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    Adams Eclipses Mamdani in Recent Fund-Raising, as Cuomo Lags Behind

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    Mayor Eric Adams reported raising $1.5 million over the last month, but his inability to qualify for matching funds may hamper his re-election bid.When Eric Adams appeared at a campaign fund-raiser in Florida earlier this month with people who are aligned with a Young Republicans group and President Trump, the event seemed incongruous for a sitting Democratic mayor of New York City.But this is no ordinary mayor’s race.As Mr. Adams makes a long-shot re-election bid as an independent candidate in November, he has begun to expand his fund-raising network to try to compete with the Democratic nominee, Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani.The latest fund-raising period in the race suggests that the mayor still holds sway with some donors — even if they are outside the typical New York donor world.Of the $1.5 million that Mr. Adams raised during the most recent filing period, from June 10 to July 11, nearly half came from outside New York City. Eight donations arrived from Florida on the day of the fund-raiser, totaling $2,325.Mr. Mamdani also posted a strong fund-raising haul during that period. He raised $852,000, including $256,000 that is eligible for public matching funds, effectively boosting his total to $1.1 million, according to his campaign. And in a sign of his growing national stature, roughly 45 percent of his contributions came from outside New York State. He now has just over $2.6 million on hand.Former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, in contrast, raised just $64,000 during the recent fund-raising period, in part because he was not actively fund-raising while he mulled whether to continue his campaign as an independent in November. He has almost $1.2 million on hand, and, after releasing a video on Monday confirming his intention to run, is expected to now start focusing on raising money.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Mayor Adams Loses Another Round in Bid to Receive Public Matching Funds

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      The New York City Campaign Finance Board rejected Mayor Eric Adams’s request for millions of dollars from the city’s generous matching-funds program.Mayor Eric Adams of New York City was again denied public matching funds for his re-election campaign after a panel said on Tuesday that he had once again failed to provide requested information regarding his campaign’s fund-raising efforts, including interactions with Turkish business interests.The New York City Campaign Finance Board initially denied Mr. Adams’s request for public funds following his indictment on corruption-related charges last year, blocking him from the city’s generous program that gives qualifying candidates an eight-for-one match of small-dollar donations.In May, Mr. Adams sued the board in an effort to overturn the ruling, arguing that the decision to withhold $3.4 million was based on an indictment that had been dropped by the Justice Department. The mayor’s lawsuit was dismissed last week, with a federal judge in Brooklyn, Nicholas G. Garaufis, noting that Mr. Adams had been late to provide information regarding conflicts of interest and that more information was still outstanding.In its denial on Tuesday, the Campaign Finance Board said that the mayor’s team still had not provided the necessary documents, some of which were requested in November. The board’s chairman, Frederick P. Schaffer, said that Mr. Adams’s campaign had requested an extension until Aug. 1.A spokesman for Mr. Adams’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment.The board’s denial comes as its investigation into the Adams campaign’s financing practices appears to be expanding, with its lawyers indicating in court filings that the board had requested more information from the campaign to explain potential improper behavior. Some of the requested correspondence is connected to an Uzbek businessman, according to court documents.The board’s decision is yet another blow to the mayor’s effort to defeat the Democratic nominee, Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani, who won a decisive victory in last month’s primary, handily outpacing his closest rival, former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, by 12 points.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Eric Adams Asked Bill Ackman to Vet Campaign Manager Before Hiring Him

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      Mr. Ackman and another hedge fund titan, Daniel S. Loeb, interviewed a potential campaign hire for Mayor Adams, who is courting their financial support.As Mayor Eric Adams of New York City searched for a new campaign manager, he asked his leading candidate to sit for private interviews with two crusading hedge fund titans he wants to bankroll his re-election effort.The billionaire financiers, Bill Ackman and Daniel S. Loeb, had both met separately with Mr. Adams as they weighed potential large contributions. But the mayor’s decision to give them a say in who he hired to run his campaign illustrates the remarkable lengths he is willing to go to secure their support.Mr. Ackman and Mr. Loeb have collectively given millions of dollars to Democratic and Republican candidates over the years and could meaningfully boost the mayor’s flagging candidacy if they were to cut large checks to a pro-Adams super PAC.Mr. Adams, who is running as an independent, enters the general election contest as a distinct underdog against Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee. The mayor’s approval ratings among New Yorkers are dismal after he faced federal corruption charges and then was accused of striking a deal with the Trump administration in order to get them dropped.Eugene Noh, the candidate interviewed separately by Mr. Ackman and Mr. Loeb, was announced on Tuesday as Mr. Adams’s new campaign manager, part of a slate of hires. The Daily News reported the news of Mr. Noh’s hiring, but the involvement of Mr. Ackman and Mr. Loeb — who vocally oppose Mr. Mamdani — has not been previously disclosed.Frank Carone, Mr. Adams’s campaign chairman, confirmed that the mayor’s team had asked the businessmen, and other unnamed supporters, to speak with Mr. Noh in recent days to make sure they were comfortable with him. He stressed that they did not have veto power over the hire.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      French Police Raid National Rally Over Campaign Finances

