Cuomo’s new push to have the party play a larger role in congressional elections seems to have had some impact on the Democrats’ fundraising. | Getty Democratic activists push for more control of party’s finances

ALBANY — Activists within New York’s Democratic Party are pushing to have a greater say in how the party spends its money in future elections.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo repeatedly has proven to be one of the most adroit fundraisers in the country. But since he effectively took control of the state's Democratic apparatus seven years ago, the party has put up relatively anemic fundraising numbers, at least compared to his own and Democrats in other states. And when the party has mounted significant fundraising drives, the money often has gone to benefit Cuomo's agenda.


All of this has frustrated party members who’ve made the case that the party should play a greater role in helping Democrats control the state Legislature in a solidly-blue state. In numerous competitive elections in recent years, the party hasn’t reported playing any role in backing its own candidates.

“It’s basically an ongoing joke within the circle of people that run for the state Senate that there is no Democratic Party in the state of New York,” said former senator Terry Gipson, who has run for a Hudson Valley seat three times since 2012 and is exploring challenging Cuomo from the left in a primary next year.

“Whatever you decide to do in terms of moving your campaign forward, you should be prepared to do it without the help of the party,” he said.

At a state party meeting in Albany’s suburbs last week, committee members proposed a resolution that would give rank-and-file delegates more of a say over how the party spends its money. Backers included several members who broke with the state party to endorse Bernie Sanders in last year’s presidential primary, and proponents overlapped with those who pushed through a measure urging the party to be slightly more combative in dealings with the Senate’s breakaway Independent Democratic Conference.

The resolution would have the party’s leadership submit an annual spending plan and audited financial report to all committee members. The members would be notified any time the leadership deviates from the plan by more than $15,000, and they’d have a chance to question specific expenditures.

“The Democratic state committee is meant to be a governing board that manages the affairs of the party,” said resolution author Ben Yee, a committee member from Manhattan. “It’s completely opaque what the party’s doing right now as far as I’m concerned.”

The proposal did not receive a vote at a meeting of the state committee last week.

“While it’s well-intentioned by them,” said Mike Reich, a member of the Queens party who presided over the meeting, “the executive committee has voted to table this because the additional expenses would be astronomical and the restrictions on it would hamper the ability of the political party to operate in an election time where you have to make quick expenditures in response to Republicans — as you know, Republicans can drop a million dollars in a district in a blink of an eye — and we have to be able to respond.”

Reich told attendees that if they had questions about how the party they were tasked with overseeing was spending its money, they could look at its campaign finance filings.

“You’ll see every single expenditure to the penny and every single receipt including who gave the money,” he said.

To Yee, however, this wouldn’t really give party members a better view of how their money is being spent.

“Going to look up their finance filings with the Board of Elections is like finding a bunch of receipts from last year in your desk that belonged to somebody else and not being able to ask any questions,” he said.

The resolution was motivated by Cuomo’s announcement last month that the party was planning a large campaign in advance of next year’s congressional elections. He held a rally with House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, and the party sent out a fundraising email urging small donors to get involved.

“I had zero idea we were doing anything congressional until three days before, when they were like ‘hey, can you turn people out for this launch of our congressional campaign?’” Yee said. “This could be a good campaign, it could be a bad campaign, there could be lots of money on it that will be spent well, lots that could be wasted, or there could be no money behind it. We have zero idea, and the impetus for the resolution was the people in charge of the party knowing what the party’s doing is valuable at all levels.”

Cuomo’s new push to have the party play a larger role in congressional elections seems to have had some impact on the Democrats’ fundraising, but that also underscores the idea that it hasn’t been an active force in down-ballot races since he took office.

The party’s federal account reported raising $33,060 in itemized individual contributions in June, as well as $7,496 worth of unitemized individual contributions under $200. That combined total of $40,556 easily surpasses the $7,099 monthly average over the prior year, and it more than doubles the previous record June haul during Cuomo’s time as governor ($16,670, set in 2014).

But it’s still far below the norm in some comparable states. In Florida, for example, the party’s federal account brought in $229,756 from individual donors in June.

All told, New York’s federal Democratic Committee has raised $1.2 million in individual contributions since the beginning of 2011 compared to $1.6 million in New Jersey, $1.9 million in Illinois and $5 million in both Florida and Massachusetts.

The party also controls two committees designed to get involved in state and local elections. Since Cuomo took office, these state accounts have received less than $22 million in contributions. (During that time, the governor’s campaign committee has raised $70 million).

And much of this $22 million has gone solely to benefit Cuomo.

Consider the party’s “housekeeping” account. It has no contribution limits, and theoretically exists to fund party-building activities like voter registration efforts and the maintenance of a central office. It has received $15.7 million, or a majority of the two accounts’ total, since 2011.

This committee’s fundraising has not occurred at a steady pace. In 2011 and 2012, it brought in a combined $1.7 million. Then, in the first six months of 2013, it raised $5.9 million. It received $1.2 million in the 14 months beginning in January 2016, then raised $1.5 million in the following four and a half months.

During the 2013 fundraising boom, the party spent $5.3 million on television advertisements. These ads included one that praised Cuomo’s budget, and another in which the family of James Brady lauded the governor’s gun control efforts.

And this year’s fundraising uptick coincided with more ads praising Cuomo’s agenda. This year’s round of ads, which cost at least $539,000, focused on Cuomo's subsidized college tuition program.

The party’s third account is another state-level one that can spend money on directly helping candidates. There are two ways it can do it — by transferring money to candidates or spending cash on their behalf.

The party has almost completely declined to transfer money to outside committees since Cuomo took office. It has made only $44,000 in contributions to individual Senate candidates since then.

The party has been a little more involved in independent spending — it has identified $1.48 million in spending in Senate races over the past three cycles.

But most of that spending has occurred after candidates transferred equivalent amounts of money to the party, which was able to handle expenditures like mailers with cheaper bulk costs.

The only general election in recent years in which the party spent significant money that wasn’t preceded by transfers was in 2014. That year, it spent $1.04 million helping Democrats running for the Senate. Cuomo had pledged to spend $10 million on behalf of Democratic senatorial candidates as a condition of receiving the Working Families Party’s line in that year’s gubernatorial election.

The party’s liberal wing believes it should dramatically step up its role in helping win control of the Senate, consolidating Democratic control of state government. Zephyr Teachout, who unsuccessfully ran for Congress last year, says the party wasn’t completely absent from her race. It’s nice that Democrats might more aggressively target the state’s GOP congressional delegation, she said, but it could make much more of an impact by spending its money on the state Legislature.

“Honestly, my real focus and concern is on the state Senate,” she said. “I overlapped with five state Senate races in my last congressional race, and the party could have done a lot more … These are potentially competitive Senate races with Democrats in tough but winnable districts, and the party was just not involved.”

The party’s executive director, Basil Smikle, says it has played a significant role in past Senate races.

“In 2016, we did run a robust coordinated campaign to assist the key state Senate candidates in their races, and we worked with the Senate Campaign Committee to do that,” he said. “We as a party, and certainly our officers, have been very focused and worked with the Senate Campaign Committee to identify target districts and talk about the kinds of resources we need to get to those districts.”

The party, he says, often helps Senate candidates by getting out the vote in congressional races — there’s a bit of overlap between the most competitive seats in each house, with swing districts located in places like the Hudson Valley and Long Island.

And Smikle says he expects the party to play a greater role in 2018.

“It’s very important for us to work with a lot of these groups that have grown organically, particularly after last year’s presidential election, and recruit candidates to run for the state Senate," he said.