The Outside Game

At first glance, the two socialist city council members seem to hold the upper hand. Besides the advantage of incumbency, both have outraised their opponents, with Avilés having drawn more than double the amount in private donations than that of her leading challenger, Ling Ye. (New York’s new matching funds program means a candidate’s private donations can end up being only a fraction of their overall total.)

But it’s the outside spending, the “independent expenditures” by groups backing one or more campaigns, that makes clear just how intent big money interests are on ousting the two. Avilés’s and Hanif’s opponents have so far benefited from a combined total of nearly $305,000 in outside spending in their favor, in the form of digital ads, leaflets, and mass mailing. There is so far no reported outside spending backing either socialist city council member.

That outside spending is coming almost entirely from business interests the two socialist incumbents have clashed with over their time on the council. One is the real estate lobby. The Real Estate Board of New York (REBNY), a powerful real estate trade association, has upped its spending for this election threefold from two years ago, to nearly $240,000. More than half of that total has gone toward backing one candidate: Avilés’s challenger Ye.

That enormous sum was made possible by donations from just eighteen mostly real estate firms based in New York, all but two of which gave REBNY’s campaign entity — named “Jobs for New York” — at least $45,000 each. That list includes names like Vornado Realty, Rudin Management, RXR, and Jack Resnick & Sons.

Avilés has clashed with the real estate sector by vehemently denouncing rent hikes and calling for a citywide rent freeze and has over the years introduced and cosponsored a suite of bills strengthening tenants’ rights. Public records show that over the past year and a half alone, REBNY has directly lobbied on more than a dozen bills strengthening regulations on landlords and commercial property owners that both Avilés and Hanif have cosponsored or introduced. The trade group has also lobbied on a major zoning reform that both voted for and that Avilés worked to add affordable housing funding into, and on New York’s City Fighting Homelessness and Eviction Prevention Supplement, of which Avilés has been a major champion and wants expanded.

Also spending big on these elections is Madison Square Garden Entertainment, the company that owns and operates the storied New York venue and has been controlled by the family of former Cablevision CEO James Dolan. The firm’s outside spending vehicle, the Coalition to Restore New York, has put $13,000 toward digital ads promoting Ye and has put its biggest single-spending total, $39,000, behind the candidacy of Maya Kornberg, Hanif’s challenger in the Thirty-Ninth District, presenting her as the progressive candidate fighting for “an affordable, sustainable, and inclusive” city that will end homelessness and invest in schools.

Both socialist incumbents have run afoul of the company for backing legislation, authored by Hanif, banning the use of facial-recognition technology and other biometric data-gathering by private firms like MSG, which records show lobbied against the bill in 2023. Hanif made specific reference to MSG’s abuse of the technology when she reintroduced that bill this year, complaining that “New Yorkers shouldn’t have to endure dystopian biometric scans to cheer for the Knicks.”

Hanif and Avilés were also part of the unanimous city council vote two years ago that gave the arena its shortest-ever permit. This came after MSG had furiously lobbied that year for a permit with no expiration date, hiring three lobbying firms alongside its in-house efforts, and whom it paid nearly $600,000 to work on the issue.

Also wading into the races is Uber, whose PAC — which is funded by a single $2.5 million donation from the rideshare app company — has poured a whopping nearly $814,000 backing ten city council candidates, $100,000 of which has gone to mailers promoting Kornberg. That sum alone is more than Hanif has raised in total from private donors.

The Uber NY PAC is being run by Joel Aurora, a partner at California lawyer-lobbyist firm Nielsen Merksamer Parrinello Gross & Leoni, which counts among its clients firms like AstraZeneca, Bank of America, and Comcast. The firm doesn’t lobby in New York City and doesn’t count Uber as one of its clients in California — but Aurora, among the many ways he helps corporate clients navigate government issues, does list helping operate independent expenditure committees on their behalf.

