Longshot NYC mayoral candidate Michael Blake gets $2 million in matching funds on eve of primary

NEW YORK — Mayoral candidate Michael Blake has secured $2 million in public matching funds approved by the city's Campaign Finance Board — a significant but belated cash infusion for the longshot campaign.
With just five days left in the primary race, the new cash influx likely comes too late for Blake, a former Bronx assemblyman, to mount a competitive campaign or significantly raise his profile.
But Blake said the new funds mean his 'name will resonate across the city over the final five days' and mentioned get out the vote efforts and field operations targeting undecided voters. He declined to give specifics.
'We have days to close the deal,' Blake told the Daily News. 'Now we can make it clear to voters — you still have a choice. Especially to Black and brown voters, Michael Blake is a choice for you.'
The decision comes after the Democrat sued the CFB for its refusal to allow him to participate in the second and final mayoral debate last week.
The board in late May ruled that Blake would not be participating in the debate because he hadn't met the fundraising threshold to qualify for it, and a Manhattan Supreme Court justice backed up their decision.
Blake's campaign argued in their suit that he had, in fact, met that threshold, and that the CFB's system errors mistakenly made it seem that he hadn't.
The candidate garnered some attention with a lively performance at the first debate at the start of June, and climbed onto some endorsement slates after State Sen. Jessica Ramos, another mayoral candidate all but removed herself from consideration when she endorsed Ex-Gov. Andrew Cuomo.
He also cross-endorsed Zohran Mamdani earlier this week as part of a broader attempt to block Cuomo from the mayoralty.
Blake received 2% of the vote in a recent Marist poll.

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Boston Globe

38 minutes ago

• Boston Globe

At Embrace Ideas Festival, Black Bostonians discussed politics, art, business

Advertisement Margaret Breeden, daughter of Boston civil rights leader Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up 'My parents really ingrained social justice in me every day at the kitchen table, so I came here to figure out what I could do to help,' she said. In the first panel of the day, State Senator Liz Miranda and Segun Idowu, chief of economic opportunity and inclusion for the City of Boston discussed how they were using government policy to uplift Black Bostonians in light of the new presidential administration. Miranda represents the 2nd Suffolk district which includes parts of Roxbury, Mattapan, Dorchester and Northeastern University or 'the Blackest district in the Commonwealth' in her words. Idowu, a member of Mayor Wu's cabinet, Advertisement Idowu said that Trump's tariffs and executive orders would impact the 'five pillars' of Massachusetts' and the city of Boston's economy — medical institutions, educational institutions, life science research, tourism and climate technology. Idowu also said Trump's tariffs were impacting community projects in the city like the P3 project, a plan to build affordable housing and a research lab on the site of a vacant lot in Roxbury. Miranda was critical of the Trump administration's rollback of diversity, equity and inclusion policies. She said Trump's actions would hurt sectors like medical research. 'It's not just symbolic, it's sidelining brilliant people,' Miranda said. Miranda also said that even when DEI policies were not under attack, Massachusetts' government was not representative. 'I'm one of four Black women in the entire legislature of 200 people … we're not even represented in the bluest state in the country,' Miranda said. Miranda encouraged attendees to boycott companies that rolled back DEI efforts and to contact their alma maters if the institutions were abandoning programs to foster diversity. The politicians also told the audience policy wins they're proud of. Miranda said that she's proud of a bill she passed last year that addresses the higher morbidity rate that Black mothers face compared to white mothers. 'Six years ago when I first started talking about this issue, everyone told me 'there's no problem here,' here in the public health Mecca of the world,' Miranda said sarcastically. Advertisement Idowu said that he felt proud that people of color have started businesses in almost every neighborhood in the city and no longer feel limited to Mattapan, Dorchester and Roxbury. 'The whole city belongs to us … we can go to establishments in other neighborhoods now and not feel policed,' Idowu said. Priscilla Douglas, an executive coach and author who recently stepped down from the board of the Boston Public Library, attended the Embrace Ideas Festival. She is a lifelong resident of the city who went to Northeastern University and worked at the Roxbury YMCA and the Urban League growing up, but said the festival was eye-opening. 'Listening to the policy panel, I had no idea that 17 percent of Boston residents live in poverty,' Douglas said. At the last panel of the day, Jeneé Osterheldt, deputy managing editor for culture, talent and development at The Boston Globe interviewed entrepreneur Morgan DeBaun about her new self-help book and her career. DeBaun is the founder and CEO of Blavity Inc., a digital media company geared to Black millennials. DeBaun said that she had the idea to start a company focused on Black people when she was working for Intuit in Silicon Valley because she didn't see anyone building technology with Black users as the primary customer they were targeting. DeBaun, who is originally from Missouri, said that the murder of Ferguson teenager Mike Brown at the hands of the police in 2014 also led to her wanting to work with Black people. Advertisement 'I was sitting in a cubicle in San Francisco after Mike Brown and the people around me were asking 'what's for lunch,' they just were not seeing what I was seeing,' DeBaun said. In the audience, Laurie Nicolas resonated with DeBaun's experiences of working in predominantly white offices. Nicolas works in the healthcare space but started her own nonprofit called Pink Sunday which focuses on physical fitness for women. Nicolas learned about the Embrace festival after the inauguration of the Embrace statue in Boston Commons in 2023. She said she appreciated the diversity of the speakers at the festival. 'I want to focus on cultivating spaces where people feel included, not just people who look like me, but all kinds of diversity and I learned a lot from this event,' Nicolas. This story was produced by the Globe's team, which covers the racial wealth gap in Greater Boston. You can sign up for the newsletter . Angela Mathew can be reached at

