Cornell University does not have Columbia’s reputation as a factory for New York politicians. But the June primaries, as The Cornell Daily Sun tallied them, put an unusual number of Cornellians on regional ballots. With the general election on November 3, it is worth checking on the class.
The swing seat: Bennett versus Kean
The most consequential race involving a Cornellian is across the Hudson, in New Jersey’s Seventh Congressional District, where Rebecca Bennett ’09 is the Democratic nominee against Representative Thomas Kean Jr., the Republican seeking a third term.
Bennett studied chemical engineering at Cornell, flew helicopters in the Navy, retired from active duty in 2019 and later took a Wharton M.B.A. and worked at the health start-ups Midi Health and Oshi Health. She won the nomination on June 2. “I felt this calling to lean in, because I love this country,” she told The Sun.
Kean is no novice. The son of a popular former governor, he was the Republican leader of the New Jersey Senate before winning the House seat in 2022, and he beat the Democrat Sue Altman by about five points in 2024. The district, which includes Bedminster, has changed party control in each of the past two midterm cycles; President Trump carried it by about a point in 2024, and Democrat Mikie Sherrill carried it by about two in last year’s governor’s race. It is, in short, the kind of seat that decides House majorities.
The two met in their only debate on September 27, at Rider University, and the exchange, as reported by the New Jersey Globe, turned on the war with Iran. Kean made the case for confronting Tehran directly. “Iran’s leadership says, ‘Death to America,’” he said. “We know they want nukes. You can’t say they want nukes and then do nothing about it.” Iran, he argued, can never be allowed to develop nuclear weapons.
Bennett, who has emphasized diplomacy, said: “What this war is doing is make us less safe and less secure.” PBS NewsHour reported that she said, “We need to end the war in Iran,” and that Congress should step in on tariffs, which Kean described as within the president’s prerogative.
Kean’s pitch to a suburban district is a record of independence and delivery. He pointed to a bipartisan record in Trenton and to his fight to protect federal funding for the Gateway rail tunnel, one of the largest infrastructure projects in the region. “I will challenge anybody who gets in my way, including this president,” he said. He also cited the increase in the state-and-local-tax deduction, a priority for high-tax New Jersey, and new tax breaks on tips, overtime and seniors’ income. He said Bennett would toe her party’s line; she has presented herself as an independent-minded veteran. Neither, they said, would support Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for president.
Outside money is flowing in both directions. PBS reported that a super PAC tied to President Trump had spent more than $3 million for Kean, and a Democratic PAC about $2.5 million on the other side. Analysts quoted by the Globe gave the challenger a slight edge. In a district this close, the honest forecast is that the voters of Somerset and Hunterdon counties have not finished deciding.
The safe seat: Northrup on the Upper West Side
Eli Northrup ’07 is in a very different position. A public defender, a former Cornell sprint-football defensive back and, in a previous life, a co-founder of the hip-hop group Pants Velour, he won the Democratic primary in the 69th Assembly District, which covers much of the Upper West Side, in June. He was endorsed by Mayor Zohran Mamdani and the Working Families Party and defeated Rabbi Stephanie Ruskay, who was backed by State Senator Brad Hoylman-Sigal and Comptroller Mark Levine.
Northrup ran on the left of the party: he has called for the abolition of ICE and for universal child care. Those positions have a strong constituency on the Upper West Side and determined opposition elsewhere, notably from Republicans who have made immigration enforcement central to their platform. A super PAC funded by the sports-betting companies FanDuel and DraftKings ran ads supporting him; he denounced them. In a district this Democratic, the primary was the real contest.
The ones who fell short
Two other Cornellians lost in June. Drew Warshaw ’03 challenged State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli and was defeated. And Assemblyman Alex Bores ’13, an ILR graduate and former Palantir employee, lost the Democratic primary in the 12th Congressional District to Micah Lasher by about four points.
Bores’s race was a national story because of who paid for it. As author of the RAISE Act, New York’s AI-safety law, he drew more than $8 million in opposition from Think Big, a super PAC affiliated with the Leading the Future network, and about $7 million in support from Jobs and Democracy, a group backed by Anthropic, according to The Sun’s accounting; PAC spending in the race totaled about $26 million. Lasher, endorsed by Representative Jerry Nadler, Governor Kathy Hochul and Michael Bloomberg, also used Bores’s résumé against him: “I chose public service. You chose Palantir.”
Whatever one thinks of AI regulation, and there are serious people on both sides of that argument, the race showed that the technology industry now spends on primaries the way finance and labor long have.
The top of the ticket
Above them all is the governor’s race between Hochul and Republican Bruce Blakeman, the Nassau County executive, which will shape turnout up and down the state. No Cornellian is at the top of the ticket. But on November 3, the Big Red will have a candidate in at least one race that could help decide who controls the House.
Featured image: Cornell University’s campus in Ithaca, New York. Photo by P. Hughes via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.
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