Both sides claim the lead in AI’s high-stakes midterm race
Polling from Public First shows Alex Bores in the lead in NY-12 — but polling from rival super PAC Leading the Future does not
In the Upper West Side of Manhattan, two dueling AI-focused super PACs are wrestling with an existential question: can their ads flip an election?
In two NY-12 primary polls, shared by both super PACs with Transformer, each side claims to be making a difference. But with each side’s polls finding starkly different results, it’s still very unclear what impact — if any — the super PACs’ $2.55m in spending is having.
The NY-12 race is serving as a microcosm for a wider political spending battle. On one side lies a group which supports stronger AI safeguards and is pushing for the election of Alex Bores, the New York assemblyman behind the RAISE Act — spending $602,208 supporting him to date.
A poll shared exclusively with Transformer by one of those “pro-safety” groups, Public First Action (which funds a network of super PACs and is at least partly funded by Anthropic), puts Bores at 20% of the vote: one point ahead of Micah Lasher, two points ahead of Jack Schlossberg, and seven points ahead of George Conway.
That’s despite $1.95m in Bores attack ads from the Leading the Future network, a “pro-innovation” group of super PACs funded by OpenAI president Greg Brockman and venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, among others.
“Leading the Future and its affiliates have spent nearly $2 million in an unprecedented effort to smear Alex Bores in this district, and the result is that he’s leading the primary,” said Brad Carson, co-founder of Public First.
Leading the Future, however, would disagree. Its most recent polling estimates that Bores currently has only 11% of the vote, behind Schlossberg at 23% and Conway at 13%, and surpassing Lasher at 6%.
That’s roughly similar to polling numbers commissioned by George Conway’s campaign, which put Schlossberg in the lead at 25% of likely Democratic voters in the district, and Bores at just 11%. The three polls make the race seem like much more of a toss-up than is projected by prediction markets, each of which put Lasher in a hefty lead as of the time of writing.
The fight for, and result of, the NY-12 primary is particularly important for AI’s role in the midterms precisely because both sides are so invested in the outcome. Bores has become a poster child for a bigger battle taking place across the country in which millions of dollars of AI money are being deployed.
A $175m AI campaigning war chest
Organizations focused on AI have, as of February, raised more than $175 million to spend on midterm Congressional candidates. Only $9.36 million of that has been spent.
It’s a stunningly large war chest, especially for elections in which fewer than 50% of Americans even vote, and when the public are less tuned-in to politics than they are in presidential election years. And because the numbers actually voting in primaries tend to be far lower, a dollar potentially goes further in the midterms than the general election. So when it comes to AI, we’re talking about a lot of dollars going very, very far.
In order to shine a light on where the money is coming from and where it’s going, we’ve created a dashboard for tracking political spending as reported to the Federal Election Commission, the government agency which oversees these money movements in the US. It will be updated shortly after each new filing, with all additions approved and verified by our team of journalists.
We hope that this is a resource you can continue to come back to throughout the year, as midterm elections pick up and new candidates you may not be aware of start clarifying their policy positions on AI.
We’d love to hear your thoughts about the tracker, and any suggestions for ways to improve it: please get in touch at feedback@transformernews.ai.
Correction, March 10: Corrected the section header figure to $125m.
Will the Public First poll results be publicly released?