Alex Bores was phone banking for his upcoming primary the other day when he reached a particularly disgruntled voter. “Are you the Palantir guy? Absolutely not,” she snapped before hanging up.
Bores took a deep breath and then tried to appeal to her with a follow-up text. She’d seen the ads, of course, attacking him for his prior employment at the company that’s been dominating headlines for its involvement in ICE raids and bombing in the Middle East—ads that were partly funded, in a twist of truly breathtaking hypocrisy, by Palantir cofounder Joe Lonsdale. (Venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman, and SV Angel Founder Ron Conway have also given hefty sums to Leading the Future, the Super PAC seeding this narrative.) The part those ads left out? That Bores had resigned from the company in 2019 over his own concerns about its work enabling deportations. “I will do more homework,” the voter promised.
Bores, 35, is a New York assemblymember running in one of this election season’s most intriguing primaries, pitting him against John F. Kennedy’s grandson Jack Schlossberg, Kellyanne’s ex-husband George Conway, and former Jerry Nadler aide Micah Lasher. (Parkland shooting survivor Cam Casky was also in the running before he dropped out to dedicate himself to pro-Palestine activism full-time.) “Is New York’s 12th Congressional District about to experience the hottest primary ever?” reads one Reddit thread, alongside photos of the unusually youthful bunch.
While a lot can happen between now and June, early polls show Schlossberg and Bores pulling ahead of the pack. I asked if the young Kennedy scion’s history of shirtless selfies, Ripstik riding, and general “silly goose” antics has made him a less intimidating opponent. “I mean, look at some other people that have been elected recently,” Bores answered wryly.
Bores thinks he can offer some much-needed tech (policy) support amidst our aging gerontocracy. “I’ll be the second Democrat ever with a degree in computer science. I worked at start-ups. I understand how tech works.” Meanwhile, he’s had to devote no small part of his campaigning hours to playing defense against a multimillion-dollar ad spend from some of the most powerful people in tech. “They would like nothing more than for me to be spending all of my campaign money texting and emailing right now. So there’s some amount of just taking it on the chin,” he told me in an interview last week.
The AI industry has been running a playbook perfected by the crypto industry in 2024: Single-issue, pro-tech super PACs willing to spend staggering amounts to make an example out of a handful of candidates who dare to oppose them. With AI’s approval ratings sinking to all-time lows, these groups know they won’t get far on pro-AI messaging. So they play dirty.
