20 Apr 2026, 13:40 p.m.
2026 NY State Comptroller Election: Who's Running
These three guys all say we can do (b) invest in New York's needs and values, and have overlapping proposals.
Official campaign website, Wikipedia, Twitter, LinkedIn, Bluesky, Instagram.
Goyle is a 50-year-old lawyer who served in the Kansas legislature and unsuccessfully ran for a Congressional seat before moving to New York in 2010. He founded Bodhala, a legal technology company, and has worked at ACLU protecting immigrant rights.
Proposed policies: redirect pension funds into new affordable housing projects in New York; audit the Public Service Commission, which sets utility rates, to bring down prices; divesting from all foreign bonds (including Israel bonds) and from Palantir. Supports the Tax the Rich campaign and is thus further left than some progressive Democrats. On climate: wants to divest from fossil fuels; was arrested this year while protesting the possible rollback of NY's climate law; is endorsed by Sunrise Movement NYC.
His voting record while in the Kansas legislature raises some eyebrows for progressive Democrats in New York. For instance, he voted (caution: NY Post) to “make English the official language of Kansas, place additional restrictions on abortions after 22 weeks, allow concealed carry on government properties such as college campuses, allow Kansans to own automatic firearms and silencers and to stop undocumented immigrants from getting drivers’ licenses”. But he defends himself partly by saying that, when DiNapoli was in the NY Assembly, DiNapoli was also against drivers’ licenses for undocumented people. More generally (and I can't easily re-find where I read him saying this, but I think I'm not imagining it): look, I was trying to do harm reduction in a conservative state, ok?
He has a few prominent endorsements. I particularly notice Ali Najmi, an election attorney who previously worked on Zohran Mamdani's campaigns, and New York Communities for Change, a pretty solid organizing group.
Goyle is pretty rich and is self-funding part of this campaign. Cash on hand in mid-January: $1,246,543.04. As of mid-March: $1,252,221.31.
Official campaign site, Bluesky, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, Instagram.
Warshaw is a 44-year-old energy and "affordable" housing executive with an MBA who has worked in solar energy, and at Port Authority helping rebuild after 9/11. (I put "affordable" in quotes because the jargon can be confusing. "Affordable" is often a specific industry term that means "targeted to future tenants earning [a particular percentage of] of the area median income, as defined by the US federal government." That does not necessarily mean you would consider it affordable!)
Warshaw criticizes the incumbent for underperforming funds: “Tom DiNapoli’s bankers, who invest the third-largest public pension fund in the United States, have underperformed his own benchmarks over the last 17 years by nearly 40%. He has cost taxpayers $55 billion for that underperformance. And he has paid these bankers $11 billion over that time in fees, taxpayer-funded fees, for them to not do their job.” He's also criticizing DiNapoli on the unclaimed funds issue and on the fund's investment in Palantir, and wants to divest from Israel bonds ("New York state holds stakes in just three other countries: Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Canada, a degree of selectivity that suggests no coherent strategy").
Policy proposals include: redirect pension funds into new affordable housing projects in New York; audit the Public Service Commission, which sets utility rates, to bring down prices; fire "Wall Street bankers" who help invest the pension fund. Warshaw came to the Feb. 25th Tax the Rich rally in Albany, and co-wrote a "tax the rich" editorial. Has been racking up some endorsements from the progressive caucus of the state Democratic committee, but his array is weaker than the incumbent's.
This is one of the wealthier campaigns in this race. Cash on hand in mid-January: $1,270,448.84. As of mid-March: $911,639.50.
A neighbor in Queens had a bad experience with someone petitioning for Warshaw in early March. The petition signature-gatherer sort of tricked her into signing the petition by only mentioning a different candidate. When the resident figured out that this petition was for multiple candidates and she didn't want to support one of them, the signature gatherer then didn’t let her cross her name out. That's pretty shady! Now, I've done this kind of signature-gathering as a volunteer, but campaigns often hire people to do it, and I've met many who aren't very well-informed (and who often know very little about the candidate). In some cases they get paid based on how many completed sheets they turn in, and many campaigns subcontract the work to other companies; campaigns ought to supervise those workers well enough to prevent fraud and respond to problems when they're reported. I don't know how the Warshaw campaign reacted to this complaint and I don't know how frequently this kind of problem crops up with other campaigns, so I don't know enough to treat this as a strong data point.
Warshaw is the only challenger who got any votes at the state nominating convention in February (DiNapoli got 90% of those votes and sailed to a spot on the primary ballot). The press seem to think Goyle and Warshaw are the only candidates likely to have enough petition signatures to get on the Democratic primary ballot. But there's one more guy trying:
Bunkedekko's campaign website. YouTube, Twitter, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, Medium.
Adem Bunkeddeko is a 38-year-old nonprofit executive with finance experience, a former Working Families Party organizer, and a former Congressional candidate in 2018 and 2020.
A Bunkedekko campaigner at the No Kings rallies in NYC promoted him as a tax-the-rich progressive; he's endorsed by Rep. Jamaal Bowman and by a few other progressive or Democratic groups. He proposes using possibly billions in unclaimed funds to create a trust account for every new child born in the state & issue rental vouchers. (But what if those billions are not available, because the Comptroller gets better at returning them to their owners, or the legislature has already spent them?) And: “pay transmission lines to carry hydroelectric power from Canada to the New York City region and to build high-speed rail”. For more policy stances, check out his answers to an endorsement questionnaire from his 2020 Congressional run.
Given that Bunkedekko literally used to work for WFP, it's so eyebrow-raising that they haven't endorsed him -- and, given that they didn't endorse anyone in this race, nor Delgado for Governor, and didn't endorse Chuck Park for Congress, my eyebrow-raising is much more directed at WFP than at Bunkedekko. WFP, which has endorsed DiNapoli for 2 decades, might choose to endorse a comptroller candidate before Election Day. I predict it'll be DiNapoli.
Campaign’s cash on hand as of mid-March: $77,886.32.
Warshaw is challenging Bunkedekko's and Goyle's petition signatures to try to keep them off the ballot and make this a two-candidate race between him and DiNapoli. My personal bet, based on the overall strengths of the campaigns, and based on the fact that Goyle's been working with election lawyer Ali Najmi: Goyle stays on the primary ballot, Bunkedekko gets kicked off.