Politics
The lines Bill Ferguson won’t cross
When Wes Moore and Bill Ferguson stood together in a Baltimore bar on a sweltering Saturday afternoon in the summer of 2022, the two political figures projected a promising vision of power for Democrats in a blue-leaning state where they stood on the cusp of fully controlling government.
Moore was a former Rhodes Scholar and decorated combat veteran who was running for governor with Oprah Winfrey’s blessing but no experience in public office. Ferguson was a tactful consensus-builder who arrived in Annapolis with the moniker of “baby senator” before rising to become the chamber president a decade later.
“I’m a Baltimorean,” Moore told the campaign volunteers gathered in the Federal Hill neighborhood that Ferguson had represented since first being elected in 2010 at the age of 27. “Who’s making these decisions matters.”
Three years later, Maryland’s two top Democrats find themselves unable to agree on a big one. Moore has become a champion of redrawing his state’s U.S. congressional lines to generate an additional seat for his party in next year’s midterm elections. Ferguson, scarred by an earlier experience in which he helped deliver such an extreme map only to see it struck down by courts, is refusing to commit to even allowing a vote on a new redistricting measure.
The new rupture highlights a fault line emerging within both parties as Democrats and Republicans scour the national map for opportunities to improve their congressional positions via gerrymandering — between the short-term priorities of their respective national parties and the often longer-range yet parochial concerns of state legislative leaders.
For Democrats, the most immediate obstacle to further gains is Ferguson, whose defiance has made him a villain to party officials nationwide. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries spoke with Ferguson in October ensuring he “understands the assignment,” as Jeffries put it. “We need the state of Maryland,” California Gov. Gavin Newsom said upon redrawing his state’s maps via passage of Proposition 50 to give his party five Democrat-leaning seats in the state. “Grow a pair” and stand up to President Donald Trump, a top Virginia lawmaker bluntly instructed Ferguson the next day.
The stand-off will likely come to a head in the coming weeks, as Moore faces an imminent choice: Call a special session and rely on Ferguson to deliver a majority for a gerrymandered map, or wait for the General Assembly to return in January for a regular session to allow more time for negotiations. Either way, the governor will have to convince 24 of the 34 Democratic senators to buck a respected leader whose control of campaign funds could help determine the fate of their reelection bids.
The view from outside Maryland may have Moore, a likely 2028 presidential contender, towering over Ferguson. But in Annapolis, many think it is the Senate president who has made the better case for how Democrats should move forward.
Ferguson “holds the cards” on redistricting, says former state Sen. Jill Carter, who served under both men. “Moore is very popular and charismatic, but Bill is very politically savvy.”
William Claiborne Ferguson IV was born in Silver Spring, just outside of Washington, to a conservative-leaning father who worked in commercial real estate and a labor union-supporting mother who adored former President Bill Clinton. Ferguson attended Georgetown Preparatory School — the elite, all-boys Jesuit academy that also produced conservative Supreme Court Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh — and Davidson College in North Carolina, where he studied politics and economics with sights on a business career.
But a post-collegiate stint with Teach for America at one of Baltimore’s toughest schools veered Ferguson away from his father’s career and towards one in left-leaning politics. While serving as an aide to local-government officials, Ferguson pursued a law degree at the University of Maryland and prepared to seek office. In 2010 he challenged Democratic state Sen. George W. Della Jr., who had been first elected in the year before Ferguson was born. As the primary devolved into mudslinging, Ferguson tried to keep the choice simple for voters: stick with the status quo or march with him into the future.
Ferguson came to a chamber dominated by Maryland Senate President Mike Miller, known for deploying hardball tactics to keep his caucus in line over what became a 33-year tenure in the role. As the chamber’s youngest senator, Ferguson won a reputation as a mild-mannered nerd who mastered education policy and the state budget while being teased by his staff for not knowing classic rock tunes.
When Miller prepared to retire in 2020, senate Democrats turned to the then-36-year-old Ferguson, unanimously voting him the next senate president. Many in the party cheered his ascension as a generational and philosophical pivot to a new progressive era in the state capital.
“Bill Ferguson is more collaborative. He listens. He is open to changing his mind when … arguments are effectively made,” said state Sen. Cheryl Kagan, a Democrat who served under both Miller and Ferguson. “He’s less of a king and more of a leader among equals.”
