Albany, New York Campaign Contributions Mayoral

Article published July, 2025.

Analyzing Campaign contributions for Mayoral contenders

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

Note: after we published this initial article on Mayoral candidate contributions we published a related article on Mayoral candidate spending.

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:

Donation Statistics by candidate

	Applyrs	Cerutti	Ellis	McLaughlin
Total Campaign Contributions [$]	$390,510	$355,450	$300,148	$92,191
Total [$] after 01/24	$257,380	$330,482	$19,364	$55,192
Total # of Donations	2328	800	862	580
Donations after 01/24	1572	739	50	360
Average*	$164	$447	$387	$153
Median*	$99	$200	$155	$50

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.  

Donation Statistics by Amounts

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).

Donation Statistics Over Time

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.

The contribution per month data suggests that both Applyrs and Cerutti had campaign contribution momentum going into the primary voting, with a significant portion of Applyrs donations coming from May 2025 alone.

Cerutti also had relatively high levels of donations starting in February 2025 with the highest month also being May 2025.  

Ellis' contributions were largely in late 2024 through Spring 2025.

McLaughlin's contributions spiked at the beginning of 2025.

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.

Outside Contributions

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.

Candidate	“Outside” Contributions [% of all money donated]
Dorcey Applyrs	51.5%
Dan Cerutti	53.5%
Corey Ellis	35.6%
Carolyn McLaughlin	51.5%

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.

Conclusions

We were able to retrieve and analyze public data associated with the Albany’s democratic mayoral candidates that sought the nomination for 2025.  We elected not to write an article based on the data available on the June 9th Board of Election reporting deadline in favor of painting a more complete picture of the donations received by each candidate through the entire election.  

Are there other ways that we should slice, dice and report on the campaign contribution data?  Let us know by dropping an email to albanydatastories@gmail.com.

Process

Charts and analysis were performed in Python. Process and code available on request.

Credits

This data story and its content is available under the Creative Commons Attribution license.

Persons or organizations that Share or Adapt this content should provide Attribution that provides appropriate credit, which includes:

• © Copyright 2025
• Tyche Insights, P.B.C.
• AdamTyche (AdamD)

For example, a data product or service that utilizes this article could include attribution such as:

"Portions derived from 'Albany NY Campaign Contributions Mayoral', © Copyright 2025 by Tyche Insights, P.B.C., AdamLDS (AdamD) & licensed under the CC BY 4.0 license"