Alex Lasry, the 33-year-old senior vice president for the Bucks and the son of team governor Marc Lasry, announced on Wednesday that he will run for Senate as a challenger in the Democratic primary for the seat currently held by Republican Ron Johnson.
In a video announcing his candidacy, Lasry, who worked in the Obama White House out of college, pledged to bring the strategies that helped the Bucks mesh “progressive values” with good business into the federal government as a senator.
Much of the video centers on the construction of Fiserv Forum and the way it reinvigorated the downtown Milwaukee area and created thousands of jobs in the city. But it also shows Lasry at marches in protest of police brutality following the killing of George Floyd as well as the shooting of Jacob Blake by police in the Milwaukee suburb of Kenosha last summer.
The Blake shooting inspired the Bucks to strike their game in the NBA Bubble, at which point Lasry and the team’s management group stood behind their players. Yet in recent months, Lasry, a hedge fund manager and the son of a billionaire, has been the target of backlash for not locking in the Fiserv Forum as a polling place after promising to do so, and for cutting the line to get his hands on a vaccine dose last month.
Johnson’s senate seat in Wisconsin has been called “vulnerable” by the political media since the state went to Joe Biden in 2020 and because the state has both Republicans and Democrats across its state leadership.
