Zohran Mamdani hasn’t taken the oath yet, but his transition team is already swimming in more cash than any mayor-elect in modern city history. Campaign officials told The Post the fledgling administration has pulled in at least $3.7 million since Election Night—four times what Bill de Blasio scraped together in 2014 and nearly fourfold Eric Adams’s 2021 haul of $967,000. The surge came from almost 30,000 separate donations, with a median gift of just $25, a figure the incoming socialist mayor’s aides love to repeat the way other camps brag about poll numbers.
The donor map tells two stories at once. More than half the contributors list addresses outside New York, a sign either of national enthusiasm for urban leftism or of savvy digital fundraising that finally cracked the ZIP-code barrier. Inside the city, the campaign says bodega owners, teachers, and college students chipped in five and ten dollars at a time, building a war chest big enough to rent sound stages, hire policy brains, and bankroll the promised 50,000-person “Inauguration of a New Era” block party in Lower Manhattan. Critics, however, note that 244 donors—many from California universities, Midwest unions, and tech enclaves—maxed out at the legal $3,700 ceiling, a slice of high-dollar help that looks more Silicon Valley than Bronx block association.
Paperwork filed before December shows three gifts actually broke the limit; the transition says the overage was mailed back within days. Overseas money, which tripped up Mamdani during the general election, has so far stayed away, sparing the team another round of refund headaches. Spokeswoman Dora Pekec argues the small-donor engine proves the transition belongs to “regular people, not lobbyists,” even if the final balance sheet rivals what some Senate candidates spend in an entire cycle.
The mountain of cash arrives as the mayor-elect’s personnel office works slower than expected, leaving dozens of top posts unfilled with barely a week until the inauguration. Transition leaders insist the delay is deliberate—they want ethicists, planners, and nonprofit executives who can stomach a $125,000 city salary after years of higher private pay. The lavish inaugural fund helps bridge that gap by flying finalists to New York, paying for background lawyers, and hosting policy retreats in union halls, all costs previous administrations either skipped or hid inside city agency budgets.
What the money will not cover, aides promise, is the giant January 1 street festival starring Senator Bernie Sanders, actors Cynthia Nixon and John Turturro, novelists Min Jin Lee and Colson Whitehead, and children’s entertainer Ms. Rachel. Organizers bill the show as a “people’s celebration,” yet vendors, stages, and NYPD overtime do not come cheap; final price tags are still being tallied. If the crowd really reaches 50,000, the event could single-handedly eat a seven-figure slice of the transition surplus.
Whether the record haul signals grassroots magic or the dawn of a donor class friendly to democratic socialism will become clearer once the Campaign Finance Board posts December numbers. For now, Mamdani enters office with a bank account most incumbents would envy and a promise to keep the average gift small—even as he prepares to govern a city where $25 won’t buy lunch for two. The paradox is glaring: a mayor who campaigned on redistributing wealth has raised more of it faster than any predecessor, and every outsider is waiting to see how quickly he can spread it around.
