How much did Zohran Mamdani's (D) call to action help Adrienne Adams' (D) fundraising?
New York City Council Speaker and mayoral candidate Adrienne Adams’ campaign is projecting that she will qualify for public matching funds this week, just in time to use them for the final month of the Democratic primary. Though she didn’t ask for his help, she may have her opponent, Assembly Member Zohran Mamdani, to thank – at least in part.
Adams received an influx of campaign donations on the last day of the fundraising cycle after Mamdani posted a video on X on the evening of May 18 urging his supporters to contribute to her campaign. The video, which generated 830,000 views on X, coincided with the end of the latest campaign finance cycle on May 19 – a critical deadline for Adams to qualify for the city’s generous public matching program after her late entry into the race. The Campaign Finance Board is expected to officially announce whether Adams qualified on Friday.
The speaker accrued about $117,000 in donations on May 18 and 19, which was about 30% of her total fundraising since the cycle began two months prior.
A City & State analysis of campaign finance records comparing Mamdani’s donor list to the list of people who donated to Adams on May 18 and May 19 turned up about 370 overlapping donors. (Our numbers matched those found first by this X sleuth.) Those people were the most likely to have donated in response to Mamdani’s call to action, but that list almost certainly doesn’t capture everyone who donated because they saw Mamdani’s video. Just those overlapping donors gave Adams’ campaign $18,000, and the campaign submitted roughly $14,300 of those donations for the 8-1 match with public funds. That’s about 16% of Adams’ estimated matched funds for those two days.
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