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Who is bankrolling New York’s gubernatorial candidates?

Real estate and finance still top the list, but AI and gambling have been pouring money into the 2026 race.

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Governor Kathy Hochul (left) via Governor Kathy Hochul on Flickr and County Executive Bruce Blakeman (right) via Arthur Raslich on Wikimedia Commons

While money from the ultra-rich and the corporate elite plays an outsize role in politics across the United States, the problem is particularly acute in New York, where there is both an abundance of wealth (New York City has more billionaires per capita than anywhere else on Earth) and loose campaign finance laws allowing massive campaign donations from individual people as well as donations to candidates from corporations and other business entities.

As New York prepares for another gubernatorial election this November, we analyzed the first reports of the year from the two remaining major party candidates – incumbent Governor Kathy Hochul and current Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman – to find out where New York’s ruling class was placing their bets in this election.

Governor Hochul enjoys a large lead in fundraising, bringing in more than $5.3 million in new donations from mid-July 2025 through mid-January 2026, compared to the just over $260,000 in new donations reported by County Executive Blakeman in the same time period. Hochul also has a significant lead in opinion polls, with a recent poll from Siena College reflecting a 20-point lead for the incumbent governor.

Both donors are heavily reliant on large dollar donations: we found that 82.9% of the dollars Governor Hochul reported raising and 85.5% of the dollars County Executive Blakeman reported raising in the period came from donors giving $1,000 more, and 35.8% of Hochul’s dollars and 38.3% of Blakeman’s dollars came from donors giving $10,000 or more.

Further, both candidates raised extensively from New York’s real estate sector, which was the top donating industry to both Hochul and Blakeman. 

This donation period was especially notable for the huge amounts of money Governor Hochul raised from the so-called “artificial intelligence” sector. We found that Hochul had received at least $270,500 from donors in the technology industry, including at least $202,000 from donors with ties to “AI”, including large language model developers Anthropic and OpenAI, the foundation Coefficient Giving which was formerly known as Open Philanthropy, and the effective altruism movement.

This report analyzes some of the key donor sectors to Governor Hochul and County Executive Blakeman in an effort to show where each candidate is drawing their base of material support as well as to place these donations in the context of what these donors hope to get from the next Governor of New York State.

Methodology and Overall Trends

We analyzed the campaign finance filings for the January 2026 filing period, which runs from July 12, 2025 through January 11, 2026, from the gubernatorial campaign committees of sitting Governor Hochul and County Executive Bruce Blakeman. 

Combined, the two major party gubernatorial candidates reported raising more than $6.7 million in the January 2026 filing period. Governor Hochul reported $5.3 million in donations, of which we identified 450 donors giving a total of $3,483,270.46, accounting for 66.3% of all the money Hochul reported raising in the period. County Executive Blakeman reported raising $1.5 million, primarily from transfers from his previous campaign account and from the Nassau County Republican Committee. Of the $260,976.09 Blakeman reported in new donations, we identified 44 donors who gave a total of $223,189.50 to his campaign, totaling 85.5% of the new money that Blakeman reported bringing in during the January 2026 period.

Each candidate relies heavily on large dollar donors. According to Governor Hochul’s filing, 82.9% of her total fundraising take came from donors giving $1,000 or more and 35.8% came from donors giving $10,000 or more. According to County Executive Blakeman’s filing, 85.5% of his new fundraising came from donors giving $1,000 or more and 38.3% came from donors giving $10,000 or more.

To calculate totals by industry, we reviewed all the donors that candidates reported contributing $5,000 or more to their campaigns during the filing period, and attempted to match donors giving lesser amounts to lists of identified donors we have compiled from previous election cycles. We classified those donors by industry in order to determine which candidates were favored by key industrial sectors and special interest groups, including billionaires, the real estate industry, Wall Street, technology and “artificial intelligence”, and gambling.

For each candidate, real estate was the top-donating industry, with Governor Hochul reporting that she raised at least more than $667,000 from donors in the real estate and construction industries, including maximum $18,000 donations from some of New York City’s top developers, and Bruce Blakeman bringing in more than $63,000 with maximum donations from Paul Jerkovich as well as at least $10,000 from a suite of real estate entities owned by controversial Buffalo developer Carl Paladino.