Ferguson, now 42, spent much of his first few sessions as the Senate’s top Democrat in trying to reel in then-Gov. Larry Hogan’s Republican agenda. In the final two years of Hogan’s second term, Maryland Democrats overrode the governor’s vetoes more than two dozen times. Ferguson also scored some bipartisan wins, too, helping Hogan deliver on a campaign promise by passing the largest tax cut in state history.
But it was a standoff with Hogan following the 2020 Census that left an indelible mark on Ferguson.
Maryland had gained a half-million people over the previous decade, even as its largest city, Baltimore, suffered a steep population drop. Hogan saw the churn as an opening to target a Democrat-held congressional district — the 6th, stretching north from the Washington, D.C. suburbs to the Pennsylvania border and west to the West Virginia line — often described as one of the nation’s most gerrymandered. Hogan established a nonpartisan redistricting commission, which returned a map that had two of Maryland’s eight seats leaning Republican.
When Hogan called a special legislative session in December 2021 to approve the map, Democrats rebelled. With supermajorities in both chambers, they instead passed their own over Hogan’s opposition, turning seven districts into safe Democratic seats and the long Republican-dominated 1st district — represented by House Freedom Caucus chair Andy Harris — into toss-up territory.
“I felt a little bit uncomfortable, I’ll be totally candid, with the first map we passed,” Ferguson recalled recently to The Bulwark. “I thought, I’m willing to help facilitate this process.”
After Republicans sued, astate court ruled in March 2022 that the Democrats’ map amounted to an “extreme partisan gerrymander” that violated the state Constitution. Already well into an election year, senior Judge Lynne Battaglia gave lawmakers just days to pass a new map. Democratic lawmakers had little choice but to pass a revised map that would win Hogan’s signature. Republicans kept their hold on the 1st district and Democrats have not since mounted a serious challenge to Harris there.
Ferguson, who declined repeated requests to be interviewed for this article, now says he made a misjudgment in acquiescing to more seasoned leaders who convinced him a maximalist strategy would stand up to legal scrutiny. Seeing it shot down by the courts gives him a “different calculus of the risk,” as he told the Bulwark, about any attempt at a nakedly partisan gerrymander.
“Experience does matter. What you’ve seen and gone through in the past does matter,” said Malcolm Augustine, the second-highest ranking Democrat in the Maryland Senate. “That’s the bottom line. He was there.”
On an unseasonably warm afternoon in January 2023, Ferguson stood at the state house to welcome Moore — a well-reviewed author and former college football player, Army officer, investment banker and nonprofit executive — to Annapolis. The ceremony dripped with nods to Moore’s status as Maryland’s first African-American governor. Ferguson, who is white, stood less than three feet away as Moore placed his hand on a Bible belonging to abolitionist Fredrick Douglass during the swearing-in, which was held in a private event in the Senate chamber.
Moments later, at the public outdoor ceremony before a crowd that included actor Chris Tucker and presidential daughter Chelsea Clinton, the new governor name-checked Ferguson in the second line of his inaugural address. “It’s an honor to be your partner,” Moore said.
After years of playing defense against a Republican executive, Ferguson now had an ally who could allow legislative Democrats to define a proactive agenda. Many wanted to use the state’s structural surplus to fund mortgage assistance programs for first-time homebuyers and cancel parole debt for long-serving inmates.
Early optimism about what the state’s Democratic trifecta could deliver evaporated. Economic downturns ballooned the state deficit, as the Trump’s administration’s dismantling of the federal workforce and government contracts hit Maryland especially hard. Earlier this year, legislators resorted to raising taxes and fees by $1.6 billion — and have braced for lingering effects from the longest federal government shutdown in U.S. history. The Francis Scott Key Bridge collapse in Baltimore last year that left six people dead has become an unending catastrophe: A state agency last month estimated bridge-repair costs have doubled while the expected reopening has been delayed by years.
This year, Maryland’s two top Democrats have found themselves frequently at odds. In April, Moore was unable to pass a bill expanding the state’s reliance on nuclear power, reclassifying it to count towards clean-energy goals. Ferguson’s critics haveaccused the Senate president of killing the bill to benefit the Baltimore solar-panel company where he works as an executive. (Officials in Maryland’s part-time legislature are permitted to maintain outside employment.)
