Gov. Kathy Hochul loves the Buffalo Bills, but the New England Patriots and Miami Dolphins are funding her campaign. | Darren McGee/Office of Governor Kathy Hochul
BUFFALO SOLD(OUT)IER: Gov. Kathy Hochul’s backing the Buffalo Bills on Sunday, but the New England Patriots and Miami Dolphins have been lining her pockets for years.
Hochul — the Bills most ardent supporter in New York politics — is sitting on a fat lump of cash from a host of major sports teams owners, including the Bill’s most infamous rivals. Hochul has received nearly $4 million from the owners of 15 major American sports teams and their families since she took office.
We asked the Hochul’s campaign, “How can the governor claim to be such a fan of the Buffalo Bills fan when she takes money from the likes of the New England Patriots and Miami Dolphins?”
“The governor is proud of her widespread support but … Go Bills!” her spokesperson Jen Goodman told us.
Hochul, for what it’s worth, touts her Bills love pretty much everywhere she goes — including MLK ceremonies, public health announcements and local and national television appearances.
“I'm sure many of them were Buffalo Bills fans who would've enjoyed this experience,” she said during one announcement, remembering those who died during the December 2022 Buffalo blizzard.
She even played the Bills’ fight song and flashed images of the team behind her during her State of the State address.
But why are so many sports owners donating to one of the country’s most unpopular governors?
It’s not wholly surprising some of the country’s richest people both own sports teams and also are prolific political donors to the governor of one of the country’s biggest states. But plenty of the donors also have clear interests before the state.
Mets owner Steve Cohen and his wife have given a combined $966,000 to Hochul’s fundraising efforts since she took office. Cohen is vying for one of the three downstate casino licenses up for grabs from the state, and the winning bidders will likely build some of the world’s most lucrative casinos.
Miami Dolphins owner Stephen Ross has combined with his daughter to give Hochul $443,000 since 2021. Ross, chair of Related Companies, also wants to see his bid for a casino in Hudson Yards come to life.
(Lest anybody think ties to the Dolphins aren’t a big deal among voters – Andrew Cuomo’s supporters once ran a TV ad in Western New York highlighting the fact his opponent was a Miami fan).
Hochul has also gotten $55,500 from Jonathan Kraft, president of the family holding company that owns the New England Patriots. She received $10,000 from Denver Broncos owner Carrie Walton Penner.
And various members of the Knicks-owning Dolan family and their holdings have combined to donate $626,000. They’ve long had plenty of business before the state – currently, some Albany Democrats are looking to scrap Madison Square Garden’s $42 million tax break.
The money has been steady throughout the governor’s tenure. In a disclosure report submitted last week, she reported $5,000 from New York Islanders owner Scott Malkin; $18,000 from Bernadette Leiweke, wife of one of the Seattle Kraken’s owners; and $72,000 from the Jacobs family, which owns the Boston Bruins.
While she hasn’t received any money from the Pegulas – the Bills owners who were once big Andrew Cuomo donors – her work with the family has likely made her popular among the owners of other teams. Three years ago, she negotiated an $850 million public subsidy for a new stadium, at the time the largest-ever government investment in the NFL.
If the Bills win Sunday, their NFC opponent in the Super Bowl will be a team that’s partially owned by a Hochul donor. Christina Weiss Lurie, who owns a “sizable” share of the Philadelphia Eagles, gave the governor $10,000 in 2022 and another $10,000 last January. Eric Schmidt – the former Google CEO who’s part of the group that bought the Washington Commanders in 2023 – has given Hochul and the state Democrats $205,000 since she took office. —Bill Mahoney and Jason Beeferman
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Airbnb has launched an attack on NYC's housing and neighborhoods. The company quietly introduced Intro 1107: a bill that could allow thousands of housing units to be turned into tourist rentals. Tenants not Tourists is a broad coalition of housing advocates, tenant activists, labor members, and others fighting to protect our homes and reject Airbnb's attempt to profit from New York's scarce housing supply. Learn more at TenantsNotTourists.com.
From the Capitol
Brooklyn state Sen. Zellnor Myrie is attacking former Gov. Andrew Cuomo along racial lines. | Courtesy of state Sen. Zellnor Myrie's office
ZELLNOR COMES FOR CUOMO: Black Brooklyn State Sen. Zellnor Myrie is attacking former Gov. Andrew Cuomo — his potential mayor’s race rival — along racial lines.