The top-donating industries to Hochul and Blakeman in the January filing period can be seen in the table below. 

Kathy Hochul

Polling shows that Governor Kathy Hochul is the clear favorite to win New York’s 2026 gubernatorial election, which is also borne out by Hochul’s complete domination of fundraising. Hochul brought in millions of dollars in donations from New York’s most powerful people and industries, including donors normally more aligned to the Blakeman’s Republican Party. 

The extremely lopsided support for Hochul among New York’s political power players and donor class could be attributed to a variety of factors. So far in office, Hochul has aligned herself with elite and corporate interests, for example, resisting increasing taxes on the rich to fund public programs like universal childcare and seeking to roll back New York’s landmark climate law, which has been a major priority of the fossil fuel industry and powerful corporate lobbying groups. Huge contributions to Hochul from powerful sectors could also be simply a recognition that Hochul is likely to win re-election and a desire to back the winner. Donations could also be an effort to curry favor with Hochul: the Governor’s top donor groups all have a keen interest in state policy, from the perennial mega-donating real estate, finance, and billionaire sectors to relatively recent big donor classes like gambling and technology companies in the so-called “artificial intelligence” sphere.

Hochul’s top donor sectors can be seen in the chart below, with more discussion on key sectors and donors following.

Billionaires

From July 12, 2025 through January 11, 2026 Hochul reported receiving at least $226,500 from nine billionaires and 13 members of billionaire families with a combined net worth of $61.4 billion. This total includes maximum $18,000 donations from:

  • Ron Burkle (net worth $3.7 billion), a private equity and venture capital billionaire and major Democratic donor who co-founded the tech-focused A-Grade Investments with actor Ashton Kutcher;
  • Patricia Kraft (net worth $13.8 billion), the daughter-in-law of New England Patriots NFL team owner Robert Kraft; 
  • Mindy Rich, the wife of Robert Rich Jr. (net worth $6.5 billion), owner of Buffalo-based processed foods corporation Rich Products who gave $13,000 himself to Hochul and an additional $5,000 through his business;
  • Jay “J.B.” Pritzker (net worth $3.3 billion), an heir to the Hyatt hotel fortune and the current Governor of Illinois; and
  • Alex Lasry, the CEO of the FIFA World Cup 2026 New York & New Jersey Host Committee and son of Marc Lasry (net worth $1.8 billion), a private equity and hedge fund billionaire with significant investments in the fossil fuel industry and a former owner of the Milwaukee Bucks NBA team.

Other major billionaire donors to Hochul in this period include the billionaire Jacobs family of Buffalo, which owns the casino and concessions conglomerate Delaware North, and the Bluhm family of Chicago, whose wealth comes from family investments in casinos and real estate. 

The Jacobs Family

Governor Hochul has strong ties to Buffalo’s Jacobs family, the billionaire owners of Delaware North and the Boston Bruins NHL team. Delaware North hired Hochul’s husband as soon as he resigned as U.S. Attorney for the Western District of New York in 2016, where he served as the corporation’s general counsel until 2023. In the time that William Hochul worked for Delaware North, the Jacobs family-owned company paid the Hochul family as much as $5.35 million, according to financial disclosures made by Gov. Hochul. 

Hochul’s relationship to the Jacobs family and Delaware North drew significant conflict of interest concerns during Hochul’s first term in office, which may have led to the Jacobs family ceasing their donations to Hochul. In 2025, however, Jacobs family donations began flowing again, funneling huge amounts of money from the Western New York billionaires to Hochul’s campaign.

We found that Kathy Hochul received an aggregate of $69,500 in donations from nine members of the Jacobs family in the January 2026 campaign finance filing period, including:

  • $9,000 each from Delaware North co-CEO Jeremy Jacobs Jr. and his wife Alice Jacobs;
  • $9,000 from Maragaret Jacobs, the wife of Delaware North Chairman Jeremy Jacobs Sr. and mother of Jeremy Jacobs Jr., Louis Jacobs, and Charles Jacobs;
  • $9,000 each from co-CEO Louis Jacobs, his wife Joan Jacobs, and their daughter Charlotte Jacobs;
  • $6,500 each from Charles Jacobs, co-CEO of Delaware of Delaware North and CEO of the Jacobs-owned Boston Bruins NHL team, and his wife Elizabeth Pedley;
  • $2,500 from Matthew Enstice, the CEO of the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus, and husband of Jessica Jacobs Enstice, the cousin of Jeremy, Louis, and Charles Jacobs.

