Mayor Adams received just over $36,000 in donations for his reelection campaign in the past two months, the lowest single period haul he has had to date and the worst fundraising performance out of all the candidates running to unseat him this year, a new filing reveals.
The filing, made public Tuesday, raises serious questions about Adams’ reelection chances, which have already been hobbled by his record low approval ratings and ongoing federal corruption indictment as well as the Campaign Finance Board’s decision to deny him public matching funds due to concerns about his criminal case.
The $36,121 raised by Adams in the latest period, spanning between Jan. 12 and March 13, came from 38 individual donors.
Adams’ campaign also spent $145,326 in the most recent period, meaning he ran a major deficit and leaving him with $3 million in cash on hand, less than several of his challengers in June’s Democratic primary whose accounts are padded by hundreds of thousands of dollars in public matching funds they’ve received.
One of the Adams campaign’s largest expenses in the period was a $20,000 “consult” payment to the firm of Brianna Suggs, one of Adams’ longest serving fundraising aides whose Brooklyn home was raided by federal investigators in November 2023.
The raid at Suggs’ home was the law enforcement action that first hurtled the federal investigation into Adams’ Turkish government ties into the public spotlight, a probe he was indicted in about a year later, becoming the first sitting New York City mayor in modern history to face criminal charges. Suggs’ exact role on the campaign remains unclear, as Adams told reporters shortly after the raid that she would no longer spearhead his fundraising operation.
Vito Pitta, Adams’ compliance attorney who’s one of his only other paid campaign staffers, did not return a request for comment Tuesday on the latest filing.
By contrast, former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who has for months polled as the favorite to win June’s Democratic mayoral primary, raised more than $1.5 million from more than 2,700 donors in the two weeks after he announced his campaign on March 1, his new filings released Monday show. Queens Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani, a democratic socialist who’s courting significant support from younger, left-leaning voters in the city, raised more than $840,000 in the most recent reporting stretch from some 13,000 individual donors, per his filings.
Adams’ latest filing was due Monday, when the fundraising disclosures for all of his challengers were released by the Campaign Finance Board. However, Adams’ team submitted its disclosure so late that the Campaign Finance Board wasn’t able to make it public until Tuesday.
On Monday, Adams pointedly didn’t rule out running as an independent candidate in November’s general election should he fall short in this summer’s Dem primary.
Still, Adams’ latest filing does show he has taken some steps to campaign for the June 24 Democratic primary ballot.
According to the filing, his campaign paid My Brnd, a Westchester County-based consulting firm, $67,000 for petitioning services in the most recent stretch. Petitioning is the labor-intensive process of gathering thousands of signatures from registered New York City voters required to get your name onto the primary ballot.