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      The authorities said they were investigating whether the nationalist, anti-immigrant party broke France’s campaign-finance rules.The police raided the headquarters of France’s far-right National Rally party on Wednesday as part of an investigation into its campaign finances, the Paris prosecutor’s office said.No one has been charged in the investigation, which was opened in July 2024 and aims to determine whether the nationalist, anti-immigrant party ran afoul of campaign-finance rules for France’s 2022 elections and the 2024 European elections.The investigation was the latest in a series of allegations of financial impropriety against the party. It adds to the persistent uncertainty that has dogged French politics in recent months as parties gear up for a 2027 presidential race.The National Rally, which has grown more powerful in recent years, has denied any wrongdoing and on Wednesday denounced the investigation as politically motivated.“This deployment of force has only one aim: to put on a show for the news channels, to search the private correspondence of the leading opposition party, to seize all our internal documents,” Jordan Bardella, the National Rally’s president, said on X. “Nothing to do with justice, everything to do with politics.”About 20 armed officers from France’s financial brigade took part in the raid, which was led by two investigative judges, according to Mr. Bardella.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      She Spent Nearly $600,000 on Her Council Race and Lost. Was It Worth It?

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      If nothing else, Elizabeth Lewinsohn’s failed bid for a New York City Council seat highlights two great needs: housing and idealistic candidates.Last December, Elizabeth Lewinsohn, a longtime TriBeCa resident, entered the Democratic race to represent her district in New York’s City Council, eventually raising and spending far more money than any of the other 216 people running for the Council. Of the $568,665 her campaign put toward securing the Democratic nomination in a district that covers the bottom tip of Manhattan, $522,000 came from a source with whom she was intimately acquainted: Elizabeth Lewinsohn.The return on investment did not inspire; she effectively spent $72 per vote and lost by 20 points to the incumbent, Chris Marte.City Council races typically generate little civic interest or remarkable dispersions of cash, one of the reasons that the race, which could be seen as a referendum on development, wound up on the radar of people who might have ignored it. Over the past 25 years, only one other campaign, to elect a Stanford-educated lawyer named Kevin Kim, spent more money on a Council bid. Running for a seat in Queens in 2009, he won the primary and then lost to a Republican in the general election.But the scale of Ms. Lewinsohn’s self-financing seems unprecedented in a contest of this kind. She opted out of the city’s matching funds program, which would have limited her spending. The prospect of a political novice beating an incumbent seemed daunting to the point of impossible, she told me, had she kept within the constraints of public financing, which cap spending for primary campaigns to $228,000.To put her gambit in perspective, the former hedge fund manager Whitney Tilson donated just under $15,000 toward his own failed bid to become mayor. Out of four candidates in the Democratic primary for the First District, Ms. Lewinsohn ranked second, despite outspending Mr. Marte, the son of a bodega owner, by nearly $400,000 — roughly the tab she would have run up had she taken the 7,905 people who cast ballots for her to the Odeon for a plate of steak tartare and a glass of Bordeaux.While the paperwork she filed with the city’s Campaign Finance Board identifies her as a “homemaker” (she is married to Jonathan Lewinsohn, an investment manager), Ms. Lewinsohn is, in fact, a quietly accomplished public servant, a graduate of Yale Law School, a former director of policy for the Police Department’s Counterterrorism Bureau, a member of her local community board for 12 years now and a co-founder of Gotham Park, a revived public space under the Brooklyn Bridge.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Big Names, Bigger Money and Global Themes Color the N.Y.C. Council Races

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      All 51 seats are up for election this year, and the Democratic primary battles feature crowded fields, moneyed interests and some recognizable figures.The ballots feature political figures who resigned in disgrace. Global story lines related to Israel and President Trump have defined contests. And millions of dollars from corporate interests have been injected to sway outcomes.Even as most of New York City’s political attention is focused on Tuesday’s Democratic mayoral primary, this year’s races for City Council have also drawn widespread interest and money.Two names well known in New York congressional circles will grace the ballots in Manhattan: Anthony Weiner, the former congressman who spent about a year and a half in prison and much longer in public exile; and Virginia Maloney, whose mother, Carolyn Maloney, was a longtime congresswoman. Each is running to fill an open seat.All 51 Council seats will be up for election in November, and eight have no incumbent. But with most districts heavily Democratic, the primary on Tuesday has become the real race.Super PACs backed by companies, unions and housing advocacy groups, many with interests before the Council, have spent about $13.4 million to influence the contests, $6.8 million more than in 2021.Some of the races have been defined by local issues. In Lower Manhattan, for example, candidates have sparred over the fate of the Elizabeth Street Garden, where a long-gestating plan to build affordable housing for older New Yorkers has been put on hold.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      A Daunting Task for Democrats

