Money Rolls in for State’s Top Democrats

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The New York Sun

The state’s attorney general, Eliot Spitzer, a Democrat, is likely to bank between $4 million and $5 million tonight at his largest fund-raiser since declaring his candidacy for governor, according to his campaign.


The event, which will be held at the Sheraton in Midtown Manhattan and is expected to draw roughly 1,500 guests, is an unambiguous sign of how quickly the political focus has shifted from the city races of last month to the state elections to be held in 2006.


Until November 8, when Mayor Bloomberg won his landslide re-election victory, his Democratic opponent, Fernando Ferrer, was desperately trying to raise cash. Hosting a gala-style fund-raiser was essentially off-limits for Democrats supporting Mr. Ferrer, whose cash-strapped campaign was floundering as it tried to compete. But the fund-raising floodgates have now opened.


“We’re now looking at a situation where the next big election is ours,” a spokesman for Mr. Spitzer’s campaign, Ryan Toohey, said. “There were important races all over the state, from county exec races to mayoral races and county legislature races outside the city.


“We viewed Election Day this year as the beginning of a period of ramping up our campaign on the policy front, on the political endorsement front, and in terms of fund raising,” Mr. Toohey said.


Mr. Spitzer, who made trips to Buffalo and Rochester last week to raise money, is not the only Democrat taking advantage of the new political landscape. Still, if his campaign’s estimate of how much money he will raise tonight is accurate, he will add more to his war chest in one night than many candidates do in the course of an entire campaign.


In the last week, several of the candidates hoping to replace Mr. Spitzer as state attorney general – including President Clinton’s secretary of housing and urban development, Andrew Cuomo; the 2001 Democratic mayoral nominee, Mark Green, who served as the city’s public advocate, and a former lieutenant governor, Charles King – have rolled out endorsements.


Last night, Mr. Cuomo held his largest fund-raiser to date at the Metropolitan Pavilion in Chelsea. The event, which doubled as a 48th birthday party for Mr. Cuomo, was expected to generate $1 million. And Senator Clinton also padded her campaign bank account last night as her husband headlined a $50-a-person fund-raiser at Crobar on West 28th Street. “The mayoral election is over and people are starting to turn to ’06,” Mr. Cuomo told The New York Sun during a phone interview. “It’s going to be an important year all around and the attorney general’s office, frankly because of the import that Eliot Spitzer has given it, is a very serious race.”


Both Messrs. Cuomo and Green have tried to align themselves with Mr. Spitzer, who despite criticism from some on Wall Street and in the press for overstepping his authority in his quest to root out corruption and for accepting campaign contributions from money managers he regulates, has been lionized in his party as a star.


According to state campaign finance disclosures, Mr. Spitzer had raised roughly $16.3 million as of the last filing in July and had $12.3 million in the bank.


Mr. Spitzer may face a primary challenge in the governor’s race from the Nassau County executive, Thomas Suozzi. In the general election, possible Republican candidates include Thomas Golisano, a billionaire businessman from Rochester; William Weld, a former Massachusetts governor; John Faso, a former Republican leader in the State Assembly; Randy Daniels, a former secretary of state for Governor Pataki, and Patrick Manning, an assemblyman from Dutchess County.


Mr. Cuomo had roughly $2.9 million on hand in July, including some money transferred from his aborted 2002 gubernatorial campaign, and Mr. Green had raised about $1.4 million. Assemblymen Richard Brodsky of Westchester County and Michael Gianaris of Queens, and Denise O’Donnell are also running for Mr. Spitzer’s job.


A former U.S. Attorney General, Janet Reno, is scheduled to host a fundraiser tomorrow night on the Upper East Side in a private home for Ms. O’Donnell. Ms. O’Donnell is the former U.S. attorney for the Western District of New York, a position she was appointed to by Mr. Clinton.


Yesterday, Mr. Green said his next large fund-raiser was scheduled for the spring, but that he was raising money privately and was on pace to meet his fundraising goal. “Candidates,” he said, “think about money like Mark Twain thought about bourbon when he said too much is not enough.”


“I’m raising money with smaller events that will get us to the target we seek,” Mr. Green said, though he would not specify the target. “In ’06 we will have larger events to get to the larger target we seek.”


Mr. Green, who ran against Mr. Ferrer in 2001 in the mayoral primary, said he would have felt “uncomfortable about having a fundraising event during the mayoral election when other Democrats were seeking scarce funds.”


Mr. Cuomo said, “The first focus was on Freddy Ferrer’s race and now that that’s over,we can move on to next year.”


A leading Democratic consultant, Howard Wolfson, said while the public may be more focused now on buying Christmas and Chanukah gifts, the donor community is starting to think about 2006. He said many candidates were waiting for the November elections to be held before ramping up their campaigns.


“Obviously candidates wanted to cede as much ground as possible to the people who were running in ’05,” Mr. Wolfson said. “The problem is when you have to raise so much money it’s hard not to participate in fund raising pretty much all year round.”


The New York Sun

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