Politico

44 minutes ago

• Politico

The gerontocracy gets a big test

SENIOR MOMENT — Keep an eye on the internal election in the House Democratic Caucus next week — it will have far bigger stakes than it might seem. The race to be the top Democrat on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee has important near-term political ramifications since the victor will serve as the foil to Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) on a panel that has seemed as interested in investigating former President Joe Biden's age as current President Donald Trump. But there are also significant institutional implications. The contest will be a test of the future of the seniority system which has been a key feature of how Congress has governed itself for centuries. There are four Democratic contenders, two congressional veterans in their 70s and two congressional newcomers in their 40s. The old guard are 70-year-old Rep. Stephen Lynch (D-Mass.) was first elected to Congress in 2001 and 76-year-old Rep Kweisi Mfume (D-Md.) who has spent 15 years on Capitol Hill in two stints nearly 25 years apart. The upstarts are 47-year-old Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.) and 44-year-old Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas), both of whom were first elected in 2023. The candidates will first try to make their case Monday to the House Democrats' Steering Committee, which will make a recommendation for the full caucus to ratify on Tuesday. At a time when, particularly among Democrats, there is a circular firing squad over issues surrounding age in the aftermath of Biden's presidency and failed reelection campaign, the idea of a system that benefits the old over the young, has drawn scorn in some quarters. After all, some progressives are still embittered over the fact that 74-year-old Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.) beat out 35-year-old Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) for this position at the end of the last Congress, shortly after Connolly was diagnosed with cancer. Connolly, who was first elected in 2008, had a positive prognosis at the time. However, within months the cancer proved untreatable and he stepped down as the top Democrat on the committee in March. The Virginia Democrat died in May. Seniority, the concept that the longest tenured member of a committee should be its chair, is not written in any formal congressional rules. It's as much a custom whose strength has ebbed and flowed. It only rigidly determined who became a committee chair for a little over half a century —- the period from the overthrow of the iron fisted Speaker Joe Cannon in 1911 to the post Watergate era in 1974, when rebellious House Democrats ousted three veteran committee chairmen, the youngest of whom was 73. Since then, the seniority system has held increasingly less sway on Capitol Hill. Republicans have imposed term limits for committee chairman whereas Democrats have proved increasingly willing to oust older chairmen who are viewed as enfeebled or simply inadequate. Yet the notion of seniority still has a certain persuasive power in internal debates. As former Rep. Emanuel Celler (D-N.Y.) argued in an essay 60 years ago (written when he had served a mere 38 years in the House and was in his sixth year as chair of the House Judiciary Committee) argued 'the seniority criterion for selecting committee chairmen has the added virtue of being objective. It automatically eliminates the intrigues, deals, and compromises that characterize election campaigns.' It does, though, inherently favor those members in safe seats who face little opposition in primaries or general elections. In the mid 20th century, this made seniority a bugaboo among those reformers in the Democratic Party who wanted to push progressive legislation, particularly on civil rights. After all, the Democrats most likely to be easily reelected year after year were conservative white southerners. Now though, in the third decade of the 21st century, those members of the caucus who most benefit from it are members of the Congressional Black Caucus, who are often in safe districts, many of which are protected from gerrymandering as well by the Voting Rights Act. The question is whether seniority's appeal will continue to dwindle on Capitol Hill next week in the vote. It wouldn't be the first time that Democrats have rejected the committee's most senior member to lead it —- Lynch has already been passed over twice and is considered likely to be rejected yet again. But, of the two top contenders, the difference between passing over Lynch for a veteran like Mfume or newcomers like Garcia and Crockett is significant. House Democrats have elected a number of less tenured members of their conference to top committee slots in recent years but going with Garcia or Crockett, who are only in their second terms in Congress, would set a new benchmark for doing it and further mark the transformation in how congressional power is accumulated and held. After all, for generations, the surest path to power on Capitol Hill was a slow and steady apprenticeship before finally wielding a gavel. More and more, that's not the case. Instead, as Congress has become an increasingly enervated legislative body, the value of playing 'the inside game' has diminished. Seniority's value was that it served as the most objective available proxy to determine legislative gravitas. It was never exact but it was better than the alternatives. No alternative has since emerged for the imperfect system of simply relying on length of tenure. In a social media age, legislative gravitas isn't the only thing that matters anymore — cable news hits and viral