Bores spreads a $30 million target across 11 states after the cycle's costliest House primary

Divide the $30 million Who Decides wants in hand by 2028 across the 11 battleground states it is targeting and each state gets about $2.7 million over two years ^[2][3][1]. Leading the Future spent more than $7.6 million against Bores in a single primary ^[5]. The per-state budget is roughly a third of what it cost to beat one state assemblymember ^[2][9]. Bores said he is not trying to outspend Leading the Future or Build American AI, and that he wishes he had the resources ^[4].

That primary is also the reason to be careful with a spending-contest model of frontier regulatory risk. Anthropic put $20 million into Public First Action, which spent in Bores' corner, and Fortune does not break out how much of that went into this race ^[6]. The figure spent against him is $7.6 million ^[5]. Outside money in the race for Jerry Nadler's open seat topped $40 million, the most expensive House primary of the cycle ^[7]. If Anthropic's whole contribution went into it, those two sums are about 69% of the total ^[3]. Bores lost ^[8].

The $10 million already raised pays for coalition work ^[2]. Bores wants Who Decides to unite the AI advocacy organizations Democrats already trust and let them build their own agendas, on "a shared floor of an agenda on things that we all want to see good done" ^[23]. "Give the American people a say in how AI develops," he told Fortune ^[11]. The model is the RAISE Act, which Gov. Kathy Hochul signed late last year after a coalition of 55 organizations formed behind it ^[13]. "The opposition was always the same. It was a small subset of Silicon Valley that thinks there should be no regulation on AI whatsoever," Bores said ^[14].

The demand side is the softest part of the case. "The basics of this issue, while the urgency has changed a lot in the past week, the basics have not, which is that 80% of Americans want there to be more regulation on AI, and that's across parties," Bores said ^[17]. The Annenberg Public Policy Center's February-March 2026 survey put it 15 points lower, with 65% saying the government has done "too little" to regulate AI, and the partisan gap inside that number runs 24 points, 77% of Democrats against 53% of Republicans ^[18][6][5]. Fortune sets the pattern against gun laws, where Gallup finds 56% to 58% of Americans want stricter rules and Pew puts background checks near 90% support in both parties, and Congress rarely acts ^[19].

Industry money is on both sides of this. Many of Bores' donors came from inside the AI industry while he ran on the RAISE Act ^[10]. Sam Altman asked the Senate Judiciary Committee to regulate him in May 2023, then told Senate Commerce in May 2025 that requiring government approval would be "disastrous" ^[20]. Dario Amodei held the pro-regulation position throughout, while Anthropic-linked money went into the same political fights ^[21]. "So many of the mega donors who are pushing for there to be no regulation whatsoever are Republican mega donors," Bores said, naming Marc Andreessen and Elon Musk ^[22].

I'd carry the $7.6 million forward as the working price of contesting one frontier-safety candidate ^[5]. The case against that: Who Decides is not in a spending race at all, and its money runs through organizations already working in the states, of the kind that moved the RAISE Act through Albany ^[4][3][13]. Inbound interest is one-sided so far, with everyone who has approached Bores a Democrat, and he counted "The seven major presidential candidates since my election, the 16 Congress members since last week" after Jacob Coxon resigned from Anthropic ^[16][15]. If the next contested primary ends the same way at the same price, the spending model holds. If one of the 11 state coalitions moves a frontier bill without matching that money, it does not.