Thomas P. DiNapoli has been in office for nearly two decades, longer than any statewide elected official in New York.
Yet his longevity as state comptroller — only one other person in state history has held the position longer — has done little to heighten voter awareness of what he does or who he is. A recent poll by Siena University suggested that about two-thirds of those surveyed had no opinion of Mr. DiNapoli or no idea who he was.
But because of his close ties to the state Democratic Party, Mr. DiNapoli has never faced a primary challenger until now.
Two newcomers are running to the left of Mr. DiNapoli, 72, trying to define him as the candidate of the establishment who has served well past his expiration date. The candidates, Raj Goyle and Drew Warshaw, have sought to emulate the energy and enthusiasm that Mayor Zohran Mamdani generated in his winning campaign.
They say that Mr. DiNapoli has been a poor steward of the state’s $300 billion retirement fund, which the comptroller oversees, and has not used the job’s other central responsibility — auditing other local and state agencies — forcefully enough.
The three jousted over these issues and more in a fiery televised debate last week where Mr. Warshaw opened his dress shirt to show a T-shirt that said “ICE Out,” and Mr. Goyle castigated Mr. DiNapoli’s willingness to use retirement funds to purchase Israel bonds and to buy shares in Palantir, a technology defense contractor that has aided President Trump’s immigration agenda.
Mr. Warshaw attacked Mr. DiNapoli for not being “willing to challenge the governor and say ‘Yes, ma’am, we do need to raise taxes on the wealthiest.’ ”
For his part, Mr. DiNapoli said both his opponents want to overly politicize the post and “ascribe powers to the state comptroller like you’re the president, head of the U.N. and the pope.”
The campaigns of Mr. Goyle and Mr. Warshaw come amid a national wave of Democratic frustration with politicians who have held onto office for decades and are perceived by some younger voters as being out of touch. Both Mr. Warshaw and Mr. Goyle have raised millions of dollars since entering the contest and unlocked more from the state’s public financing system to spend on advertising.
The question now is whether either can excite enough voters — particularly younger and more progressive ones — to support them in the upcoming Democratic primary in June. A similar effort to challenge Ms. Hochul this year petered out, and prominent progressive groups — like the Working Families Party and the local chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America — have declined to back Mr. Warshaw or Mr. Goyle.
Each has picked up support from a smattering of smaller grass-roots progressive groups. Mr. DiNapoli, in contrast, has been endorsed by Gov. Kathy Hochul; Letitia James, the state attorney general; and the state’s largest labor unions. His campaign also recently spent about $2.1 million on television advertising.
Seated in a crowded Financial District coffee shop near his Manhattan office earlier this month, Mr. DiNapoli barely hesitated when asked to name his most significant accomplishment.
“Unlike every other position in the state government, I haven’t had to resign,” Mr. DiNapoli said before counting off the elected leaders in New York who departed in disgrace during his tenure. He only took office because his predecessor was forced to resign before heading to prison for corruption.
“Being scandal-free is, I think, a big accomplishment in this environment,” he said.
With Ms. Hochul running unopposed in the primary, voter interest may be depressed in New York. Still, a number of competitive primaries — mostly in New York City — for seats in the State Legislature and Congress could bring out voters frustrated with incumbents like Mr. DiNapoli.
“I think this going to be tougher race than he would like,” said Jay Jacobs, chair of the State Democratic Party, which endorsed Mr. DiNapoli in February. “But at the end of the day, it’s about if voters come out.”
Both challengers have focused intensely on the comptroller’s decision to invest heavily in Palantir. The number of shares the fund owns more than doubled in the last year — rising in value from about $90 million to $340 million in that period.
Mr. Goyle and Mr. Warshaw said such investments are unconscionable and run counter to the values of the state. Their focus on this previously obscure technology company, which has grown considerably as its work for the Trump administration expanded, mirrors Democratic primaries across the country.
Kyle R. Seeley, the deputy director of corporate governance for Mr. DiNapoli, said the growth in the retirement fund’s investments in Palantir can be traced to two index funds that expanded their positions in the company.
One of the investment strategies of the state’s retirement fund, which has a benchmark return of 5.9 percent, is to have its individual stock purchases mirror what is included in these index funds. Mr. Seeley said that selling the state’s shares of Palantir would throw that investment strategy out of whack.
“You can’t on the one hand say, ‘Oh, you got to be in these basic index funds and then say, ‘Well, but you got to take out this. You got to take out that,’” Mr. DiNapoli said. “Right now it is Palantir, next year it will be something else.”
On a recent Thursday, Mr. Warshaw sat in a Peruvian restaurant in Jackson Heights, Queens, listening to members of immigrant advocacy group discuss in Spanish how President Trump’s immigration enforcement actions and the work of companies like Palantir were uprooting their lives. Translating the conversation was Brian Romero, an Assembly candidate who is locked in a fierce Democratic primary and has also endorsed Mr. Warshaw.
Mr. Warshaw said he would use the comptroller’s auditing tools to ensure that local municipalities were not working with agencies like Immigration and Customs Enforcement. It was a refrain he referred back to frequently: The office should be acting far more aggressively and urgently.
“We have power, we just need to use it,” said Mr. Warshaw, who previously was an aide to a previous attorney general, Eliot Spitzer; worked at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey; and served as an executive at a large affordable housing nonprofit.
Mr. Warshaw also said that Mr. DiNapoli could be doing far more to address the state’s housing crisis. One way to do so, Mr. Warshaw suggested, would be to invest $20 billion of the state’s $295.4 billion retirement fund in affordable housing. He argued that the state can accrue a reasonable rate of return for retirees while doing more to expand the housing supply. His idea follows a recent proposal from the New York City comptroller, Mark Levine, who said he would invest $4 billion of the city’s pension funds in affordable housing.
Mr. DiNapoli said in an interview that he was watching what his counterpart in the city was doing.
“We’ve been talking with Mark about doing some things together,” he said. “We’ve been in conversations with the mayor’s office as well.”
Like Mr. Warshaw, Mr. Goyle has sought to court progressive activist groups by zeroing in on how the office could help highlight the causes of sharply rising utility costs. He appeared at a protest earlier this month outside Con Edison’s Gramercy Park headquarters. The rally was organized by New York Communities for Change, which, along with Zephyr Teachout, who has run unsuccessfully for attorney general and governor, and the Muslim Democratic Club of New York, have endorsed him.
Mr. Goyle, who is a lawyer and previously served in the State Legislature in Kansas, told the crowd at the protest that he would vigorously investigate rate hikes by utility companies and the Public Service Commission, which approves them.
“We need to have somebody who is aggressive in that office to watchdog those rate hikes,” he said.
An interesting side note in the race has been the now-severed relationship between Mr. Goyle and Mr. Warshaw. They have been friendly since they first met as young employees at the Center for American Progress in Washington, D.C., and are neighbors in Lower Manhattan and during the summers on Fire Island.
Mr. Warshaw once donated $100 to Mr. Goyle’s campaign for the Kansas statehouse in 2006; Mr. Warshaw’s campaign now is attacking Mr. Goyle, and has said that Mr. Goyal wanted to “crack down on hiring undocumented workers and oppose amnesty” when he was in Kansas.
Mr. Goyle said he was a progressive Democrat running in one of the most conservative regions of the country. The two men’s decision to run against each other has confounded some of their friends as well as some political observers, who suggest that their competing candidacies could prevent a coalition of progressive voters from forming.
Benjamin Oreskes is a reporter covering New York State politics and government for The Times.
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