while the others talk in terms of affordability, equity, and gentrification. But he’s running against some of the most YIMBY progressive candidates the city has ever seen. Zellnor Myrie wants to build a million new units of housing, and reclaim the record for world’s tallest building! Brad Lander’s massive redevelopment of Gowanus is the signature plank of the policy record he is running on. Zohran Mamdani’s record on this is a little spottier, but he’s gotten the memo that tons of privately developed market rate housing is essential to addressing the affordability crisis at the center of his campaign, and he recently filmed a campaign ad in front of the undeveloped Atlantic Rail Yards, a symbol of bureaucratic NIMBY dysfunction.
Tilson also ardently supports congestion pricing, joining the progressives who all support it, in opposition with Cuomo, who has disavowed it. And if you stick around to the end, you’ll hear Tilson rave about Bill de Blasio’s universal Pre-K as an excellent, essential program that he wants to expand. On most issues, he works to pair the rhetoric and macro-worldview of the reactionary moderate wing of the party with the policy solutions of the liberals and progressives.
You’ll hear the tensions in this straddling act reach a breaking point when he turns to his campaign’s signature issue: crime. Tilson certainly has the rhetoric down, running as the candidate who wants to, as the headline of his FAQ-NYC podcast interview read, “make crime illegal again.” Yet you’ll also hear him speak about the unfairness of cash bail and coercive prosecutorial tactics with real feeling, remembering his synagogue’s advocacy for reform that he enthusiastically participated in.
To reconcile this, and burnish his “middle of the road” credentials even as he advocates some truly extreme measures like making retail theft a felony and allowing fentanyl dealers to be charged with murder, Tilson has a narrative about how 2019’s state reforms to bail and discovery were well intentioned, and even necessary, but simply went too far, a narrative which to my eye is at odds with the facts. These reforms led to a 47% increase in murder, he claims, (Highly suspect once you adjust for the nationwide COVID violent crime spike). Judges shouldn’t be able to put people in jail if they can’t afford bail, he argues, but they should be able to use bail as a proxy to detain people they consider dangerous (they already have wide latitude to do this, with the predictable result that many people do end up in jail because they can’t afford the bail, and they also can already remand without bail for dangerousness on many charges). Prosecutors shouldn’t be able to flagrantly violate discovery rules to delay trials and coerce defendants into unfavorable plea deals, but they shouldn’t be forbidden from doing it if following the rules adds an administrative headache that they say leads to dismissals of violent felony cases they should have won. (In fact, while discovery reform has led to an increase in dismissals for low-level nonviolent cases like Browder’s, it’s had no discernible effect on violent felony cases).
But while I disagree with the places that this balancing act between reactionary rhetoric, liberal policy and progressive values leads him, I think there’s a constituency for it. Just anecdotally, I know a bunch of loyal liberal Democrats who haven’t changed their core values since the 2010s, but have a nagging concern that the kids are batshit insane censorious communists, and that the party needs some middle of the road common sense.
Tilson is polling at 1% right now, as Cuomo dominates the reactionary moderate lane. So far, Tilson has remained pretty quiet on Cuomo, leaving his ire for the progressives (in one interview, he mentioned that he’s running in case Cuomo loses, so that someone else like him can win). Some free advice: he should change course and go scorched earth on the former governor immediately. As I wrote Wednesday, the New York Post is churning out attacks on Cuomo from the right, and their readers are up for grabs if anyone wants to make a play for them. If you hate bail reform so much, point some fingers at the guy who signed it! Contrast your hard-won business management skills with Cuomo’s incompetent handling of COVID! You’re running against the machine, and there’s no greater embodiment of the political machine in New York than the guy who ran the state for ten years, and currently leads the race in endorsements from elected officials. You’ll get some attention, maybe even some favorable coverage in the Post, and then who knows? The election’s ten weeks away, anything can happen.
As a highly educated, wealthy, Upper East Side-residing lifelong Democrat running on a platform of liberal technocracy, Tilson might find aspects of courting outer borough New York Post readers outside his comfort zone. But this is what it takes to be competitive in a citywide election, and if he’s already running a campaign full of contradictions, he should be able to handle one more.
Anyway you can listen to my conversation with Whitney Tilson here and decide for yourself!