When Ferguson the next month helped deliver a bill forming a commission to study reparations for descendants of slavery, Moore vetoed it. The surprising rebuff was viewed by many Senate Democrats, including those in the General Assembly’s Black Caucus, as motivated by Moore’s desire to demonstrate to a national audience that he was willing to buck his own party. “I strongly believe now is not the time for another study,” Moore wrote to Ferguson in a May 16 veto letter.
But it was a national movement on redistricting that did most to fracture Ferguson and Moore’s relationship. In June, Republicans in Texas — under public pressure from the White House — first entertained the possibility of redrawing their U.S. House maps to produce more Republican-friendly seats. Democrats looked for states where they could offset Texas’s moves with partisan gerrymanders of their own.
Maryland appeared a natural candidate to join the growing Democratic counteroffensive. While California, Colorado and Virginia would have to amend their state constitutions for politicians to redraw lines mid-decade — and in New York a lawsuit to upend the status quo — pulling off such a move in Maryland would require only simple legislation. In August, Democratic state Sen. Clarence Lam introduced a bill that would place more liberal-leaning voters in the Republican-held 1st district.
Moore soon embraced the idea of moving forward with such plans. In September, he accused Trump of “attempting to gerrymander Black leaders out of office” and called the actions of Republican legislatures akin to “political redlining” in a speech at a Congressional Black Caucus dinner.
“It’s time for Maryland to have a conversation about whether we have a fair map or not,” he told reporters then.
Ferguson, too, expressed openness to the redistricting idea, telling Blue Light News earlier that month that a mid-decade gerrymander was “the last possible option that we should explore, but we won’t sit by idly and watch democracy get undermined.”
But as the pressure nationally ramped up, the more his ambivalence began to surface. He reminded colleagues of a 2002 state-court decision in which judges redrew Baltimore-area state senate districts upon ruling that a map drawn by Democrats violated constitutional requirements for Maryland’s districts to be “compact in form” around county lines and bodies of water. Ferguson also likes to point out that since the more recent smackdown of the 2021 gerrymander, Maryland’s Supreme Court still does not favor Democrats: five of the seven judges now on the court were appointed by Hogan.
That make-up, Ferguson suggests, could mean if the courts throw out any newly passed map, reverting to congressional boundaries with the current 7-1 advantage is not a foregone conclusion — and a replacement could end up a lot worse for Democrats.
Other Democrats who participated in the 2021 redistricting case see the legal issues differently. “There’s no binding precedent in Maryland that would impact congressional redistricting in the way that I think Senator Ferguson fears,” former Attorney General Brian Frosh said in an interview last month.
Amid the uproar, congressional Democrats set their sights on Ferguson. Jeffries, who would become speaker if his party retakes the House, called Ferguson multiple times to make the case that the time was right for a partisan gerrymander. Days later, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee released a poll showing a majority of Maryland voters did not just support redistricting, but “are likely to support primary candidates that support Maryland redistricting by wide margins,” according to an accompanying memo from Change Research. Former Majority Leader Rep. Steny Hoyer and Judiciary Committee ranking member Rep. Jamie Raskin — a former state senator who served alongside Ferguson for six years — issued a public letter on Nov. 10 calling it an “ethical moral and political imperative” that state lawmakers break with the Senate president.
Moore, too, began ramping up pressure on Ferguson. He formed a Governor’s Redistricting Advisory Commission that holds virtual meetings with residents to solicit recommendations to the governor and the General Assembly on whether to move forward with redistricting. At the first meeting, Ferguson — the only member of the panel who has publicly opposed Moore’s plan — was seen nodding in solidarity with members of the public imploring the commission to stand down on redrawing lines.
Moore also launched a “Leave No One Behind” legislative slate, something akin to a political action committee that those around the governor suggest he may use to launch primary challenges to incumbent Democratic lawmakers. (Moore’s office declined a request to interview him for this article.)
If anything, the public pressure seems to be hardening Ferguson’s hesitation about redistricting into full-blown resistance. In late October, a week after speaking with Jeffries, Ferguson issued a memo to his Senate caucus laying out his biggest fear about moving forward: that his party could end up losing up to two seats if more aggressive maps were struck down and ordered redrawn by the courts. The “certainty” of the current map, he wrote, “evaporates the moment we start down the path or redistricting mid-cycle.”
“The legal risks are too high, the timeline for action is dangerous and the downside risk to Democrats is catastrophic,” Ferguson wrote.
Some of the Democrats in Ferguson’s caucus have begun to internalize his arguments. Nick Charles, whose senate district covers Prince George’s County, a wealthy majority Black suburb outside of Washington, said his constituents want lawmakers to join the national fight, but soften when they learn of the potential risks.