Hanif has been a vocal champion for rideshare workers, calling out Uber and Lyft for deactivating the accounts of drivers as a way to underpay them and urging drivers to file a claim for their share of a $328 million wage theft settlement the state won against the companies. Uber has also spent thousands of dollars the past three years lobbying on various pieces of legislation Hanif has cosponsored on behalf of rideshare drivers and other gig workers, legislation that proposed: extending worker protections and minimum pay rates to workers of delivery services like DoorDash; mandating higher pay for rideshare drivers and banning rideshare apps from deactivating them without just cause; and extending guaranteed paid leave to some independent contractors, a bill she introduced.

In some cases, Uber lobbied Hanif’s office directly over the legislation. One of the Uber lobbyists who paid thousands of dollars to lobby her, other councilmembers, and City Hall more generally on these bills and other matters is Josh Gold, who has also personally donated $250 to Kornberg’s campaign and is listed as the only other official of the Uber NY PAC.

Uber’s PAC also gave $50,000 to the same “Jobs for New York” that has spent heavily to defeat Avilés in the Thirty-Eighth District. Avilés has cosponsored much of the same gig-worker-related legislation as Hanif and introduced her own, which Uber and Gold have lobbied on — suggesting a level of coordination between the outside spending groups.

Taking a page out of the Israel First lobby’s playbook on the national stage, the ads this money is funding make no mention of the incumbents’ positions on these issues and are mostly devoid of policy beyond accusing them of wanting to defund the police. In the Thirty-Eighth, they instead paint Avilés as more interested in protesting than being effective, and Ye — who opposes a rent freeze and emphasizes the cost of city contracts for sheltering New York’s homeless — as the candidate backing safer streets and affordable housing. When Avilés confronted Ye in a recent debate about the real estate–funded mailers attacking her, Ye claimed ignorance and said that she is “not backed by any groups or organizations.”

The candidates’ respective lists of donors make this corporate affinity clearer. The socialist incumbents’ donors tend to be dotted with professors, nonprofits, students, educators, and other government employees, as well as health, tech, arts, and union workers. The challengers’ donor lists are peppered with real estate, finance, and investment firms, business executives, and, in Kronberg’s case, venture capitalists and corporate lawyers.

That includes names like Joshua Nash of investment firm Ulysses Management, hedge funder John Petry, pharmaceutical executive Sherrie Glass, former News Corp executive and Rupert Murdoch advisor Gary Ginsberg, and private equity maven Eric Edell. Some have already drawn controversy, like Leonard Blavatnik, a major donor to the British Conservative Party, who also gave $1 million to Donald Trump’s 2017 inaugural fund. Others, like venture capitalist Lee Fixel and his wife, real estate empire scions Edward and Ezra Stern, and billionaire hedge fund manager Daniel Loeb, have donated to both.

An AIPAC at the Local Level

This onslaught of corporate money has been accompanied by the involvement of the local pro-Israel lobby, which has similarly intervened in the races.

Avilés and Hanif have each made waves by backing a cease-fire in Gaza and supporting Palestinian justice more broadly, and both races have come to be viewed as proxy battles in the larger intraparty struggle over the Democrats’ position on the war, even as their opponents have avoided centering the issue. Kornberg said in an interview she had for months “been praying for” a cease-fire but criticized Hanif for having “prioritized” the issue at the city council, while Avilés has charged that Ye had shocked her by privately telling her that “people should just leave Gaza.”

Ye and Kornberg are both officially endorsed by Solidarity PAC, a pro-Israel committee formed last year by political operatives of both major parties that, rather than making direct donations itself, directs donors to give to particular candidates. New York Focus determined that Solidarity PAC has raised roughly $80,000 for city council candidates this year, including $9,060 and $13,400 for Ye and Kornberg, respectively. Ye’s campaign has also received $175 personally from Sara Forman, Solidarity PAC’s treasurer.