In addition to these donations from the Jacobs family, in her prior campaign finance filing covering the first half of 2025, Hochul reported receiving an additional $92,500 from the Jacobs family, including $18,000 from Jeremy Jacobs Sr., $11,500 from Charles Jacobs, and $9,000 each from Margaret Jacobs, Alice Jacobs, Melissa Jacobs, Louis Jacobs, Joan Jacobs, Louis Jacobs Jr., and Charlotte Jacobs. 

In total, Hochul reported receiving at least $180,000 in donations from the Jacobs family in 2025, though this total is reduced to $162,000 when considering two $9,000 donations Hochul returned to Jeremy Jacobs Sr. and Louis Jacobs. Of the $162,000 total, Hochul received $69,500 during the period this report focuses on.

The Bluhm Family

Another billionaire family that has flooded Hochul’s 2026 campaign with money is Chicago’s Bluhm family. Patriarch Neil Bluhm, a partner in Midwest Gaming & Entertainment, has a reported net worth of $8.1 billion.

We found that Hochul has received at least $43,500 in donations from five members of the Bluhm family, including:

  • $3,000 from Andrew Bluhm, a partner at Delaware Street Capital and son of Neil Bluhm, and $10,500 from Amy Kenny Bluhm, Andrew Bluhm’s wife;
  • $10,000 each from Leslie Bluhm, daughter of Neil Bluhm, and her husband, David Helfand, the longtime lieutenant to real estate billionaire Sam Zell; and
  • $10,000 from attorney Meredith Bluhm, the daughter of Neil Bluhm.

Finally, Hochul reported receiving $7,500 from Michael Rubin (net worth $9.5 billion), the CEO of sports memorabilia and sports gambling operator Fanatics, and $3,000 from Paul Tudor Jones II (net worth $8.0 billion), the manager of the Tudor Investment Corporation hedge fund and major charter school backer and political donor in New York State.

Tech and “AI”

In this election cycle, the tech industry and specifically interests related to large language models (so-called “artificial intelligence”) have emerged as a key donor sector to Governor Hochul.

Of the donations we analyzed, the tech industry emerged as the number four top industry sector contributing to Hochul’s re-election campaign, following real estate, entertainment, and finance. Many of these donations appear to have been steered by the Buffalo-based lobbyist Jack O’Donnell, who the New York Times reported co-hosted a fundraiser for Hochul with Assemblymember and Congressional candidate Alex Bores in October 2025. 

We identified at least $270,500 in donations from 27 donors in the technology industry in Hochul’s January 2026 filing, including $202,000 in donations from 17 donors from the AI sector specifically. However, since the New York Times reported that Hochul had raised “nearly $250,000” at her AI fundraiser, there are likely other donors from this world that we were not able to identify. 

Several of Hochul’s AI industry donors currently work for Anthropic, the firm behind the Claude large language model, several used to work for OpenAI, which built the ChatGPT large language model, and several have current or former roles at Coefficient Giving, a philanthropy that provided some of the initial funding for OpenAI. Further, many of Hochul’s AI industry donors are connected to effective altruism, a utilitarian philanthropic philosophy that spawned from the Bay Area tech industry’s “rationalist” movement. These donors include:

