Former State Senator Anna Kaplan plans to run against Representative George Santos

The question no one is asking is what happens after Santos? His disgrace presents a rare opportunity.”

Will Murphy, candidate

It’s official. Republican U.S. Rep. George Santos has another challenger. Former Democratic State Sen. Anna Kaplan filed a statement of candidacy on Monday morning with the Federal Election Commission to challenge Santos in 2024 to represent the 3rd Congressional District, which includes the North Shore and parts of Queens. 

Kaplan joins two other Democrats, Nassau County Legislator Josh Lafazan and St. John’s University law professor Will Murphy.

Kellen Curry, a Republican, announced his candidacy April 4. A veteran who was a military officer in Afghanistan, Curry is a former vice president of JP Morgan.

Kaplan, 57, was born in Tabri, Iran, in 1965 to Jewish parents, and was raised in Tehran for 13 years before fleeing the country’s religious persecution after the Islamic Revolution. She spent several years in Brooklyn, Chicago and Queens until her family settled in Great Neck.

Kaplan studied to be an attorney, attending Stern College at Yeshiva University in New York, and received a law degree from the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law. After working as a lawyer for several years, she married her husband, Darren, in 1995, and the couple moved to North Hempstead, where they raised two daughters. 

Kaplan spent four years as a library trustee before being selected for the North Hempstead Board of Zoning Appeals in 2009, a position she held for two years. Her first major political race occurred in 2011, when she ran for a seat on the North Hempstead Town Council, which she won. She was re-elected in 2015 with 67 percent of the vote. 

Then, in 2018, Kaplan decided to run to represent the 7th Congressional District, which at the time did not include the North Shore. Endorsed by then-President Obama, Kaplan became the first Iranian-American elected to the state Senate serving for two terms. She lost her re-election bid in 2022 to Republican Jack Martins.

Kaplan highlighted reproductive rights and a need for stronger gun control laws as her primary reasons for running, especially following a meeting with students from Great Neck who were protesting gun laws following the Parkland massacre earlier that year. 

Santos became a disappointment to his constituents and the nation as a whole when the New York Times uncovered a variety of fabrications and inconsistencies shortly after he was elected.

When running for office Santos said he was of Jewish descent and his mother, Fatima Alzira Caruso Devolder, who died of cancer in December 2016, was working in the south tower at the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001. Records indicate that she left for Brazil in 1999 not returning until after the attack at the World Trade Center in 2003. This, and his claim that his Jewish grandparents survived the Holocaust, also proven untrue, among other assertions, drew ire from his constituents and colleagues in government.

A few weeks after he was inaugurated, amid a flurry of accusations of untruths about his biography, personal and campaign finances, and the subject of investigations, including one by the House Ethics Committee, Santos said he was stepping down “temporarily” from serving on the two committees he had been assigned to, the small Business Committee and the Science, Space and Technology Committee.  

Lafazan began hosting a series of news conferences — which total 12 — shortly after Santos was inaugurated. He has consistently been one of Santos’ fiercest public critics, leading protests outside the Republican representative’s Queens office. The legislator has also engaged in several Twitter spats with the freshman congressman and has continued to push for Santos’ resignation or ejection from the House of Representatives.

This isn’t Lafazan’s first time running for a seat in Congress. In the 2022 election primaries, Lafazan lost to Democrat Robert Zimmerman, who would later lose the general election to Santos, by 15.8 percent.

Murphy, Santos’ other Democratic opponent, is a resident of Farmingdale. A first-time candidate, he has asserted on his electoral Instagram page that he will not stay in office for more than three terms, and is presenting himself as a non-partisan candidate.

“The question no one is asking is what happens after Santos? His disgrace presents a rare opportunity,” Murphy, 40, stated in one post. “An opportunity squandered by sending another broken, self-serving politician on a one way trip to the excess of D.C. … Or an opportunity taken by sending a real person committed to fighting for real people before coming home to their real life and letting someone else go and do the same.”

Santos garnered roughly 43 percent of the vote in the district in 2020 when he lost to then-Rep. Tom Suozzi, according to the state Board of Elections. Then In 2022, Santos won nearly 54 percent of the vote in defeating Zimmerman. In Nassau County, where there was an 80 percent turnout, Santos won with roughly 55 percent of the vote.