{"id":273863,"date":"2026-06-22T12:31:29","date_gmt":"2026-06-22T12:31:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/273863\/"},"modified":"2026-06-22T12:31:29","modified_gmt":"2026-06-22T12:31:29","slug":"the-ny-12-primary-is-awash-with-money-but-short-on-belief","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/273863\/","title":{"rendered":"The NY-12 Primary Is Awash with Money but Short on Belief"},"content":{"rendered":"

At the start of May, Lasher\u2019s campaign launched something they called \u201cMicah Mayhem.\u201d \u201cMayhem\u201d was a metaphor. Lasher\u2019s argument for himself is fairly nerdy. When I asked him what set him apart from the jostling field, he said, \u201cI have figured out a way to stymie Trump legislatively.\u201d 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,<\/a> partly because he has been endorsed by their local councilwoman, Gale Brewer.) \u201cIt\u2019s a very informed, educated electorate,\u201d Lasher told me.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s war in Gaza. Lasher declined to engage when I asked if he wanted to respond to the Conway supporters who said that he wasn\u2019t a fighter. Later, when I asked Lasher if there was an ideological difference between him and his fellow-assemblyman, Bores, he didn\u2019t point out any. (The Working Families Party, a progressive party that has long supported Nadler, considered whether to endorse a candidate, but couldn\u2019t decide and endorsed no one.)<\/p>\n

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\u2014funding 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. \u201cWe could not be more different,\u201d he said, when it comes to Israel.)<\/p>\n

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\u2019d 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 \u201cIt\u2019s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.\u201d) Bores\u2014a thirty-five-year-old who worked as a data scientist before he was elected to public office\u2014is 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt wasn\u2019t Alex\u2019s intention to run on this,\u201d Mangan said, of A.I. (Bores told me, \u201cMy plan was to talk about A.I. like five to ten per cent of the time.\u201d) Mangan said that Bores can geek out about other issues, and wished that happened more: \u201cHe will actually talk to people about how the tax code is full of loopholes.\u201d 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. \u201cThere are so many pictures in my camera roll that Apple has identified of us together,\u201d he told me. At one rally, Crean said, Bores \u201cwas probably the only straight and cis guy there.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bores has been endorsed by the majority of labor unions, and also the Bernie Sanders-affiliated group Our Revolution\u2014but he then specifically distanced himself from the group\u2019s position on Palestine, which was to block sending bombs to Israel. Crean, the activist, told me, of Bores\u2019s stance on Israel, \u201cThis is a district where it is political suicide to say anything.\u201d<\/p>\n

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. \u201cproxy battle,\u201d as my colleague Gideon Lewis-Kraus recently put it<\/a>. 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\u2019s 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, \u201cYou have to place yourself in 2014. This was the Obama Administration.\u201d 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. \u201cThe pitch was that we were coming to make government effective,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"At the start of May, Lasher\u2019s campaign launched something they called \u201cMicah Mayhem.\u201d \u201cMayhem\u201d was a metaphor. Lasher\u2019s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":273864,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[416,75,9,24,55,54,56,105388,22339,4727],"class_list":["post-273863","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-york-city","tag-elections","tag-manhattan","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-new-york-city-headlines","tag-new-york-city-news","tag-ny","tag-political-campaigns","tag-u-s-congress","tag-voting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/273863","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=273863"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/273863\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/273864"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=273863"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=273863"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=273863"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}