  • $18,000 from Steven Bills, a member of technical staff at Anthropic, formerly of OpenAI;
  • $18,000 from Patrick Brinich-Langlois, a software engineer for Academia.edu and poster on the Effective Altruism forums;
  • $18,000 from Miles Brundage, an AI policy researcher and former OpenAI employee;
  • $18,000 from Joseph Kijewski, an engineer for Everlaw and poster on the Effective Altruism forums;
  • $18,000 from Girish Sastry, a former OpenAI and Coefficient Giving (formerly known as Open Philanthropy) employee;
  • $18,000 from Daniel Ziegler, an Anthropic employee, formerly of OpenAI, who has described an interest in effective altruism;
  • $18,000 from Blake Borgeson, an AI researcher affiliated with the Machine Intelligence Research Institute;
  • $12,000 from Anjay Friedman, an AI policy fellow at the RAND Institute and poster on the Effective Altruism forums; 
  • $10,000 from Tyler Tracy, an AI safety researcher at Redwood Research who has participated in Effective Altruism groups and events;
  • $10,000 from Sam Anschell, a program associate at Coefficient Giving, the charity formerly known as Open Philanthropy which was an early funder of OpenAI and also funds the Centre for Effective Altruism, and a poster on the Effective Altruism forums;
  • $10,000 from Evan Hubinger, the alignment stress-testing lead at Anthropic and poster on the Effective Altruism forums;
  • $10,000 from Eli Rose, a program officer at Coefficient Giving and poster on the Effective Altruism forums;
  • $10,000 from Aric Floyd, a video producer for 80,000 Hours, an effective altruism-influenced career coaching organization with close ties to Coefficient Giving and the AI industry and a poster on the Effective Altruism forums; 
  • $7,000 from Eric Neyman, a researcher at the Alignment Research Center, an AI-focused group, and a poster on the Effective Altruism forums; and
  • $5,000 each from Chris Lehane and Ann O’Leary, Chief Global Affairs Officer and Vice President of Global Policy respectively at OpenAI, and from Madhu Garlanka, the CEO of AI firm Allwyn, Globe DH LLC, a firm planning data centers in Niagara Falls, and Appian Corporation, an AI software firm.

In addition to these donors from the nexus of the AI industry and the effective altruism movement, Hochul also reported receiving donations from several of the tech companies in the Magnificent Seven. Google employees Maria Shim and Kent Walker gave Hochul $9,000 each, Microsoft President Bradford Smith gave Hochul $7,500, and Facebook and Instagram parent company Meta Inc. gave Hochul a maximum $5,000 corporation donation.

Hochul has been a vocal proponent of AI, touting the once-planned (and now canceled) Tesla AI supercomputer at the state-owned Riverbend factory in Buffalo and announcing a plan for an AI supercomputer center at the University of Buffalo in 2025. More recently, Hochul has announced a “blue ribbon commission” to study the effects AI will have on workers in New York State declared her intent to deploy AI to “to look at every single regulation, law, policy, all the task forces” and identify what is still needed, an initiative that echoes Elon Musk’s catastrophic “Department of Governmental Efficiency” in the first months of the second Trump administration.

Gambling

Casinos and gambling companies have been pouring money into New York politics for many years. In 2012, the Malaysian casino operator Genting, which owns Resort World casinos in New York, gave $2 million to a dark money group created to promote then-Governor Andrew Cuomo’s political agenda as the company was seeking approval to build its casino in Queens. As described above, current Governor Kathy Hochul has ties to another casino operator, Delaware North, which paid her husband William Hochul as much as $5.35 million from 2016 through 2023.

In her January 2026 campaign finance filing, gambling interests have become one of the top industry groups donating to Hochul, giving at least $180,629 and ranking at Hochul’s number six top industry donor, just behind technology. Hochul’s gambling industry donors include casino and racetrack operators, manufacturers of slot machines and video poker games, as well as relatively new entrants to the industry: phone-based gambling companies like DraftKings, FanDuel, and Fanatics.

Governor Hochul’s top donors from the gambling industry appear to be the Jacobs family, whose $69,500 in contributions in the January 2026 filing period are described above. Delaware North, the Jacobs family business, operates the Finger Lakes Gaming & Racetrack “racino” in New York State as well as other casinos in Arkansas, West Virginia, and Australia. 

Also, as mentioned above, Hochul has also received $43,500 from the Bluhm family of Chicago, including Andrew and Leslie Bluhm, board members of Rush Street Gaming, the parent company of the Rivers Casino in Schenectady. 

Beyond these donations, from a host of other gambling executives and their families, including:

