Trickle-Down Election Economics: How Big Money Can Affect Small Races

Gipson, a resident of Rhinebeck, was the senator for the 41^st district from 2012 to 2014 but lost his re-election bid and aims to take the seat back from Sue Serino, the Republican who beat him. He too has made campaign finance and corruption an issue in his race, writing a letter to Gov. Cuomo in June asking him to call the legislature back in to close the LLC loophole and pass campaign finance reform. “As a former New York State Senator…I refused to help the New York City Real Estate Board get tax breaks to build luxury condominiums for Wall Street billionaires. REBNY retaliated by spending millions of dollars in support of my opponent, because the laws allowed them to do so,” he wrote.

In all these races, as the election nears and the polls tighten, the candidates expect to see big donations coming. “I think one of the reasons that I was able to outraise my opponent is that he doesn’t really have to work for the money, it will come in in large amounts when he needs it,” Niccoli says. “What we’ll see in this campaign is he’ll saturate television and radio networks, everything through the airwaves will be negative on me but what I can do in response is get out on the ground.”

Long Island

After announcing he would not seek re-election this year, Rep. Steve Israel (D-NY) — representing the 3^rd Congressional District — followed it up with a tell-all New York Times op-ed, explaining that he was tired of the endless money race. “The romance was crushed by lesson No. 1: Get re-elected. A fundraising consultant advised that if I didn’t raise at least $10,000 a week (in pre-Citizens United dollars), I wouldn’t be back,” he wrote. “Since then, I’ve spent roughly 4,200 hours in call time, attended more than 1,600 fundraisers just for my own campaign and raised nearly $20 million in increments of $1,000, $2,500 and $5,000 per election cycle. And things have only become worse in the five years since the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, which ignited an explosion of money in politics by ruling that the government may not ban political spending by corporations in elections.”

Israel may have been tired of the game, but there was plenty of interest in replacing him. Tom Suozzi, a former Nassau County Executive, won the Democratic primary; he will face off against current State Sen. Jack Martins, a Republican and Libertarian Michael McDermott.

Martins’ open 7^th Senate District also becomes a target for a potential flood of money. Democrat Adam Haber, a former school board member who challenged Martins in 2014, leads so far in the fundraising race over Republican nominee Elaine Phillips, mayor of the village of Flower Hill.

Long Island’s state Senate districts are deeply gerrymandered: Most communities of color are split across several state Senate districts, including the 7^th and the 6^th.

In the 6th, Republican incumbent Kemp Hannon is fighting to maintain his seat in the legislature, where he’s served since 1977. The head of the Senate Health Committee, Hannon has drawn fire in the past for having investments in companies under his committee’s purview and for getting campaign donations from the medical industry. “Hannon has been getting a lower and lower percentage of the vote,” in recent years, says Kink of Strong Economy for All. “There’s going to be continued interest in what he’s doing for regular people versus what he’s doing for billionaires and big corporations.” Hannon will face a rematch with Ryan Cronin, an attorney who represented financial fraud victims and positions himself as a reformer. Cronin lost to Hannon in 2012, but by less than 4 percent of the total vote.

The fact that Haber and Cronin are competitive represents a sea change: Before last spring, every single state senator from Long Island was a Republican. Then the corruption investigation roiling Albany took out Senate Majority Leader Dean Skelos, sentenced to five years in prison alongside his son for bribery, extortion, and conspiracy. Skelos had represented the 9^th district for nearly 30 years, and had managed to maintain control of the Senate majority by hook or by crook, but his conviction left an opening for a Democrat with a strong anti-corruption message, and Todd Kaminsky, a former assistant US attorney who had famously prosecuted former Senate Majority Leader Pedro Espada in 2012, won a bruising special election in April.

Corruption and blatant dealmaking, Kaminsky argues, is at the heart of the disgust for Albany that he hears about in his district. “It’s not really a partisan issue,” he says. “I’m a Democrat but I mostly prosecuted Democrats; it’s not about party, it’s about people in power liking the system as it is and not wanting to make changes.”

