Brad Lander Endorses Elizabeth Warren For President

PARK SLOPE, BROOKLYN — Councilman Brad Lander may serve in Mayor Bill de Blasio's former city council seat, but that doesn't mean he has his vote for president.

Lander became the first City Council member to make a public endorsement in the 2020 race for the Oval Office on Tuesday when he announced his support for U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren.

The endorsement, which Lander released as a column in Buzzfeed News, focused largely on the need to rebuke a "bias toward male leadership" that Lander contends has kept even those who recognize Warren's potential as president from giving her their full support.

"It has become a maddening refrain...'Yes, Elizabeth Warren has the best policies, but..." Lander wrote. "I'm done with the 'but.' I'm endorsing Elizabeth Warren for president of the United States."

In the column, Lander explains how his own career, life and education, has benefited from male privilege and argues that there has been "little honest reckoning" about the way the patriarchy has influenced all aspects of life, and namely politics.

The councilman — who represents Brooklyn's 39th district from the Columbia Waterfront down to Kensington — contends that the Democratic primary for the presidency has become an example of that.

"As best I can tell, the argument that we should go with Biden, Bernie, Buttigieg, or Beto (rather than Warren, Harris, or Gillibrand) is that we live in a sexist country where women will struggle to be elected — and since the stakes are so high in the Trump era, we can’t risk it," Lander writes.

Lander says that he will work hard and vote for whichever of the 24 candidates gets the Democratic nomination — with special shout-outs to those with connections to New York like de Blasio, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand and Brooklyn-born Sen. Bernie Sanders —but that he wholeheartedly endorse Warren for the job.

He goes on to say that his endorsement of the Massachusetts senator, though, is not only because of the opportunity to have the first woman president.

Lander highlights Warren's policies on universal child care, affordable housing, universal free public college, antitrust enforcement and many more that she has outlined on her website.

"If I weren’t confident that Warren could beat Trump, and that she could do the best job, that victory for equality would not be reason enough in itself," he said. "But since I really believe she could — that she not only has the best plans, but would be the best president — it’s an awfully good additional one."

Read Lander's full endorsement here.