A tsunami of outside political money is cresting and crashing on the New York City primary election. The debris is all around: glossy leaflets, harsh TV ads, robocalls and pseudo-grass-roots events like the rally Wednesday in Greenwich Village denouncing the City Council speaker, Christine Quinn, who is running for mayor. The event was sponsored by a group called NYC Is Not for Sale, a creation of one union boss and two wealthy business executives, who have channeled their antipathy — and about $1.4 million — into an all-negative campaign for the notional candidate they call Anybody but Quinn.

The group has spent more than $770,000 so far, and its followers have made themselves a familiar presence at the all-but-nightly forums and debates in this long, turbulent primary campaign (no other candidate has a dedicated corps of hostile groupies, only Ms. Quinn). As the Sept. 10 primary draws closer, voters can be sure that the group’s calls for her demise will only grow louder and hotter.

But Ms. Quinn has lots of money herself and can fight back. The place where outside electioneering is a bigger problem is in the City Council races, where smaller-bore contests among lesser-known candidates have been swamped by the spending of one group, with the vaguely positive, positively vague name Jobs for New York.

Jobs for New York was set up by the Real Estate Board of New York, which includes the city’s biggest developers. It has raised almost $6.3 million, spent $1.35 million and pledged to spend $10 million, all in the service of building a more business-friendly City Council. Developers are openly anxious about life after Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who for the last dozen years has been the best friend a builder could have. No one knows who the new mayor will be, which is why the real estate industry is eager to exert its influence on the revamped City Council, whose members have considerable control over whether projects in their districts live or die.