The special election Kaminsky won last spring provided a sneak preview what could happen this fall. Kaminsky saw a media blitz against him in the few weeks right before the election. “They reached a saturation level on broadcast television, which is a difficult thing to conceptualize,” he says. “There were people in New Jersey, in upstate New York, in the city, way further out of a state Senate district that is only in Nassau County. They had so much money they could afford to spend it in frivolous ways that didn’t even impact the election.”

New Yorkers for a Balanced Albany, the pro-charter school group, dropped near $1.5 million on the race, nearly half of the total spent on the election. Despite the group’s education connection, Kaminsky notes, most of the ads it ran accused him of wanting to raise taxes and tried to tie him to New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio. “These things aren’t supposed to be coordinated between the party and the independent expenditure group,” Kaminsky notes, “but it was the same message that the opponent’s campaign was saying and it was done at a very opportune time for the opposition.”

He’s girding for more of the same this fall as he seeks election to a full term. “I know that [New Yorkers for a Balanced Albany] have reloaded and have almost $3 million back in the same independent expenditure account, whether they target me or target a different race remains to be seen,” Kaminsky says. “Obviously there’s very little you can do to prepare yourself for $1.5 million in negative advertising. But you have to be prepared.”

The message that Kaminsky was in league with de Blasio isn’t a novel one in New York state politics, where the division between the city and everywhere else is often sharp. It’s an accusation that flies in the Hudson Valley as well as on Long Island. The irony is that the very people spending heavily to spread that message usually themselves are not from the districts in which they’re dropping thousands of dollars. “It’s extremely disingenuous and misleading to try to portray some of these upstate or even Long Island candidates as somehow beholden to New York City when the fact is that the people financing these attack campaigns are largely from New York City,” says Billy Easton. “What they’re failing to talk about is that the same incumbent senators who are benefiting from all this political campaign largesse from these Wall Street types are also actually standing in the way of adequately funding their own schools.”

In particular, the charter-school affiliated groups that spend so heavily outside of NYC are mostly advocating for more money to flow into their schools — almost all of which are located in the city.

Real estate money also flows freely on Long Island, notes Lucas Sánchez, Long Island Director of New York Communities for Change, mostly to prevent more regulation around affordable housing but also to prevent higher taxes on the wealthy. NYCC members, mostly from communities of color in the city and on Long Island, have to challenge the heavy spending with on-the-ground organizing. “We need senators who will represent the people who are living here — not wealthy Wall Street interests — and our members are doing everything they can to ensure their voices will be heard in November,” Sánchez says.

Another potentially tight race has emerged in Long Island’s 1^st Congressional District, where Anna Throne-Holst, a Southampton town supervisor and one of very few Democratic elected officials in her part of the island, is running against incumbent Lee Zeldin. Between them the two candidates already have spent more than $2 million. So far, Throne-Holst has had the most help from super PACs, but New York Wins, the group underwritten by Singer and Mercer, has surfaced in a small way on Zeldin’s behalf.

Upstate

A couple of upstate state Senate districts also merit watching:

The 58^th District, currently held by Republican Tom O’Mara, who is being challenged by attorney and longtime Democratic party activist Leslie Danks Burke, and the 60^th, where Amber Small, a civic activist with witty campaign slogans like “Think Big, Vote Small,” and “Cutting the Crap [out of our water]” originally filed to oust state Sen. Mark Panepinto, a fellow Democrat. Then Panepinto announced that he would not seek re-election — as questions swirled about his ethics and behavior. Small now faces Republican Chris Jacobs, the Erie County Clerk and member of the Jacobs family, which owns the Boston Bruins hockey team and the Delaware North Companies.

The only thing that’s certain is that with several tight House races and the fate of the state Senate in the balance, big money is sure to flow. To combat it, community organizations will be out on the ground and a group of activists are working to direct some of the money heading into headline-grabbing races toward grass-roots get-out-the-vote work and longer-term community organizing. “We are making a larger argument that funding grass-roots organizing is a better bang for the buck than TV ads or super PACs,” Billy Wimsatt of Movement 2016 says. “The beauty of funding local groups that do vote work is it’s not just about one candidate or one election, it’s about building people power to organize in the community and make the community a better place.”