posts, both of which are valuable currencies today, can be measured far more precisely. Welcome to POLITICO Nightly. Reach out with news, tips and ideas at nightly@ Or contact tonight's author at bjacobs@ or on X (formerly known as Twitter) at @Bencjacobs. What'd I Miss? — Judge orders pro-Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil released from jail: A federal judge today ordered pro-Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil released from immigration detention, more than three months after the Trump administration jailed him while attempting to deport him on foreign policy grounds. U.S. District Judge Michael Farbiarz determined that Khalil isn't a flight risk or a danger to the community, and lightly rebuked the government, calling its effort to continue seeking his detention 'highly, highly unusual.' — Parliamentarian nixes key pieces of Tim Scott's megabill proposal: The Senate parliamentarian ruled today that several key provisions in Banking Chair Tim Scott's proposed contribution to the GOP's 'big beautiful bill' violate the upper chamber's rules for the budget reconciliation process, according to Budget Committee ranking member Jeff Merkley's office. Scott's proposals to zero out funding for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, slash some Federal Reserve employees' pay, cut Treasury's Office of Financial Research and dissolve the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board are all ineligible to be included in a simple-majority budget reconciliation bill. — Majority of staff axed at Voice of America: The Trump administration today sent out termination notices to hundreds of employees at Voice of America. Included in that group are employees working for the network's Persian-language service who were called back from administrative leave just last week in the wake of Israel's attack on Iran, according to two people familiar with the decision. The move — which makes official what has long been expected since hundreds of contract employees got termination notices in early May — is a part of the Trump administration's sweeping target to downsize the government and remake America's role in the global order. — Supreme Court revives lawsuits seeking to hold Palestine Liberation Organization liable for terrorist attacks: The Supreme Court has revived lawsuits against the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Palestinian Authority over terrorist attacks that killed and injured Americans. The justices today unanimously overturned a ruling from a federal appeals court that Congress violated the Fifth Amendment's guarantee of due process by enacting a 2019 law that expanded the jurisdiction of U.S. courts to hear terrorism-related suits against the PLO and PA. AROUND THE WORLD IN BREACH — Israel's actions in Gaza may have violated the terms of the country's agreement with the EU, the bloc's diplomatic corps found. 'On the basis of the assessments made by the independent international institutions … there are indications that Israel would be in breach of its human rights obligations under Article 2 of the EU-Israel Association Agreement,' the European External Action Service (EEAS) concluded, according to a leaked document seen by POLITICO. The EU's top diplomat, Kaja Kallas, was asked to lead a review after more than a dozen countries requested the European Commission look into the potential political and legal ramifications of the conflict. The EU-Israel Association Agreement establishes close relations between the bloc and the Middle Eastern nation, governing cooperation in key industries and bilateral trade. While tearing up the pact entirely would require unanimous support from all 27 EU member countries, four officials confirmed to POLITICO that interim measures, such as paring back trade ties, are being considered and could be passed by a qualified majority of countries. CRISIS MANAGEMENT — Ursula von der Leyen is facing the biggest challenge yet to her authority as European Commission president after political groups threatened to withdraw support over her decision to cancel climate-friendly legislation. 'We are on the brink of an institutional crisis,' Valérie Hayer, chair of the liberal Renew Europe group, told POLITICO. Von der Leyen is from the center-right European People's Party. Although it's the biggest group in the European Parliament, it relies on votes from the Socialists and liberals to get its way. The Commission's ability to introduce EU laws risks being blocked if the groups refuse to play ball. The Commission announced today that it was pulling the Green Claims directive ― a landmark law that would hold companies accountable for unfounded environmental claims ― even though it has already passed through many stages of the legislative process. That move, which the EPP group in Parliament requested the Commission make on Wednesday, was applauded by the right-wing European Conservatives and Reformists and the far-right Patriots for Europe, the group of France's Marine Le Pen and Hungary's Victor Orbán. Nightly Number RADAR SWEEP TRASH OR TREASURE — For centuries, Londoners have combed the banks of the River Thames in search of ancient ceramics and medieval accessories. Known as mudlarkers, they are now documenting their hunts on TikTok. The activity, once done by just a few hobbyists, gained popularity during the pandemic as new enthusiasts began sharing their finds on social media. Now, longtime mudlarkers say they feel pushed out. The permit waitlist now sits at over 10,000 people for just 4,000 spots. Elizabeth Anne Brown reports on the hobby and its future for National Geographic. Parting Image Did someone forward this email to you? Sign up here.

