Assemblyman Alex Bores’ campaign launch video for New York’s 12th district opens on an unlikely scene: a gritty baby cam. He says his three-month-old son is a big part of why he’s running in the June 2026 primary.
“I think about having to explain to him what America stands for, what democracy means … conversations that people are having with their kids throughout the country,” he said in an interview with The Sun. “So I’m running not just for my kid, but for the families everywhere that want to stand up for what is right.”
The 12th district, which covers Midtown, the Upper West Side and Upper East Side, is safely Democratic — last electing a Republican candidate in 1958. Bores is therefore expected to face a congested Democratic primary; a Kennedy grandson, a former chief of staff for incumbent Jerrold Nadler, a socialist Gen Z activist and New York City council member have already joined the race. There are currently 10 total candidates for the coveted seat.
For Bores, who was first elected as an assemblyman in 2022, his background in computer science from a Master’s at Georgia Tech will help him stand out in a field where “almost everyone else is either a political neophyte or is an elected official but came up as a staffer,” Bores said.
“I am the first Democrat elected in New York State, at any level, with a degree in computer science — a fact I find 10 percent cool and 90 percent horrifying,” Bores said.
The School of Industrial and Labor Relations alumnus joined Palantir, a software company that builds platforms for data analysis, in 2014. Bores said he worked on Medicare fraud, the opioid epidemic and “going after the big banks for their role in the Great Recession.”
He said he “knew he had to leave" in 2019 as a government liaison for Palantir because of contracts with Immigration and Customs Enforcement during the first Trump Administration, specifically regarding deportations.
Jobs in software propelled Bores to write the Responsible AI Safety and Education Act, which passed the assembly earlier this year.
The act "applies safety standards to the largest AI developers, holding them to things they had already committed to publicly but didn’t have the force of law,” Bores said.
He added that the law was passed to avoid a race to the bottom on crucial safety issues. “[It] sets a floor that they can’t go past. It requires the largest AI developers to have a safety plan that they make public and stick to, and disclose critical safety incidents,” he said.
Bores said he wants to see national AI regulation like the RAISE Act implemented during his term as congressmember and also plans to “massively fund and expand” the AI safety council established by former President Joe Biden.
In response to Bores’ focus on AI regulation, he has already been targeted by a leading AI industry PAC, Leading the Future, which is backed by Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale and Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta, alongside other tech leaders.
If elected, Bores said he would vote for fellow New Yorker House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) to be speaker of the House of Representatives, noting historically low approval ratings for the Democratic party because “many people feel that the current [Democrats] in Congress have not been fighting hard enough against the authoritarian takeover.”
“It feels like everyone is focused on scoring political points and social media hits,” Bores said.
Bores said he would release a platform on his website in the coming months, but has previously indicated he supports single-payer healthcare, ending mandatory minimums and reparations.
The assemblyman, who endorsed Zohran Mamdani in his race for mayor, has said the mayor-elect’s “Not On Our Dime!: Ending New York funding of Israeli settler violence act” Assembly bill was “unserious” because of its singling out of Israel. Bores said to The Sun that he would not “pick out” individual PACs, in reference to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, though he has committed to refusing corporate PAC donations and said he has not yet taken any money from any PAC in his run for Congress.
Bores was born and raised in Manhattan, but he said that “the best education I ever got was on the picket line” during the 1998 National Association of Broadcast Employees and Technicians strike.
Inspired by his experience during the year-long lockout, Bores attended the School of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell. During his time in ILR, Bores was elected student trustee and joined the debate team, where he met his wife.
As a trustee, Bores recalls being surrounded by CEOs and foundation presidents, and said that, “watching them analyze the problems and opportunities was better than any MBA.”
He also helped run a campaign against Nike’s refusal to give 1,800 Honduran workers severance pay. After other universities joined Cornell in cancelling Nike contracts, Nike finally paid out $1.5 million to the fired workers in 2010.
Bores spoke some parting advice for university students.
“My favorite quote is from Bertrand Russell, who says, ‘The sign of a civilized human is the ability to read a column of numbers and weep,’” Bores said. “By the time you graduate, you have the capacity to make sense of the world. The question is, are you fostering enough of your humanity that those numbers still make you weep and still make you want to make a difference?”
The primary election will take place on June 23, 2026.
Atticus Johnson is a member of the Class of 2028 in the College of Arts and Sciences. He is a senior writer for the News department and can be reached at ajohnson@cornellsun.com.