“What happens if we take that position?” asked Charles. “On the surface, it looks good, like ‘Man, we look like we’re fighting.’ But it’s like bringing a knife to a gunfight.”
Still other Democrats are growing more confident in their depictions of Ferguson as timid and naïve.
“I think President Ferguson … is an awesome public servant, very thoughtful guy, and certainly intends well,” said Baltimore city Councilman Mark Conway, who last month announced he would challenge Rep. Kweisi Mfume for not doing enough to confront Trump. Conway sides with Moore on redistricting and is disappointed by Ferguson for not jumping into the brawl. “I just think we’re looking at a new day and maybe some of the toughest times we’ve ever had as a country in light of the willingness of Republicans to do whatever it takes to secure power.”
Ferguson has already drawn his own primary challenge from social-media influencer Bobby LaPin — a charter-boat captain and political novice known to 90,000 followers on Instagram as the “Sail Local Guy” — who has said the Senate president’s resistance to redrawing maps pushed him to run.
Those close to Ferguson say he knows the intricacies of keeping his caucus together and brushes off the outside pressure campaign as political distractions. Ferguson had closely watched developments in Indiana, where Republican legislative leaders for weeks held off pressure from the White House and the state’s governor to take up redistricting, and had taken solace in their successful defiance. But those leaders reversed course and will begin a special session this week.
Maryland’s commission will end its work in December, which Moore could use as a basis to call a special session to take on the redistricting question. Otherwise, Moore could hold off until mid-January, when lawmakers return for their regular 90-day session. That would leave little wiggle room to move maps through the legislature, and limited time to survive likely legal challenges before the state’s all-important June primaries.
Each option carries political risks for Moore. Ferguson has the power to essentially ignore the governor’s desires by convening a special session and then quickly adjourning before a vote on redistricting. If Moore waits to focus his pressure campaign in January, Ferguson could respond by otherwise working to stymie the governor’s agenda at a moment he is hoping to elevate his national profile, including by overriding Moore’s veto of the reparations bill.
“It’s not going to be a good session for him, at least not starting,” a legislative aide, granted anonymity to speak candidly of Ferguson’s calculations, said of the governor. “He’s not going to get shit through — not a confirmation, not a thing.”
While Moore may feel urgency to join Democrats’ redistricting bonanza in time to shape the midterm elections, that time crunch is of little relevance to Ferguson. The Senate president is half a decade into his role leading the Maryland Senate — a blip compared to a predecessor who held it for more than three decades — and Ferguson expects to be still toiling away in Annapolis well beyond 2028.
Moore’s “only way out of the box that he’s built for himself is to either change Bill’s mind, which doesn’t seem likely … or it’s doing something that Wes has never done before in his life, and literally take out another politician — a sitting Maryland Senate president,” said Doug Mayer, a Republican strategist who worked for Hogan. “Bill Ferguson lives here, Wes Moore is just staying here. That’s why Bill Ferguson is saying no to this.”
Trump is still the center of the GOP money universe
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Republicans’ small-dollar donor base has contracted in recent years, leaving the party more dependent on a tiny group of wealthy megadonors for support.
The GOP has had a cash advantage all year thanks to a relatively small group of large donors who have funded super PACs — Elon Musk alone has given nearly half a billion dollars this cycle. But the campaigns themselves have raised relatively little, and there’s one major reason: Other than President Donald Trump, who is still the party’s biggest fundraiser, Republicans still haven’t figured out how to raise money online.
New campaign finance filings reveal just how deep the problem goes. While Republicans have long struggled to grow their grassroots donor base, they’ve moved in the wrong direction in recent years. The number of federal donors giving through WinRed, the major GOP online fundraising platform, is down, with roughly 1.5 million donors so far this cycle compared to 2.2 million at this time in 2022. Meanwhile the number of donors has increased by about one third on ActBlue, from 4.9 million to roughly 6.6 million.
The contrast is stark: A single Democratic candidate, James Talarico in Texas, has had roughly the same number of donors on ActBlue this cycle as all Republican candidates and committees combined had on WinRed, according to a Blue Light News analysis of reports ActBlue and WinRed submitted to the Federal Election Commission.
Republican digital strategists who have been sounding the alarm for years say lagging donations are a product of fatigue, driven by years of urgent messages to the same set of potential donors.