  • Maximum $18,000 donations from Shannon Robins and Lindsey Dodge, the spouses of DraftKings CEO Larry Robins and Chief Legal Officer R. Stanton Dodge (each of whom had also given Hochul maximum donations earlier in 2025);
  • $6,500 from Amy Howe, the CEO of FanDuel, $6,000 from Christian Genetski, a President of FanDuel, $4,000 from Mike Raffensperger, the President of Sports at FanDuel, and $3,879.82 from FanDuel’s corporate entity;
  • $7,500 each from Michael Rubin and Matt King, the CEO of Fanatics and CEO of Fanatics Betting & Gaming respectively; 
  • $7,500 from Trip Stoddard of bet365;
  • $6,500 from Caryn Skurnick, who is an investor in the Bluhm family’s Midwest Gaming LLC;
  • $6,250 from Nicky Nichols, the owner of Redman Gaming, a Louisiana video poker company;
  • $5,000 each from the World Poker Tour, the Sports Betting Alliance gambling lobbying group, and Scientific Games LLC and Light & Wonder Inc., two different names for a video poker machine company;
  • $1,000 each from Joseph Maloney, the president of the Sports Betting Alliance, and Byron Brown, the President & CEO of Western Regional Off-Track Betting, the New York State gambling company that operates Batavia Downs casino.

The rush of money from traditional and new gambling interests may be related to efforts to legalize online app-based casino gambling in New York.

Other Sectors

Real estate and finance were the number one and number three industrial sectors giving to Governor Hochul respectively. We found that Hochul had received $667,974 from the real estate industry and $404,186 from finance. As we have analyzed these industries’ political clout at length in previous reports (for example, our March 2023 report “Crooked Kathy’s Dirty Donors”), this report does not dig deep into these donors. Hochul has long been an ally of both of these sectors and the wealthy political donors who made their fortunes in them; this year she has staunchly opposed new taxes on the rich as well as putting residential construction at the center of her policy agenda, proposing a rollback of environmental regulations to speed permitting for new residential development.

Hochul’s top donors from the real estate and financial sectors can be seen in the table below.

Entertainment was also a significant donor sector for Hochul. We identified more than $445,000 in donations from entertainment industry donors, including Hollywood film studios like Disney and Sony and New York City theater producers. As New York State Focus reported in January, after Hochul raised more than $243,000 in donations from Broadway producers, she added a proposal to her executive budget to add $150 million to the New York City Musical and Theatrical Production Tax Credit.

Bruce Blakeman

The vast majority of Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman’s campaign money in the January 2026 period came through transfers from his account for his county executive campaign and from the Nassau County Republican Party. Of the $1.46 million that Blakeman reported raising from July 15, 2025 through January 15, 2026, $825,000 came from a transfer in from Blakeman’s county executive account and $375,000 came from the Nassau County Republican Committee, together accounting for more than 82% of the total Blakeman reported raising in this period.

Top donors to Blakeman’s county executive campaign committee from 2021 through 2026 include:

  • Committee for Fair Property Taxes, a PAC for law firms that challenge property tax assessments: $114,500
  • Nassau County Police Benevolent Association, $87,000
  • Harry Singh, CEO of Bolla Oil, a chain of gas stations and convenience stores: $70,000
  • International Union of Operating Engineers, a union in the building trades: $67,000
  • Ben Landa, the CEO of Sentosa Care, a chain of nursing homes: $62,500

Of the $260,976 in new money that Blakeman reported raising in the January 2026 filing period, more than 85% came from donors who gave $1,000 or more to his campaign and 38.3% came from donors giving $10,000 or more. 

Blakeman’s top donors in this period include five donors who gave the maximum $18,000:

  • Tzivya Fried, who Blakeman identifies as being employed in real estate by FWD Group;
  • Paul Jerkovich, Senior Vice President of Real Estate at Mack Management & Construction;
  • Kyle Urbealis, the wife of Richard Urbealis, an investment banker;
  • Jake Duneier, CEO of Clyde Duneier Inc. jewelry; 
  • Eliyahu Glassman, who Blakeman identifies as being employed in real estate by DN Partners.

A couple, Miami-based oil trader Mark Fisher and his wife Eloah Fisher, each gave Blakeman $9,000.

Blakeman also received $10,000 from the law firm Abrams Fensterman, where Blakeman has previously worked and whose managing partner Howard Fensterman “maintains close ties” to Blakeman, according to Politico. Abrams Fensterman also employs Frank Carone, a lawyer and political operative in former New York City Mayor Eric Adams’s inner circle who is under investigation for corruption. 

Carl Paladino, a Buffalo real estate developer, former school board member, and 2010 GOP candidate for Governor, also gave Blakeman $10,000, channeling the donation through several of his business entities: Swan Group LP, Seneca Street Properties LLC, 4858 Group LP, and 4628 Group Inc.