Micah Lasher Wins NY-12 in Race Flooded With AI PAC Money

In a Manhattan Democratic primary that AdImpact tracked at $26 million in total ad spending, New York Assemblyman Micah Lasher won the NY-12 nomination to succeed retiring Rep. Jerry Nadler, defeating rival Alex Bores by roughly four percentage points. NBC News called the race for Lasher, who won with roughly 39 percent of the vote to Bores' 35 percent in a crowded field.

The spending on both sides was notable. Former Mayor Michael Bloomberg reportedly injected close to $10 million into a super PAC backing Lasher, who also drew endorsements from Nadler and Gov. Kathy Hochul. Bores, who had positioned his campaign around AI regulation, accused "some of the richest people on the planet" of spending more than $10 million against him. Anthropic reportedly supported a super PAC called Jobs and Democracy PAC that spent almost $7 million defending Bores, part of a broader pattern in which OpenAI- and Anthropic-aligned PACs poured money into the race.

The honest caveat is that 35 percent in a multi-candidate primary against that combination of establishment endorsements and opposing PAC money is not a clean repudiation of AI safety messaging. The vote totals don't tell you whether Bores lost because of his AI positions, because of the institutional weight arrayed against him, or both. What the reporting also doesn't surface is what Lasher himself has said about AI regulation -- which makes the downstream implications for Congress harder to read.

Lasher is expected to succeed Nadler, heading to Washington as successor to a member who served more than 30 years in the House. Whether or how he engages with AI oversight once there will be a more consequential data point than this primary margin.