“We beat the absolute hell out of low-dollar donors with texts and emails without expanding our [donor lists], and now no one pays attention,” said Wesley Donehue, a South Carolina-based GOP digital strategist.
Republicans’ online fundraising struggles have put their House and Senate candidates at a particular disadvantage, as candidates — unlike super PACs — face strict contribution limits and need a far larger pool of donors from which to raise money. Poor candidate fundraising has major campaign implications: Democrats’ cash advantage on that front has helped them run nearly as many ads as Republicans despite having less money overall, because candidates and parties get better rates than super PACs on broadcast TV.
Democrats’ grassroots fundraising strength is in part because of how decentralized the party is, with individual campaigns and groups building their own donor lists and fundraising operations. Virtually all of the the top Democratic fundraisers online this year are Senate candidates in competitive races.
But Republicans’ online fundraising, like so much of the party, is still centered around Trump and the official party committees. Unlike on the Democratic side, few individual Republicans have managed to break out.
Republicans’ fundraising troubles have left them more reliant on Trump: The president’s super PAC, MAGA Inc., is among the biggest midterm spenders. The group and its affiliates have now spent $296 million — after facing pressure for much of the cycle from some in the GOP who wished it would have gotten involved sooner.
“Candidates are not investing the time and resources in programs that grow the donor lists and attract their supporters into the ecosystem. Instead, they just barrage previous donors with ongoing requests for donation,” said Eric Wilson, a longtime Republican digital strategist and executive director of the Center for Campaign Innovation. “Credit to the Trump team — they brought new people into the ecosystem, and those people continue to give to them.”
Trump has continued to fundraise since returning to the White House, including through his Never Surrender leadership PAC, which was formed out of his 2024 campaign committee, and two joint fundraising committees from his previous presidential runs.
Of the nearly 1.5 million donors who have given on WinRed this cycle, 324,000 of them — a bit over 22% — have given only to Trump’s groups through the platform but not any other candidate or committee, Blue Light News’s analysis found. Another 39% of WinRed donors have given to both Trump and another Republican.
Overall, that means about 3 in 5 WinRed donors this cycle have given to Trump, when he is neither on the ballot nor able to run for president again. That’s left non-Trump GOP donors in the clear minority just as the party begins to look for a new standard bearer ahead of 2028.
WinRed isn’t the only online GOP fundraising platform, but it is by far the largest and features all of the major party committees along with prominent House and Senate candidates across the map. Its FEC reports include only federal candidates and committees, not those in state-level races or nonprofits that use the platform.
Republicans once saw their online fundraising disadvantages as a matter of technology. ActBlue, which has been around since the 2000s, gave Democrats a major fundraising advantage in the late 2010s, at a time when Republicans had no similar centralized platform. WinRed, which launched in 2019, aimed to counter that. Now strategists say the GOP’s infrastructure has come a long way, but the party’s tactics still lag behind.
Democratic candidates eyeing higher office often maintain large fundraising operations, which they can use to raise money on behalf of candidates in battleground races while also building their own lists. Among the top 20 ActBlue fundraisers this cycle are former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg’s leadership PAC and Sen. Mark Kelly’s (D-Ariz.) campaign committee. Kelly leveraged GOP attacks on his military service earlier this cycle to boost both his own fundraising and help Democrats across the map.
Wilson, the GOP strategist, credited out-of-cycle Democrats for building strong lists that they could use to shore up other candidates. The Republican side, he said, lacks similar coordination.
“Any time a Democrat announces they’re running for reelection, that week every Democrat in the Senate is sending a message to their list raising money for that person,” he said.
About the analysis: Donation totals and number of donors are based on ActBlue and WinRed receipts from all reports this cycle, covering Jan. 1, 2025, through Oct. 14, 2026. Donations that were later refunded are still included. Blue Light News’s analysis identifies unique donors based on matching full names and zip codes.
🚨🚨MUST READ🚨🚨: Mayor Zohran Mamdani and a group of fellow basketball enthusiasts have been secretly using the NYPD Police Academy’s gymnasium in Queens to play pickup ball, according to four people familiar with the games. The mayor and his crew typically show up around 10 or 11 p.m. and enter surreptitiously through a loading dock before hitting the court. While sports fanaticism has often buoyed the political brand of past mayors, Mamdani’s choice of venue is raising eyebrows. Read the story from POLITICO’s Graham Rayman, Chris Sommerfeldt and Joe Anuta here.
