Mayoral frontrunner Andrew Cuomo is rolling in cash after billionaire Michael Bloomberg on Friday pumped $5 million into efforts to get him elected — a record-shattering contribution that came in just as it also became clear Cuomo’s unlikely new supporter, fellow candidate Jessica Ramos, is in deep debt.
The drastically different financial outlooks for Cuomo and Ramos were contained in campaign finance filings released Friday on the eve of the start of early voting in the June 24 Democratic mayoral primary.
The filings portray how the sprawling primary field is starting to come into clearer view as the race enters its final stretch, with Cuomo on one end of the spectrum as the favorite to clinch the Democratic nomination, while Ramos is on the other, with nearly no shot at winning.
Bloomberg, the billionaire former New York City mayor who endorsed Cuomo earlier this week despite past tensions, sent his $5 million contribution to Fix the City, a pro-Cuomo super PAC that’s spending heavily on ads, mailers and other messaging to promote the former governor’s candidacy.
A spokesman for Bloomberg, who has largely stayed away from endorsing mayoral candidates since leaving City Hall in 2013, declined to comment.
Unlike Cuomo’s campaign, the PAC isn’t beholden to any spending or contribution limits, and with Bloomberg’s contribution, it has now raised nearly $19 million. That’s more than any independent expenditure in New York history, giving the ex-governor a financial edge that’s all but impossible for his fellow candidates to compete with.
One of those candidates, Ramos, is looking especially down for the count, with her latest campaign finance disclosure showing her nearly $100,000 in debt after raising only around $6,000 in the latest reporting window.
The revelation about Ramos’ mounting debt comes just days after she offered a shock endorsement of Cuomo, urging her supporters to put him second on their ranked-choice ballots.
The endorsement outraged many Democrats, given that Ramos, a Queens state senator who considers herself a progressive, has been one of the ex-governor’s harshest critics over the years. That included her leading calls for him to resign in 2021 over sexual misconduct and pandemic mismanagement accusations.
Ramos has countered she’s going with Cuomo because he’s more well-equipped to lead the city at a time of various challenges than Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist Queens Assembly member who has consistently polled as the runner-up to the ex-gov.
The filings from Ramos’ campaign show her debt is, in part, made up of $25,000 in outstanding salary payments to her campaign manager, Trivette Knowles, dating back to April 1. She also owes several consultants tens of thousands of dollars.
Knowles declined to immediately comment late Friday.
Many in progressive circles have speculated Ramos opted to back Cuomo in hopes she can get help from his vast fundraising network to address her debt, though there’s no indication from her new filings that something like that is afoot.
In another sign of a thinning primary field, Michael Blake, a fellow back-of-the-pack mayoral candidate, is also underwater, reporting being in the red by about $34,000 after raising only about $22,000 in the latest window.
Meanwhile, Cuomo’s campaign finance filing, which is separate from the super PAC, showed he drew in about $133,000 in the latest reporting stretch, which spanned from May 20 through this past Monday. With matching funds factored in, that means Cuomo’s campaign has effectively raised enough cash to reach the $7.9 million spending cap for the primary.
Mamdani and the other leading progressive in the race, Comptroller Brad Lander, had already reached the spending cap prior to the latest filing, so their new disclosures show heavy spending on ads and mailers, but few donations rolling in.
City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams, whose campaign has shown some signs of momentum, is not at the spending cap yet, and only raised about $63,109 in the latest window, a relatively paltry sum.
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