Politics
New York Young Republican Club gala draws white nationalist, far-right Germans as elected officials skip out
NEW YORK — Two months after prominent members of a national Young Republican organization were exposed for their role in a hate-filled, private group chat, the city-based chapter showed it’s willing to welcome almost anyone.
Inside Cipriani Wall Street, a lavish event space in the financial district, amid the sea of tuxedos and ball gowns, was white nationalist leader Jared Taylor. Across the room sat EmpathChan, an influencer who went viral recently for wearing blackface on Halloween. And appearing on stage was Markus Frohnmaier, a far-right German politician, whose political party the club had cheered with a German-language phrase popularized by the Nazis. At least nineteen other members of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party joined him.
Also spotted at the New York Young Republican Club gala: Vish Burra, a club member who lost his job at the conservative One America News Network last month for posting a video depicting Jews as cockroaches.
Just eight weeks after the city club’s statewide counterpart was disbanded by the New York State GOP, the city-based club showed on Saturday night how a Young Republican organization can throw a party. Its 113th annual gala came as local chapters are still reeling from the racist and antisemitic “I love Hitler” chat — and as the GOP faces a larger reckoning over whether anti-Jewish voices have space within the party.
On Saturday night, the festivities provided a glimpse of what the party’s youth wing looks like amid those conditions. Over the course of the gala, a club member struck an attendee in the face outside on the sidewalk, President Donald Trump was endorsed for a third term and a protester wearing a Nazi armband and waving a swastika-laden banner popped up from his seat to shout, “I guess we’re all Nazis!” in an attempt to disrupt the event, according to two attendees and a release from Goofball, the group behind the protest.
The sold-out Cipriani served its signature bellini cocktail to attendees upon arrival. Zoltán Mága, a Hungarian violinist whose last name sparked jokes among the GOP faithful, performed during the six-course dinner, which featured baked tagliolini with mushrooms, prime rib and potatoes.
Meanwhile, Democratic state senators, assemblymembers and city council members were outside protesting the event at a demonstration hosted by the Manhattan Young Democrats.
“The people that are in that room, they were calling folks like me watermelon people,” said Assemblymember Jordan Wright, who is Black, referencing a line from the chats exposed by Blue Light News. “They were being racist, they were being homophobic, they were idolizing Hitler.”
In October, Blue Light News reported on a chat with a dozen Young Republicans who held leadership positions in chapters of the organization across the country. Since that initial report, at least seven people involved in the chats lost their jobs, including a Vermont state lawmaker who resigned. Two members of the chat apologized for the chats but blamed the rival city group for them coming to light
Later in the evening, white nationalist Nick Fuentes — whose friendly October interview with Tucker Carlson has splintered the GOP — lingered on the sidewalk outside Cipriani after the club’s organizers banned him from entering.
“This is the worst event they’ve ever thrown,” the club’s press chairman, Lucian Wintrich, told reporters huddled together in the “press pen” where the media was restricted for much of the event. Wintrich had been expressing frustration that the dozens of outlets he welcomed to the gala were relegated to a distant corner by his fellow organizers.
Conspicuously absent from Saturday night’s event were five GOP elected officials — including one congressman — who the club had announced would be there.
Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ) was advertised as scheduled to attend in an October email, but he didn’t show up. His team did not respond to requests for comment.
Neither did New York City GOP Council Member Inna Vernikov — who was brought on stage by Trump at the 2023 gala while she wore an Israeli-flag-themed gown. The local MAGA firebrand and longtime ally of the club skipped its event despite being promoted as an “honored guest” days before. Assemblymember Michael Tannousis and City Council Members David Carr and Frank Morano were also not seen, despite promotions touting their participation.
Vernikov and Tannousis declined to comment. Carr and Morano did not respond to requests for comment.
From the stage, the speakers took an increasingly anti-immigrant bent.
“If dubiously elected or rather naturalized illegal immigrants are polluting our politics, the new right must have courage to deport them,” said Rep. Andy Ogles (R-Tenn.), in reference to his call to deport Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, which he said would “resurrect our nation.”
Earlier in the night, the club’s president, Stefano Forte, addressed attendees.
“We all know who the enemy is,” Forte said. “The enemy is who shot President Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania. The enemy is who almost shot him again two weeks [later] in Mar-a-Lago…The enemy slanders us in the media, throws wide open our borders, replaces our native population.”
On Sunday, in the wake of the mass shooting at a Hanukkah celebration in Australia, Vernikov had a blistering message for her fellow Republicans that seemed to reference her absence.
“For years, antisemitic rhetoric has dominated THE LEFT and has fully infiltrated the Democratic Party,” she wrote on X, saying such rhetoric led to the terror seen in Sydney. “Unfortunately, today the same venom has entered corners of the conservative movement and the hard RIGHT WING of the Republican Party. Lunatics like Nick Fuentes, Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson, who spew bigoted, racist and antisemitic rhetoric, should be condemned and excommunicated from the Republican Party never to be welcomed again … I will DISASSOCIATE myself from any event, individual, or organization whether Democrat or Republican, that welcomes these vile bigots into their mist, defends them or amplifies their voices.”
The club had a very different message about the attacks — one which was deleted from social media after Blue Light News started asking questions about it.
“The horrific terror attack in Australia last night is more evidence that Remigration is the only path forward for Western countries,” the club wrote in the since-deleted post. “America, Germany, Australia, and the rest of Europe must implement Remigration or more shootings like this will be inevitable.”
Pauline von Pezold contributed to this report.
A version of this article first appeared in Blue Light News’s New York Playbook. Subscribe here.
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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- Conservative climate movement faces a blue wave wipeout
- Democrats’ affordability message collides with calls to defend transgender rights
- Trump’s fundraising dominance is masking a long-term problem for Republicans
- Judge bars Trump admin from further tree-felling, closures, at golf course
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