Analyzing Campaign contributions for Mayoral contenders

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With the recent results of the June 2025 Democratic primary,  we decided to take a look at the contributions to, and money raised by, each candidate beginning January 1st, 2024 through Tuesday, June 24th, 2025 which was the primary.  Our goal was to examine trends between the four Democratic primary candidates: Dorcey Applyrs, Daniel Cerutti, Corey Ellis, and Carolyn McLaughlin.  

All data used in this analysis was obtained from New York State Board of Elections website: https://publicreporting.elections.ny.gov/ContributionsByRecipient/ContributionsByRecipient

Because each candidate announced their candidacy at different times, both officially and unofficially, we elected to start our analysis beginning January 1, 2024.  Applyrs, Ellis, and McLaughlin all have records that predate this from other elected positions they’ve held or sought.  However, for this analysis, we only analyzed records that were associated with “Mayor” from the NYS BOE website. Records also indicate that there was some money contributed to Daniel Cerutti prior to 2024 as well. Here’s a quick breakdown:

Some observations on the data:

1. Since 01/01/2024, Cerutti raised the most money towards his campaign, followed by Applyrs, McLaughlin, and Ellis. 

2. The data also shows that both Applyrs and Cerutti raised more funds than Ellis by 13.3x and 17.1x, respectively.  

3.  However, the largest percentage of Ellis’ donations came prior to 2024, which puts his total donations compared with Applyrs and Cerutti at approximately 76.9% and 84.4%, respectively.

4. McLaughlin raised more than Ellis since 01/01/2024, however Applyrs and Cerutti have raised 4.7x and 6.0x more, respectively.  She also raised the least amount in total, sitting between ~23-31% of total donations relative to the other democratic candidates for mayor.  

Next we wanted to look at the breakdown donations in terms of contribution amounts - big money, small money, and in between. First, we looked at each candidates fundraising with a histogram of the total number of donations by donation amount.  We start with histograms of each candidate's contributions and a rough magnitude of how much was donated is provided below.  Cerutti had 17 donations in excess of $4,000, followed by Applyrs (3), Ellis (1), and McLaughlin (0). 

Next, we looked at the total number of donations relative to the total contributions received each month.  The purpose of this was to see if there was a consistent trend betweenthe total number of donations and the total contributions (money) raised.  We plotted each candidate separately, and decided not to use a fixed y-axis scale because in this instance we were focusing on trends of each individual candidate, not trends between the candidates.

With all of the campaign contributions we can view how each candidate's war chest accumulated.  The graphic above shows the running sum of all funds each candidate received since Jan. 2024. This plot shows a clear uptick in money received by Applyrs beginning in April 2025 and further gains extending into May. Data also shows an uptick for Cerutti in Feb. 2025. Donations to McLaughlin remained relatively stable, and Ellis receiving a bump in Jan. 2025. 

Lastly, we analyzed the percentage of “outside” money received by each candidate, that is to say the percentage of all of their donations that do not list “Albany” as the city of the donor. Over 50% of Applyrs, Cerutti, and McLaughlin total contributions were not from Albany mailing addresses. This final piece of data contradicts some of the speculation and narratives that occurred on social media platforms leading up to the primary.