ALBANY — The political clout of New York’s wealthiest donors has been soaring.
Last year, 200 of the state’s most generous donors supported candidates before and after the vote, disbursing nearly $16 million to campaigns across the state and in the Legislature. By comparison, 206,000 people who spent $250 or less donated a total of $13.5 million, according to an analysis of publicly available data by OpenSecrets and the Brennan Center for Justice.
“It’s surprising, but not shocking,” said Ian van der Valk, who served on the senior committee at the Brennan Center and was involved in the study. “If one of those guys picks up the phone and calls the governor, the speaker or the leader of the Senate, they’re probably going to get the call, not the average voter.”
Those numbers imply that in 2022, the individual donors in the top 200 will give an average of about $80,000 directly to candidates of different races in 2022, far more than the state’s median annual household income. Some influential people paid more.
The report released Monday by van der Walk and his co-authors Brendan Gravin and Michael Malbin said it was “similar to a broader trend across the country.”
“Donors provided a record $16.7 billion in state and federal election spending in 2022, with the largest donors taking an increasing share since 2010,” the report said.
New York politicians are limited in the amount of money they can raise through direct donations; individuals and corporations can spend unlimited funds to influence elections, according to a 2010 US Supreme Court ruling. As more and more money goes into politics in general, such external spending efforts also gain prominence and start to look more like the candidates’ own campaigns.
During the last election cycle, New York allowed tens of thousands of dollars per donor to each candidate for statewide campaigns. But after November 8, the limit was lowered to $18,000. Overall, donors in the state are predominantly high-earners: Only 11 percent of all candidate funding analyzed in the new report came from small donors with $250 or less. The majority (69%) came from donors who gave $1,000 or more and from groups including political action committees, corporations and unions.
One of last year’s biggest donors was Ronald Lauder, the billionaire heir to the Estée Lauder cosmetics company.
But Lauder’s donations don’t just go directly to political candidates. After hitting the donation cap of Republican gubernatorial candidate U.S. Rep. Lee Zeldin, Lauder began funneling money to two outside spending groups that launched their own campaigns in support of the candidate: Safe Together New York and Save Our State NY.
News of the influx of cash that Zeldin has highlighted on the campaign trail has set in motion a parallel arms race to fund state-level super PACs ahead of Election Day.
The close race achieved record levels of fundraising and also broke records for dollars spent, as Zeldin, Gov. Kathy Hochul and the super PACs supporting them all raised and spent more than $105 million during the campaign cycle.
The authors of Monday’s report are advocating for the state’s new public financing program, which would allow candidates to opt-in and receive additional matching funds earmarked for small donations within districts, especially those that show their strength in the state’s Senate and assembly races. potential.
They calculated that if the direct-to-candidate giving model of 2022 were to be replicated, “small donors and public funds would be New York’s largest sources of funding.” They also said there was “little risk” that the program would be eliminated by super PACs, which tend to focus on specific competitive games.
But state analysts generally agree that outside spending by super PACs, some of which also support public financing, will play an increasingly decisive role in New York’s race.
In November, Reinvent Albany’s John Kaehny said the increase in massive individual donations to outside spending groups was “a direct blow to the fundamental notion of New York’s democracy. …Think how many super-rich people are in New York , even nationally, because there’s no limit to that, who can easily write a $20 million check” to independently influence a close contest.
While Zeldin didn’t win the New York gubernatorial election, he made it one of the state’s closest gubernatorial elections in the past 100 years. His campaign finances trailed Hochul’s by about $28 million in direct contributions, but spending by super PACs on his behalf narrowed that imbalance, surpassing Hochul’s by more than $14 million.
Zeldin counts some of the biggest donors among his supporters, but he also collects a larger share of dollars from smaller donors than his opponents: 17.9% of the campaign money he controls comes from donations of $250 or Fewer donors, compared with 1.1 percent for Hochl.