New York Post

an hour ago

• New York Post

Andrew Cuomo aide and Eric Adams trade social media blows as NYC mayoral campaign heats up: ‘Which private club was this sent from?'

New York City's general election for mayor is still more than four months away — but the mudslinging has already started. Incumbent Mayor Eric Adams, a Democrat running on an independent line in the November contest, sparred with a longtime Andrew Cuomo aide on social media — after she called out Hizzoner's penchant for clubbing. '12:01am tweeting – which private club was this sent from? Or were you busy smoking cigars with more antisemites at the time of the tweet?' Cuomo lieutenant Melissa DeRosa zinged at Adams Thursday. Advertisement 4 Incumbent Mayor Eric Adams and longtime Andrew Cuomo aide Melissa DeRosa clashed on social media after the Cuomo lieutenant called out Adams for constantly going clubbing. Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images DeRosa — a fierce backer of Cuomo's comeback bid for mayor who worked as his right-hand in the governor's office — had amplified a New York Times story reporting that Adams' Deputy Mayor for Public Safety Kaz Daughtry was working with ICE on immigration raids. 'Thank god this city has Jessica Tisch @NYPDPC at the helm, or one can only imagine what @ericadamsfornyc and his admin would be doing to bend to Trump's will,' she wrote. Advertisement The mayor shot back with his own choice words shortly after midnight. 'Agreed. Jessica Tisch — second woman NYPD commissioner — is leading the department because I appointed her. And she's delivering results. Andrew Cuomo? He's running for office because he got run out of office?' he posted. DeRosa then slammed Adams' love of nightlife, while also bringing up his recent controversial interview with antisemitic podcaster Sneako over cigars at Gracie Mansion. 4 DeRosa took to X to call out Adams, sending a tweet at 12:01 am speculating that he was at a club or smoking cigars. Eric Adams/X Advertisement Adams hit back, posting: 'I was en route to the Crane Club,' a luxury Chelsea steakhouse that also boasts a members-only club within the restaurant. 'Crime is down, nightlife is back, and the $30 billion industry is helping to rebuild the economy @andrewcuomo tanked with his failed policies like bail reform,' the mayor posted from his campaign account. 'Eric Adams: Delivers. Never quits.' 4 Adams fired back and responded that he was on his way to the Crane club while also taking a shot at mayoral hopeful and Democratic nominee for mayor, Andrew Cuomo. Getty Images Advertisement To political observers, the social media spat was sign that November's election is heating up and likely only to get nastier along the way. Political consultant Chris Sosa said that DeRosa's posts were indicative of Cuomo's political style but that there was little the campaign could gain from it. 'This is the Andrew Cuomo way – insult, antagonize and bully, even when there's nothing to be gained. It's not new to anyone who's had to deal with Andrew in Albany,' he said. Every morning, the NY POSTcast offers a deep dive into the headlines with the Post's signature mix of politics, business, pop culture, true crime and everything in between. Subscribe here! 'But favorably citing the NYPD commissioner to score a point against the mayor who appointed her is head scratcher.' Bill Cunningham, a former Communications Director for Mayor Bloomberg and staffer, agreed that Cuomo's camp came off looking worse in the tiff, and predicted that the general election 'could be very vicious.' 'This episode shows Adams as pretty handy in the clinches. Cuomo people should take heed that when they spot an opening they don't fall into it,' he said. 4 Adams is seen as a long shot to win the mayoral election, while running as an independent, with Cuomo still the front runner to win the Democratic nomination for mayor of New York City. Getty Images Advertisement 'No one voting now or on Tuesday gave a rat's hindquarters about where and when Adams was tweeting. All Melissa did was give him a free shot,' Cunningham added, referring to the June 24 Democratic mayoral primary, in which Cuomo is the frontrunner to get the party's nomination. Cuomo rep Rich Azzopardi fired back even harder in response to an inquiry from The Post. 'He's a desperate man who sold out the city to President Trump for his own personal benefit. We wish the MAGA mayor well with whatever administration appointment he gets come January,' Azzopardi snipped about Adams. Advertisement Adams campaign spokesperson Todd Shapiro said that mayor was more focused on delivering results for New Yorkers than 'social media theatrics.' 'Mayor Adams is focused on good government, not political mudslinging,' he said in a statement. 'We're not going to be distracted by the noise. This campaign is about leadership, not likes' The mayor has previously defended his late nights at members-only clubs like Zero Bond, saying, 'I hang out with the boys at night and I get up with the men in the morning.'