In between railing against left-wing groups and officials in the city, Forman penned an article this past spring that outlined the thinking undergirding the work of herself and groups like Solidarity PAC: disaffected left-wing Jews, she wrote, have formed their own organizations like Jewish Voice for Peace and IfNotNow that, together with left-wing groups like Democratic Socialists of America — which have backed both Avilés and Hanifa — “have been smart to treat internal [Democratic] party politics as the crucial battleground.” At stake is the question of “which Jewish voices will determine the future of the Democratic Party,” she wrote, and it is time for “liberals and moderates to save the party from its own activist class,” noting that it could be done at “a fraction of the campaign cost.”

“A competitive New York State Assembly race, for example, will cost around $450,000, which amounts to a rounding error in a competitive US House race,” Forman pointedly wrote.

Solidarity PAC isn’t the only pro-Israel organization weighing in. Hanif has also weathered more than $13,000 worth of flyers from Brooklyn BridgeBuilders, which presents itself as a group of disaffected former supporters who turned against her after October 7; it raised an early $15,000 with the help of Rep. Ritchie Torres, the notorious Israel First congressman funded by Trump donors and other right-wing financiers. The flyers lobbed a range of attacks on Hanif’s record, including by taking a page out of pro-Israel groups’ tactics at the national level and accusing her of being a disloyal Democrat undermining the party. 

The pro-Israel and corporate lobbies aren’t simply working together — they’re sometimes one and the same. The donors New York Focus identified as being part of Solidarity PAC’s money push for the city council races — like Nash, the Fixels, the Stern family, and Deep Track Capital’s David Kroin and his wife — are also major players in real estate and finance. One of Solidarity PAC’s listed officers and donors, Adeena Rosen, is married to hedge funder David Rosen of Rubric Capital; the two are among Ye and Kornberg’s donors, and previously backed Republican Lee Zeldin (now busy dismantling the Environmental Protection Agency on Trump’s behalf) when he ran for governor.

Listed last year as having “operational control” over Solidarity PAC is Hal Fetner, another New York real estate titan who sits on the executive board of the same REBNY that has spent nearly $140,000 backing Ye. Fetner’s wife and daughter also gave $175 each to her campaign, while the Durst Organization, which Fetner’s real estate firm was once merged with, contributed $45,000 to REBNY’s “Jobs for New York” PAC.

Meanwhile, another donor to Ye and Kornberg, hedge fund manager Loeb, also funds the New York Solidarity Network (NYSN) headed by Solidarity PAC’s Forman. Forman has described NYSN as a “centrist Jewish membership organization” set up to defeat critics of Israel running for office, by giving money to their opponents and urging non-Democrats to register for the party and vote in its primaries.

With this high-profile and well-funded support, it can be easy to lose sight of the fact that, as Forman alluded to in her spring op-ed, Jewish opinion is far from uniform on the topic of Israel. Jews for Racial and Economic Justice is backing Hanif, who has also been endorsed by Jewish city comptroller Brad Lander, and both Hanif and Avilés have received donations from executives of Jewish institutions.

The New Fault Line

What’s happening in New York is part of a wider trend. Last year, I led a statistical analysis of the donors behind the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC)’s super PAC, United Democracy Project (UDP), which had put Squad members and other Israel critics in its crosshairs during the Democratic primary contests. While the standard progressive criticism of AIPAC and UDP is that many of these pro-Israel donors wading into Democratic primaries are Republicans and specifically Trump backers — which is true — a full picture of the campaign finance data tells a bigger story.

That story is the growing political convergence between the pro-Israel lobby and corporate interests: nearly two-thirds of UDP’s donors were top-level executives, and half came from finance, insurance, and real estate alone. Just as we’re seeing in New York, these donors often had business interests that clashed with the political work of lawmakers they were targeting: at least a dozen, for instance, headed firms that sat on the American Investment Council, a private equity trade group that vocally opposed the Build Back Better bill championed by progressives because it would have raised taxes.

The big money flooding into the New York City Council elections this year solidifies that this convergence isn’t only happening in national elections but is becoming an intrinsic feature of US politics at every level. Despite its high-profile scalps in 2024, AIPAC had an overall poor track record in defeating the Left that year. In less than a month, we will find out if pro-Israel group’s attempt to spend socialists out of existence in New York will be a show of its strength — or a similar show of weakness.