Myrie launched into a critique of Cuomo at an Upper West Side mayoral forum Wednesday night, arguing the former governor’s refusal to break up the Independent Democratic Conference harmed Black communities.
"There was one man behind the entire operation,” Myrie said of the IDC. “Andrew Cuomo. Andrew Cuomo, a Democratic governor that would come into our sacred spaces, would sit in our pews, stand up in our pulpits — but hurt our communities."
The attack comes as Cuomo leads mayoral polls — even though he has not yet declared his candidacy. He is expected to be dominant in the race in the city’s Black neighborhoods, in part due to his dwarfing Mayor Eric Adams’ in a January poll. Black voters were key to Adams' election four years ago.
The IDC was a group of Democrats — including Black lawmakers — who allied themselves with Republicans in the state Legislature from 2011 to 2018. The degree to which Cuomo was complicit in the conference’s formation remains a matter of dispute. But the group’s presence in the Legislature significantly weakened — and during some years outright denied — Democratic power in Albany.
The saga over the state Senate was a dominant Albany storyline during the balance of Cuomo’s gubernatorial tenure and remains a lesson in power dynamics.
Lefty critics considered Cuomo an enabler of the IDC, which he denies.
“Cuomo had nothing to do with the formation of the IDC,” his spokesperson, Rich Azzopardi, told Playbook.
And left-leaning advocates applied various forms of pressure to Cuomo in order to get him to help his own party secure power in the chamber. But the moderate governor distrusted Senate Democrats. The party’s unhappy two-year stint in the majority between 2009 and 2011 — marred by a damaging leadership coup and an historically late budget — bolstered the hard-charging governor’s posture, which amounted to his non-aggression pact with Republicans.
Cuomo was still able to rack up a series of legislative victories with a narrow Republican majority, including the legalization of same-sex marriage.
GOP lawmakers desperately wanted to keep Cuomo on the political sidelines and the governor privately admitted to Republicans he could have done more to help his own party win control of the state Senate in 2016.
The IDC-GOP alliance became an electoral vulnerability for Cuomo ahead of the anti-Trump blue wave of 2018, as left-leaning advocates coalesced around Cynthia Nixon’s spirited but unsuccessful primary challenge.
Seeking to defuse the problem, Cuomo broked a dissolution of the Independent Democratic Conference that spring. Republicans would continue to hold a governing majority in the Senate in 2018: Democratic Brooklyn Sen. Simcha Felder continued to sit with the GOP. A Trump-inspired blue wave that November swept the Senate Republicans out of their final lever of statewide power.
Cuomo still has not announced a run for mayor, though speculation continues to grow that a mayoral run for the former governor is not a matter of if but when.
Myrie unseated a member of the IDC, Jesse Hamilton, in 2018 and never actually served in the Senate during its existence.
“New Yorkers have many concerns and long outdated, inaccurate, palace intrigue isn’t among them,” Azzopardi said in a statement. “They also know that Andrew Cuomo spent a lifetime delivering for them — beginning in the '80s when he founded the nation's largest homelessness provider, to his days at HUD when he took on the KKK and brought billions to public housing systems around the country, to his time as governor when he enacted the country’s most ambition MWBE legislation, raised wages for millions of workers and fought discrimination and hate in all its forms.” —Nick Reisman and Jason Beeferman
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SKOUFIS’ RISE: Orange County state Sen. James Skoufis is taking on a new role in his chamber: deputy majority leader for state-federal relations.
His online archnemesis, Republican Rep. Mike Lawler, is already looming over his new appointment.
“The guy who spends his time attacking sitting members of Congress in the majority on Twitter is now the new deputy majority leader for state-federal relations,” a representative for Lawler, Nathaniel Soule, wrote in a post on X. “Only in New York.”
The two millennial Hudson Valley electeds have been laser-focused on raising their individual profiles beyond their nearly-overlapping woodsy districts, with Skoufis launching a short-lived run for DNC chair and Lawler teasing a 2026 campaign for governor.
As their profiles have grown, the publicity-driven pols have butted heads.
That includes Skoufis repeatedly attacking Lawler — specifically for the Republican’s superfan obsession with Michael Jackson that led him to wear blackface when he dressed up as the pop star during Halloween his college sophomore year.
