Azi Paybarah Writes: Governor Andrew Cuomo’s campaign announced yesterday that it now has $14,382,577.13 on hand, closing out his first year as governor with much more money than his recent predecessors had at a similar point.
It’s about seven times more than Eliot Spitzer, had at the end of 2007, his first year in office.
A 1997 Times article about the first year of Republican George Pataki’s fund-raising noted he pulled in “$760,000 in the second half of 1995, bringing his year-end total to near $1.7 million, which was thought to be a record for a first-year governor. Mr. Pataki’s committee reported having $1.3 million on hand.” The article referred to Pataki’s numbers as proof of “extraordinarily aggressive fund raising by both parties.”
That was then.
In the last six months of 2011, Cuomo raised $6,116,490.17, an average of more than $1 million a month.
(Even when the numbers are adjusted for inflation, the difference is stark.)
“It’s a number you wouldn’t see typically one year after a gubernatorial campaign,” Assemblyman Joe Morelle, the Democratic Party chair of Monroe County, told me.
Cuomo’s fund-raising numbers came out the day the governor unveiled his second annual budget proposal, which included sweeping cutbacks to public-employee pensions and a demand that teachers adopt a new evaluation system before their districts get additional funding.
Cuomo’s campaign money—to say nothing of the money raised by the free-spending, Cuomo-allied lobby, the Committee to Save New York—will help him achieve those legislative goals, said Morelle.
“If there happens to be budget fights, he obviously can make sure that his voice his heard and his perspective is heard through the airwaves, through mass media, which is an expensive proposition,” Morelle said.