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      More from our inbox:A Loyalty Oath for Federal Workers?Principled Republicans Mark Peterson/ReduxTo the Editor:In “The Democrats’ Problems Are Bigger Than You Think” (column, June 6), David Brooks challenges the Democrats to do two things: define the central problem of our time and come up with a new grand national narrative.The first is easy: The central problem of our time is the Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, which removed longstanding campaign finance regulations. There is no way our government can become a government of the people when wealthy elites can buy representation.And the Democrats can ignore the second suggestion. No political party needs to create a new grand narrative. What it needs to do is to listen to the people and encourage and help those people voice their concerns and needs. Then the party needs to figure out how to best meet and pay for those concerns and needs.If money’s role in our elections can be addressed quickly, then a centrist and realistic narrative can be forged — and it should include an equitable tax policy. We are more in need of a reform of brackets and deductions in our tax system than we are of a new grand narrative.Elizabeth BjorkmanLexington, Mass.To the Editor:I agree with the view articulated by David Brooks that nothing short of a revolution in consciousness will allow us to wrest control of our future from the MAGA movement. What we need right now is a vision of the future that doesn’t involve just dismantling structures and undoing what’s been done (much of which is good), but also creating new belief systems.This will involve coming to terms with the fact that capitalism has failed the world in very serious and fundamental ways, producing a planet that is being torn apart by migration caused by civil war, climate disaster, inequality and starvation. These problems cannot be rejiggered from what already exists, because the system itself no longer recognizes the needs of the vast majority of its inhabitants.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Elon Musk Suggests He Will Spend ‘a Lot Less’ on Political Donations

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      The world’s richest person, who spent more money than anyone else last year as he helped elect President Trump, has indicated lately that he wants to turn back toward his business empire.Elon Musk was the country’s biggest political donor in 2024. But he might be ready to give up the title.Mr. Musk, the world’s richest person, said on Tuesday that he was planning to spend “a lot less” in future elections, the latest sign that he is fading into the background of American politics — at least for now.“In terms of political spending, I’m going to do a lot less in the future,” Mr. Musk said as he appeared virtually for a combative interview with Bloomberg News at the Qatar Economic Forum. “I think I’ve done enough.”He did keep the door open, however. Asked if his decision stemmed from any blowback he had faced for helping to guide the Trump administration, he said: “If I see a reason to do political spending in the future, I will do it. But I don’t currently see a reason.”Mr. Musk disclosed over $290 million in federal spending on the 2024 election cycle, most of which went toward backing Donald J. Trump through a super PAC that he started. He has told Mr. Trump’s advisers that he planned to donate about $100 million to pro-Trump groups before the 2026 midterm elections.In the months after Mr. Trump took office in January, Mr. Musk became a frequent presence in Washington as he steered an ambitious, controversial effort to sharply cut government spending. He has also remained a powerful player in Republican campaign finance. Along with an allied group, he spent roughly $25 million on a major Wisconsin Supreme Court race to back a conservative candidate who lost badly.Lately, Mr. Musk has indicated a desire to turn back to his business empire. After a sharp drop in profit at his electric-car company, Tesla, he told Wall Street analysts last month that he planned to spend less time in Washington and more on his companies.He did say on Tuesday, however, that he planned to be in Washington on Wednesday and Thursday, including for a dinner with Mr. Trump. More

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      Democrats Throw Money at a Problem: Countering G.O.P. Clout Online

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      At private gatherings, strategists and donors are swapping ideas to help the party capture the digital mojo that helped President Trump win. Yes, there’s a price tag.Six months after the Democratic Party’s crushing 2024 defeat, the party’s megadonors are being inundated with overtures to spend tens of millions of dollars to develop an army of left-leaning online influencers.At donor retreats and in pitch documents seen by The New York Times, liberal strategists are pushing the party’s rich backers to reopen their wallets for a cavalcade of projects to help Democrats, as the cliché now goes, “find the next Joe Rogan.” The proposals, the scope of which has not been previously reported, are meant to energize glum donors and persuade them that they can compete culturally with President Trump — if only they can throw enough money at the problem.Democrats widely believe they must grow more creative in stoking online enthusiasm for their candidates, particularly in less outwardly political forms of media like sports or lifestyle podcasts. Many now take it as gospel that Mr. Trump’s victory last year came in part because he cultivated an ecosystem of supporters on YouTube, TikTok and podcasts, in addition to the many Trump-friendly hosts on Fox News.The quiet effort amounts to an audacious — skeptics might say desperate — bet that Democrats can buy more cultural relevance online, despite the fact that casually right-leaning touchstones like Mr. Rogan’s podcast were not built by political donors and did not rise overnight.Wealthy donors tend to move in packs, and some jaded liberals worry that the excitement could cause money to flow into projects that are not fully fleshed out. They argue that the latest pitches on the left are coming from operatives who are hungry to meet donors’ demand for a shiny new object. In a break from the past, some of the Democrats’ new ventures are for-profit companies.And so far, there are still more ideas than hard, committed money: One Democratic operative described compiling a spreadsheet of 26 active projects related to creators, over a dozen of which are new since November. But a few of the efforts have ties to major donors that could give them liftoff.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More