Top Hochul aide Micah Lasher likely to announce Assembly run

It’s the worst-kept secret in Albany: Micah Lasher is likely running for an Assembly seat on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. So far, only three candidates have filed to run in the Democratic primary for Assembly District 69: Eli Northrup, Melissa Rosenberg and Barry Weinberg. Lasher, who is Gov. Kathy Hochul’s director of policy, has not yet filed to run for the seat and has repeatedly refused to confirm publicly that he’s running. But multiple sources have told City & State that he just settled on a campaign manager.

Lasher has said he will only make a final decision on whether to run for the seat after Hochul delivers her State of the State address on Jan. 9. He won’t have much time to decide, because the very next day, Three Parks Independent Democrats is hosting a candidate forum that advertises Lasher as a participant, along with the three declared candidates.

In a letter to the club’s members, Lasher wrote that although he’s not yet an Assembly candidate, he “did not want to miss … the opportunity to share with you some information about my background, my involvement in our community, and my connection to this wonderful club.” So will he be attending the candidate forum? “If I am a candidate at that time, or continue to be exploring a candidacy at that time, I will be at the forum,” Lasher wrote in a text message to City & State.

Lasher has deep experience in both Upper West Side politics and Albany policymaking, having advised Upper West Side power players like Scott Stringer for years. From 2010 to 2012, he worked as Mayor Mike Bloomberg’s director of state legislative affairs. After a brief stint leading the charter school advocacy group StudentsFirstNY, Lasher worked as chief of staff to state Attorney General Eric Schneiderman.

Lasher embarked on his first campaign in 2016, running for an open state Senate seat stretching from Manhattan’s Upper West Side to Upper Manhattan. After losing that race, he joined Google subsidiary Sidewalk Labs, which was then led by Bloomberg adviser Dan Doctoroff. In 2020, he was named as the campaign manager for Stringer’s unsuccessful New York City mayoral campaign. The next year, Hochul hired Lasher as her director of policy.