New York’s 12th district, currently represented by the retiring Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-NY), features Democratic candidates in four different flavors.
The frontrunners in an obscenely crowded race are New York Assemblymember Micah Lasher, fellow state Assemblymember Alex Bores, JFK’s grandson Jack Schlossberg and lawyer and news commentator George Conway.
Lasher is the paid-his-dues Democrat, having worked for Nadler, New York Governor Kathy Hochul and former Mayor Mike Bloomberg, all of whom support him. Bores has come to be defined by his skepticism toward unchecked AI, and his state regulatory legislation has turned his campaign into a bizarre Silicon Valley proxy war. (Anthropic is for him and Open AI against, to the tune of many millions of dollars.)
Schlossberg is the 33-year-old social media savant, boasting an always-sexy Kennedy lineage and a self-professed gift for connecting with the youths. Conway is the Republican-to-#Resistance convert, once Trump-curious enough to consider working for the administration, now a Trump-hating MS NOW mainstay.
The race has attracted outsized attention for its neat microcosm of some of the biggest questions plaguing the Democratic party in a district where voters are old, over-educated news junkies. It’s also a font of money, if its representative can tap it.
The resulting chaos has been hard to look away from.
The candidates’ differences are much more stylistic than policy-based, and the primary has become more of the character study that birthed 1,000 profiles. Stories circulated about the turnover in the Schlossberg campaign, his reported tendency to go for long stretches without talking to the press. Conway, the geriatric of the crowd at 62, promised to impeach Trump and then go home after one term. Bores, despite his AI focus, has been bedeviled by his stint at Palantir, a sign of the libness of this deep blue enclave. There’s a storyline for everyone.
The 79-year-old Nadler relinquished the seat a couple terms after a bloody post-redistricting battle with Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) in 2022, saying that watching what happened to the Biden presidency and campaign convinced him to pass the torch.