FINANCE FLAWS: Republican gubernatorial candidate Bruce Blakeman’s campaign finance disclosure reports have been plagued by inaccuracies since the spring. Copies of the campaign’s bank statements obtained by Blue Light News suggest his filings might have even more problems than previously suspected.
According to a disclosure report submitted to the state Board of Elections earlier this month, the Blakeman campaign had only $178,000 in the bank as of Sept. 28.
Yet the campaign’s checking account had a balance of $1.7 million on Sept. 28, according to TD Bank’s monthly statement.
The bank records also show dozens of transactions that are missing from his campaign finance filings.
On July 29, for example, the bank statements identified the campaign using a check with the number 1156 to make a $13,500 payment to an unspecified recipient. Yet Blakeman’s campaign finance reports do not identify any transactions that used check number 1156. It also hasn’t shown a single payment totaling $13,500 at any point over the past year.
In addition, there are instances in which the bank records show apparent contributions to the campaign that never show up in the disclosure reports. The statements show Blakeman was wired $18,000 by actress Lois Robbins on Sept. 2, for example, while the filings don’t show any transactions totaling $18,000 within two weeks of that date or any donations from Robbins. An $18,000 wire from attorney and campaign finance chair Howard Fensterman in July similarly doesn’t match anything in the disclosure reports.
Blakeman is the first gubernatorial candidate in state history to participate in the new matching funds program that lets him receive up to $3.5 million in public money. Then-Mayor Eric Adams was blocked from participating in a similar New York City program last year due to discrepancies between his bank statements and disclosure reports.
Reinvent Albany’s Kyle Kennedy said he didn’t know the cause of the discrepancies, but that it could just be due to “the timing of when things were recorded.”
But, he noted, Blakeman’s campaign “will automatically be audited by the Board of Elections after the election. … Campaign finance enforcement takes place after elections, not in real-time.”
Blakeman’s campaign didn’t respond to a request to explain the discrepancies. It has previously said its campaign finance problems are due to technical issues caused by a large number of donors.
Several of the candidate’s campaign finance disclosure reports have been repeatedly amended, often in ways that made the initial numbers wildly inaccurate. His July report showed him with $4.7 million in the bank; that was changed a week later to show his balance was $6.1 million; then in August it was changed to $4.3 million.
As Blue Light News reported earlier this month, Blakeman has received about $360,000 in donations over the contribution limit that he still needs to return. Many of the donations he has already returned have been highly unusual — one person who gave $1 in July was quickly refunded $780.76.
His campaign then said he accidentally submitted some duplicate contributions. Nearly a month later, it hasn’t amended the filing to show which transactions were real.
And as New York Focus reported, the Blakeman campaign submitted requests to receive matching funds for 2,600 donations that were ineligible for matches.
From the Capitol
THE WEEKEND TURNOUT: Early voting turnout has skyrocketed in every corner of the state, according to unofficial tallies provided by the state Board of Elections.
On the first two days of early voting in 2022, 261,735 people cast a ballot. This weekend, that number increased to 485,205 — a jump of roughly 85 percent.
The biggest increases were in the North Country — particularly in the congressional seat being vacated by Rep. Elise Stefanik, which is now a battleground district for the first time in over a decade. Washington County’s weekend turnout was up 236 percent from four years ago. Early voting increased 196 percent in St. Lawrence County, 182 percent in Warren County, and 179 percent in Herkimer County.
The smallest gains were in the Hudson Valley. That was especially true in the district held by Democratic Rep. Pat Ryan, where early turnout was the highest in the state four years ago as Ryan won his first full term in a nail-biter. His race isn’t widely viewed as competitive this year, and the smallest increase among the state’s 62 counties was in Ulster, which was up only 41 percent relative to 2022.
There were also relatively middling gains in Erie County (up 60 percent) and Nassau County (up 64 percent). Those are the places where New York’s two gubernatorial candidates live, perhaps indicating that neither is yet the beneficiary of any outpourings of hometown pride. — Bill Mahoney
FROM THE CAMPAIGN TRAIL
ORDER’S UP: Republican Rep. Mike Lawler spent part of this afternoon working at McDonald’s in Haverstraw – a potential backup job “if things don’t work out in November,” he said while putting on his uniform. Lawler is in the final campaign stretch in one of the country’s most closely watched congressional battlegrounds against Democrat Cait Conley.
