The NY-12 Primary Is Awash with Money but Short on Belief

At the start of May, Lasher’s campaign launched something they called “Micah Mayhem.” “Mayhem” was a metaphor. Lasher’s argument for himself is fairly nerdy. When I asked him what set him apart from the jostling field, he said, “I have figured out a way to stymie Trump legislatively.” Lasher seems to be betting on a combination of projected competence and overwhelming, overlapping endorsement. (The filmmaker Benny Safdie and his wife, Ava, an education advocate, are voting for Lasher, partly because he has been endorsed by their local councilwoman, Gale Brewer.) “It’s a very informed, educated electorate,” Lasher told me.

But, at times, Lasher is more taciturn than some of the politicians who have endorsed him. Nadler, for example, has been much more outspoken on Israel’s war in Gaza. Lasher declined to engage when I asked if he wanted to respond to the Conway supporters who said that he wasn’t a fighter. Later, when I asked Lasher if there was an ideological difference between him and his fellow-assemblyman, Bores, he didn’t point out any. (The Working Families Party, a progressive party that has long supported Nadler, considered whether to endorse a candidate, but couldn’t decide and endorsed no one.)

On Israel, a lot of candidates have clammed up. Schlossberg is the only candidate of the four to say that he would vote against providing Israel with offensive weapons. (Schlossberg still supports providing defensive weapons to Israel—funding the Iron Dome.) Lasher, Bores, and Conway have said that they will not block sending Israel offensive or defensive weapons. (When I mentioned to Schlossberg that it can be difficult to tell the candidates apart ideologically, he covered his face with both hands and groaned. “We could not be more different,” he said, when it comes to Israel.)

One weekend, I met up with Brian Mangan, a former delegate candidate for Bernie Sanders and a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, who lives in the Twelfth District. (I’d first encountered Mangan on X, where he posted under the display name Millennial Dads for Alex Bores, with a profile photo of Danny DeVito from “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.”) Bores—a thirty-five-year-old who worked as a data scientist before he was elected to public office—is best known for being an A.I. regulator. Last year, he introduced the RAISE Act in the State Legislature, which established safety plans for frontier A.I. models. But Mangan made the case that Bores was not only the most legislatively experienced leading candidate but also the most progressive.

“It wasn’t Alex’s intention to run on this,” Mangan said, of A.I. (Bores told me, “My plan was to talk about A.I. like five to ten per cent of the time.”) Mangan said that Bores can geek out about other issues, and wished that happened more: “He will actually talk to people about how the tax code is full of loopholes.” Lorelei Crean, a trans-youth activist, told me that he started campaigning for Bores because he had consistently shown up to trans-rights rallies, even before launching his congressional campaign. “There are so many pictures in my camera roll that Apple has identified of us together,” he told me. At one rally, Crean said, Bores “was probably the only straight and cis guy there.”

Bores has been endorsed by the majority of labor unions, and also the Bernie Sanders-affiliated group Our Revolution—but he then specifically distanced himself from the group’s position on Palestine, which was to block sending bombs to Israel. Crean, the activist, told me, of Bores’s stance on Israel, “This is a district where it is political suicide to say anything.”

A super PAC partly funded by investors in OpenAI has spent more than seven million dollars on attack ads against Bores. Somewhat confusingly, Bores has also received millions from other A.I. companies that are pro-regulation, which has turned a corner of the primary into an A.I. “proxy battle,” as my colleague Gideon Lewis-Kraus recently put it. Untangling the conflict can require an up-to-date internecine map of various Silicon Valley factions. Bores used to work for Palantir, the surveillance company that used A.I. to assist ICE with deportations and provided support to Israel’s air strikes in Gaza. Recently, I asked Bores about his work at Palantir, outside a campaign event at a gastropub on the Upper East Side. He told me, “You have to place yourself in 2src14. This was the Obama Administration.” At the time, the C.E.O. of Palantir, Alex Karp, was a Democrat, and Bores worked on projects aimed at improving the Department of Veterans Affairs and the C.D.C. “The pitch was that we were coming to make government effective,” he said.