Update on the Alex Bores campaign

In October, I wrote a post arguing that donating to Alex Bores's campaign for Congress was among the most cost-effective opportunities that I'd ever encountered.(A bit of context: Bores is a state legislator in New York who championed the RAISE Act, which was signed into law last December.[1] He's now running for Congress in New York's 12th Congressional district, which runs from about 17th Street to 100th Street in Manhattan. If elected to Congress, I think he'd be a strong champion for AI safety legislation, with a focus on catastrophic and existential risk.)It's been six months since then, and the election is just two months away (June 23rd), so I thought I'd revisit that post and give an update on my view of how things are going.How is Alex Bores doing?When I wrote my post, I expected Bores to talk little about AI during the campaign, just because it wasn't a high-salience issue to voters. But that changed in November, when Leading the Future (the AI accelerationist super PAC) declared Bores their #1 target. Since then, they've spend about $2.5 million on attack ads against him.LTF's theory of change isn't actually to decrease Bores's chances of winning; rather, it's to make an example out of him. Bores is an underdog, and if he loses, LTF will be able to take credit for his loss in the public eye (even if they aren't counterfactual). The goal is to scare other elected officials into avoiding pro-AI safety policy stances, for fear of also being attacked by LTF.[2] My AI policy friends in D.C. say that the strategy is working.But ever since LTF starting attacking Bores, he has been talking about AI a lot, and has arguably made it his #1 issue. This has resulted in a substantial amount of positive national news coverage for Bores.The most common type of coverage is "Here's why AI billionaires are spending millions to stop Alex Bores" (see e.g. New York Times, Wired). But there's also object-level coverage of his AI policies, including this Axios piece and this rec