“You gonna stop being a Michael Jackson psycho who puts on blackface for fun?” Skoufis wrote Lawler once.
The two share animosity despite their striking similarities. They are both self-styled moderates who campaign off of their defiant popularity in districts where voters overwhelmingly chose the other party for president. They also both hate congestion pricing.
“I haven’t spent time criticizing members of Congress from New York, plural — only the one that pushes self-interested, transparently political bullshit. I clearly live rent-free in Mike Lawler’s and his team’s head,” Skoufis told Playbook in a statement. “They should spend more time doing the work they were elected to do.” —Jason Beeferman
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FROM CITY HALL
A protest of Airbnb outside City Hall in 2015. Mayoral candidates are opposing a bill that would grant exemptions to the city's Airbnb crackdown. | William Alatriste/New York City Council
TAKING AIM AT AIRBNB: Mayoral candidates joined tenant groups and the powerful hotel workers union today in rallying against a bill to exempt one- and two-family homes from the city’s Airbnb crackdown.
City Comptroller Brad Lander and Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani, who are both running to unseat Adams, urged the City Council to reject the legislation, introduced by Democrat Farah Louis in November and backed by Speaker Adrienne Adams.
The bill, aimed at helping homeowners who use Airbnb for extra income, would allow the short-term rental giant to regain a foothold in New York City. Airbnb’s presence in the five boroughs was severely curtailed under a 2022 city law that bolstered enforcement of state rules barring short-term rentals under 30 days if a host is not present.
The coalition, which includes Met Council on Housing and TenantsPAC, and is getting funding from the hotel industry, says Louis’ bill would amount to a rollback of that 2022 law.
“Progress is not promised, it must be protected,” Mamdani said at the rally. “We know that when there are those moments of advancement, as we saw three years ago, that the very interests who we defeated then have returned now, and they don’t just want what they lost then, they want everything else too.”
Opponents additionally charge that the council bill would take much-needed units off the market amidst a housing shortage.
“Sometimes we talk about that crisis as though it doesn’t have villains, as though we just don’t have enough housing and there’s so many people who want to live here,” Lander said at the rally. “But you know what? The affordable housing crisis has villains, and one of them is Airbnb.”
The comptroller also plugged a plan he introduced today to allow homeowners who may have previously relied on Airbnb to more easily rent out rooms by matching them with long-term New Yorkers in need of housing.
“Think about that homeowner — a senior or empty nester — with some extra rooms or space, think about a CUNY student who needs a room while they’re going to school,” Lander said. “That will boost our affordable housing stock and not Airbnb’s profits.”
Nathan Rotman, Airbnb’s director of policy, said the council bill would “fix an overly restrictive short-term rental law” that has “failed to decrease rents in NYC and only increased hotel rates exorbitantly.”
“It’s important to ask who is funding this alleged tenants group that has the funds necessary to buy television advertising and whose bottom line those funders are working to protect,” Rotman said. “This is clearly about protecting the rising prices hotels are charging in New York City, not about tenants.” — Janaki Chadha
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IN OTHER NEWS
— DOUBLE DIPPIN’: Some state lawmakers collect a state pension and their salary at the same time by briefly ”retiring.” (Gothamist)
— BLAKEMAN’S BANK: Republican Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman raised $720k in the second half of 2024. (Newsday)
— CONGESTION PRICING CRASH RELIEF: Fewer crashes and fewer injuries from vehicle accidents are taking place in the congestion pricing zone. (Streetsblog NYC)
Missed this morning’s New York Playbook? We forgive you. Read it here.
A message from Tenants not Tourists:
Airbnb has launched an attack on NYC's housing and neighborhoods. The $85 billion company quietly introduced Intro 1107: legislation in the NYC Council that would weaken enforcement of short-term rental laws and eliminate tens of thousands of apartments from the rental market, driving up rents and deepening New York City's worst housing crisis in decades. We simply can't afford to lose any homes.
Tenants Not Tourists is a broad coalition of housing advocates, tenants, labor leaders, and more fighting back to protect our homes and communities, and reject Airbnb's attempt to profit from New York's scarce housing supply. Our housing should serve the people who live here — not multi-billion-dollar tech companies and real estate speculators. Join our fight at TenantsNotTourists.com.
