Jun 11
2025
Political profile: Anthony Tyson-Thompson
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Mayor candidate Anthony Tyson-Thompson
Anthony Tyson-Thompson is to many voters the least familiar of the five candidates running in the June 24 Democratic primary for Buffalo mayor.
He was the last candidate to join the field, skipping the party’s months-long endorsement process and announcing his candidacy in mid-April, just two weeks before nominating petitions were due. His campaign is largely self-funded, he said, and it shows. He has few campaign signs around the city, no ads and no mailers — just social media.
The East Side native is also the youngest mayoral candidate, at 34, with the least experience in government.
Nevertheless, in an hourlong interview with Investigative Post, Tyson-Thompson expressed confidence that his diverse resume — his lived experience, education, and work history — make him “the most qualified candidate to handle the structural, systemic issues of our city.”
“I have experienced virtually every form of education in this country,” he said, from Buffalo public schools to Columbia and Harvard universities, where he earned graduate degrees.
He was an organizer for a pro-charter school nonprofit, worked on a congressional campaign in Florida, and did a stint as communications director for Assembly Majority Leader Crystal Peoples-Stokes. He worked on multi-million-dollar fundraising campaigns for religious and educational institutions.
Tyson Thompson told Investigative Post his campaign is not built on a detailed policy platform, a fact reflected on his website and social media platforms, which have been his principal means of promoting his candidacy thus far.
Rather, he promises to bring “transformational” leadership to the mayor’s office, as well as a “scholarly theoretical lens, compassion and empathy.”
“I just don’t think that we’re going to get to a new Buffalo with the same old leaders and career politicians. We need new vision,” he said.
“Our elected leaders, they talk a big game. And they continue to seek promotion or reelection, but nothing gets done. It’s the same old leaders doing the same old thing.”
Education and experience
Tyson Thompson’s lived experience began in the Kensington-Bailey neighborhood, which he described as “one of the toughest ZIP codes not only in the city but in the country.” He has seven siblings — five brothers, two sisters.
His full name is Anthony Jerome Peter Tyson-Thompson — his mother “got a little carried away,” he said — but he’s shortened it for the sake of the campaign.
His educational experience began at Westminster Community Charter School 0n Bailey Avenue, which he attended through eighth grade. He spent his freshman year at Emerson School of Hospitality but graduated from Hutchinson Central Technical School. He started college at Morgan State University, a historically Black institution in Maryland, but left after a year because his father “couldn’t afford the out-of-state tuition,” he said.
With financial aid from the school and his church, he finished his bachelor’s degree in political science and criminal justice at Canisius College in 2013. During his senior year at Canisius, he started a yearlong fellowship in Buffalo City Hall, in the Division of Citizen Services, which runs the 311 citizen complaint line.
The candidates and their issues
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Acting Mayor Chris Scanlon: Profile and stance on the issues.
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State Sen. Sean Ryan: Profile and stance on the issues.
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University District Common Council Member Rasheed Wyatt: Profile and stance on the issues.
On Thursday we’ll profile Garnell Whitfield.
Out of college, he worked for Buffalo ReformED, a now-defunct nonprofit that promoted charter schools. Then, in 2016, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee hired him to work on the campaign of Stephanie Murphy, who that year unseated a 12-term Republican incumbent in Orlando, Florida.
He worked briefly for the American Cancer Society in Syracuse. He then enrolled at Columbia University, where he earned a master’s degree in negotiations and conflict resolution, which he finished just before the Covid pandemic hit. He returned to Buffalo to get out of New York City and got a job at a state-run vaccination site.
“Then randomly one day I got a cold call from Crystal Peoples-Stokes,” he said. “I thought it was a joke. Because why would the majority leader of the New York State Assembly be reaching out to me?”
Peoples-Stokes hired him as her communications director in April 2021, the month after the state legalized the adult use and sale of recreational marijuana — her signature legislative achievement.
The law did more than legalize pot, Tyson Thompson said. It addressed “the injustice that’s happened statewide to our communities.” The law gave people who’d run afoul of drug laws a chance to build “transformational and generational wealth,” he said, by putting them at the front of the line for licenses. Thousands of nonviolent marijuana offenders had their records expunged.
“Just watching her and being under tutelage for a couple of years … it was an amazing experience,” he said.
Peoples-Stokes called Tyson-Thompson “a fine young man” and “a contributing member of my staff.”
“He didn’t stay long enough to demonstrate his full potential,” she told Investigative Post, “but I strongly believe he has a bright future and I wish him all the best.”
