Alex Bores, who's running to succeed Rep.

Jerry Nadler in Congress, is threading a very delicate needle.On the one hand, Bores, a two-term New York State Assembly member from the Upper East Side, has garnered support from several Jewish leaders and political moderates who tout his backing for Israel.

He marches annually in the city's Israel Day Parade and has resisted growing calls for Democratic politicians to support conditioning military aid to Israel.At the same time, he's being backed by a number of left-wing groups and individuals calling for those very conditions.Those two camps seldom coexist on a single candidate's list of endorsements, especially as Israel has become a major wedge issue this midterm election cycle.

But Bores, who has made a promise to regulate artificial intelligence at the center of his campaign for New York's 12th Congressional District, has managed to maintain the coalition.“You could make a sitcom,” said Cameron Kasky, a former candidate in the race who's now backing Bores, referring to what he called the “Boalition.” “If you put 12 Alex Bores endorsers in a mansion together and showed up with a reality TV crew, you could make the most must-watch television in the entire world.”Scroll through the “Endorsements” page on Bores' campaign website, and you'll find Chi Osse, the democratic socialist City Council member who's called for divesting city pension funds from Israel bonds, just a couple rows down from Carolyn Maloney, the former Upper East Side representative who was a staunch supporter of Israel in Congress.Progressive groups such as Bernie Sanders' Our Revolution and PSC-CUNY, the City University of New York's staff-faculty union, are backing the same candidate who drew the support of ActJew, which supports more centrist candidates and calls itself “a response to a political and social landscape that normalizes antisemitic and anti-Israel activity and rhetoric.”Bores' endorsers include some of Mayor Zohran Mamdani's political allies, such as failed City Council candidate Lindsey Boylan, as well as vocal critics of the mayor, including Fabien Levy, a Jewish spokesperson for Mamdani's predecessor, Eric Adams.“I can't imagine the Bores campaign hasn't occasionally looked at each other and been like, 'What is happening right now?'” Kasky said.A coalition across the Israel divideSo how is Bores pulling it off?For progressive groups, the answer lies, at least in part, in Bores' work on AI.“He put forward the country's strongest regulation of the AI industry to protect Americans from those who want no rules and only care about unfettered power and profit,” wrote Our Revolution's executive director, Joseph Geevarghese, in an endorsement announcement.

Geevarghese was referring to the RAISE Act, a state law that Bores introduced to impart transparency and safety regulations on AI models.As an elected official, Bores is no political outsider, though the 35-year-old's background in the tech industry differentiates him from fellow frontrunner Lasher, who's spent decades working for politicians such as Nadler, Gov.

Kathy Hochul, and Mike Bloomberg, the former mayor.Bores' resume includes a nearly five-year stint at the tech company Palantir, starting as a data scientist in 2014 and working his way up to become the US government lead.

That gig has complicated how some progressives view Bores, given Palantir's work with ICE, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency that Bores himself has called for abolishing.

He has repeatedly said that he quit Palantir over its contract with ICE back in 2019, and that he chose “principle over my career and millions of dollars.”Pundits such as center-left commentator Matthew Yglesias, who has also joined the Bores coalition, say there is a “unique value” to him winning because of his promise to enforce AI regulations and the message that it would send to the anti-regulation PACs that have been spending against him.

Yglesias added that Lasher, too, would be “an above-average House member.”But in a race with little daylight between the two frontrunners, particularly regarding the US-Israel relationship, Bores' AI focus is setting him apart.

And rather than sit....