The lawmaker spent his McDonald’s shift cooking food, handing out orders and speaking with constituents – one of whom openly admitted to voting against him before taking their food and driving off. Aside from that one outlier, customers gave Lawler a warm reception at the drive-thru window. The visit was seemingly part of an effort to make inroads in Haverstraw, a town that leans Democratic.
Lawler told Blue Light News he’s feeling confident going into the final days of his campaign, but insisted that he is an underdog in the Hudson Valley district. In the 2024 presidential election, Kamala Harris and Lawler each won the district.
“I feel very good about where we are heading on Election Day. Eight days from now, we’re going to win because I’ve done the work,” Lawler said in an interview. “I’ve delivered for my district, and the people here know me. I’m from here; I’ve lived here my whole life, I know the community..”
And for those wondering about Lawler’s go-to McDonald’s order: double quarter-pounder with cheese, a Coke and a four-piece McNugget. — Katelyn Cordero
STUMPING SPRINT: Fresh off a weekend of enthusiastic campaigning for Gov. Kathy Hochul, the mayor addressed reporters at a press conference this morning.
He stuck to his rhetoric touting the governor as a champion for affordable child care and lampooning her GOP foe Bruce Blakeman as a Trump puppet.
The mayor was also pressed about whether he expects something in return for all the campaigning he’s been doing for Hochul — such as increased taxes on the rich, a top goal for Mamdani and his democratic socialist allies in the state Legislature.
“I’m expecting a continuation of a positive and productive working relationship with the governor,” he said. “I’m excited for that relationship to continue. It’s been one that’s delivered for working class New Yorkers, and I’m confident it’s going to keep delivering.”
It’s far from an explicit commitment, but it suggests he’ll continue pushing Hochul for tax hikes should she win reelection — something City Council Speaker Julie Menin told POLITICO she would support to bankroll child care programs earlier this month.
Mamdani also repeatedly mentioned the importance of showing New Yorkers that a mayor and a governor can have a productive working relationship — an apparent dig at the storied feud between former Mayor Bill de Blasio and former Governor Andrew Cuomo.
“New Yorkers across the five boroughs are excited about us finally working together, where they haven’t seen mayors and governors do that often in the past to be able to deliver on common sense things,” he said. — Molly Reinmann
FROM CITY HALL
GRAND PLANS: Mamdani’s chief of staff Elle Bisgaard-Church laid out the democratic socialist administration’s governing philosophy today — including its opposition to means-testing for government programs.
“We look especially to universal social programs, facilitating forms of collective ownership, supporting the growth of unions. In short, creating shared economic security and stability through material programs,” Bisgaard-Church said at an event on Mamdani’s affordability agenda hosted by the New York City Policy Forum, a left-leaning research and publishing network. “On the contrary, means-tested programs segregate and encumber people.”
She pointed to other periods in the city’s history that saw “rich public institutions that could compete with the private sector,” citing NYCHA, the MTA and CUNY. Public housing, in particular, has seen significant deterioration in recent decades amid federal disinvestment. Reversing that trajectory is one of the most pressing issues Mamdani faces as mayor.
“Today we are governed by rules of austerity and face a withered welfare regime, means-tested policies, decayed public sector, and weakened public institutions,” Bisgaard-Church continued. “These are the political realities our administration wants to overturn, and we know that tackling the crushing cost of living is again key to doing so.”
The event drew other top Mamdani officials including Deputy Mayor for Housing and Planning Leila Bozorg, Economic Development Corporation Chair Lina Khan, and Consumer and Worker Protection Commissioner Sam Levine. — Janaki Chadha
IN OTHER NEWS
— HOMELESSNESS: Mamdani’s early efforts to address a ballooning homelessness problem in the city have largely failed, community leaders allege. (The Wall Street Journal)
— SUNNYSIDE YARD: Housing experts weighed in on the outlandishly high cost of Mamdani and Trump’s proposed development at Sunnyside Yard. (The City Reporter)
— BK DEMS: There are four state legislative seats Democrats are looking to flip in southern Brooklyn this midterm cycle, a fact that has largely been overshadowed by the party’s drama-packed leadership succession saga. (City & State)
Missed this morning’s New York Playbook? We forgive you. Read it here.
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Politics2 years agoBlue Light News’s Editorial Director Ryan Hutchins speaks at Blue Light News’s 2025 Governors Summit