He left Peoples-Stokes’ office to follow his girlfriend — whom he’d met at Columbia — to Los Angeles. There he took a job with a consulting firm working on fundraising campaigns for the city’s Catholic archdiocese and the California Institute of Technology, among other clients.
He left that job to earn a master’s degree in public administration at Harvard, which he completed last month.
And now he’s running for mayor.
Donate to support our nonprofit newsroomHe launched his campaign on March 29, more than a month after the Erie County Democratic Committee finished vetting a host of other Democrats vying for the party’s endorsement, settling on state Sen. Sean Ryan as their candidate.
He said he entered the race late because he wanted to see if there was a candidate he could support.
“I was just waiting, like many people were waiting, to see if a leader was to step up,” he said. “And what I saw was more of the same-old, same-old. I saw a lot of leaders who’ve been a part of the system, you know, part of the problem, now try to repackage themselves as a solution.”
Tyson-Thompson said his campaign is largely self-funded. He’d raised $3,380, as of the last campaign finance disclosure filing in May. Most of that from friends and former colleagues in Los Angeles, New York City and Maryland. He said he’s getting remote advice from folks he met at Harvard and Columbia, including former staffers for former Secretary of State Hilary Clinton and U.S. Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ).
Here in Buffalo, his campaign team includes “former Grassroots people,” he said, referring to the East Side political club that gave rise to Peoples-Stokes and former Mayor Byron Brown. Because, he said, “all that Harvard theory” and “high-level strategy” will take a campaign only so far.
“Only game-on-the-ground people who’ve been here can tell you how to get it done,” he said. “They can say, ‘Oh, you need 3,000 votes. Well, we need to go to Miss Sally, because Miss Sally got five votes right there in her house.’”
Policy positions
Tyson-Thompson has offered few concrete policy proposals. Instead, he said he’ll bring to the office what he’s learned about problem-solving from all that educational and work experience.
“I think the biggest role of being a mayor is being the city’s biggest organizer,” he said. “You have to bring people together who necessarily are going to disagree a lot.”
Asked about the city’s shortage of quality affordable housing, he suggested the city should employ navigators to help residents cut through the red tape involved in seeking grants to fix their roofs and remove lead paint from their homes.
“You go to City Hall, you have to fight through bureaucracy,” he said. “You need to have people who can be proactive about it and say, ‘Hey, Mr. Johnson, if you need this grant, let me help you apply for it, let me help you see it through.’”
Navigators could also help residents get permits and grants to start small businesses and community programs.
“There are a ton of grants, and there are a ton of initiatives that are open to the public,” he said. “Only problem is how to get it. Nobody can get those resources because it’s a convoluted system mixed with red tape, and that’s a disconnect. People are good at making policy that sounds good, but they’re not practical, or they’re not accessible to the everyday person.”
He favors the state Department of Transportation’s plan to cap the Kensington Expressway over complete removal of the highway that splits the city in two, east from west.
That’s the same position championed by his former boss, Peoples-Stokes, who has accused advocates for complete removal of coming years late to the conversation. He breaks from her in supporting the complete environmental study ordered last fall by a state judge.
“I agree with a lot of people who say in the community that this plan, they feel, is being rushed. There wasn’t much community engagement,” he said.
On the city’s role in promoting economic development — via tax subsidies, grant of city land, and zoning variances — he said a project “has to serve a public good” to qualify for public assistance.
“It has to reach some of our systemic issues, and not just for show, but an actual measurement, both quantitative and qualitative,” he said.
On police reform, he lamented the political polarization that labels candidates as “either in support of police or against police.”
“There’s so much nuance in the middle. You can both be critical with love towards police and also support them,” he said.
“People have a distrust in government and its enforcement agencies. We have to change the culture, and we’re going to do that by having people in uniform make sure that they’re respectful and treat people with dignity and support.”
Asked how he’d address the city’s beleaguered finances, he recalled a professor who told his class a lot of municipal budgets are made up of WAGs — “wild-ass guesses.” Buffalo has been relying on WAGs for decades, he said.
As mayor, he said he’d commission an audit of the city’s finances to determine the size of the budget imbalance and identify inefficiencies, then look for help from the county, state and federal governments. There’s “no silver bullet” — “This isn’t an episode of West Wing,” he said — and it’ll take years to get the city on sound footing.
He’d like the charter revision commission recently empaneled to consider giving the mayor and the Common Council some say in the governance of the city’s school district.
“I think the city and its leadership have always seen education as the third rail, something that they want to stay away from, because they don’t want to put their hand on something that they can’t really guarantee success with,” he said.
That signals “a lack of boldness, lack of leadership, lack of vision,” he said.
