Dollars Just for DC: do NYC's federal campaign donors also contribute to local elections?
Overwhelmingly, no: only 13% also donated to any city race, and for federal donors working at NYC’s largest firms, just 8% did.
Local politics shapes the buildings we live and work in, the streets and spaces between them, the schools that teach our kids, and the police and fire departments we depend on.
But federal politics can absorb all our political attention. It is high stakes and high profile. It’s also diffuse, and it can hook us into following the show on our screens as a hobby.
How wide is the gap between federal and local political involvement?
On a new page, Dollars Just for DC, I dig into that gap by looking at New York City residents who made federal campaign contributions over the $200 reporting threshold and exploring whether they made any local New York City campaign contribution in the following year.
Only 13% of the 130k New York City residents who donated more than $200 to a federal campaign in 2024 donated to any city campaign in 2025. And for employees from the large companies in the Partnership for New York, the city campaign contribution rate among large federal donors was only 8%.
City campaign contribution rates among federal donors fell from the prior 2020 & 2021 election cycles: from 16% to 13% citywide and from 11% to 8% at Partnership for NYC firms.
The analysis on the Dollars Just for DC page shows how the rate varies across industries and firms, how federal pay-to-play rules shape local giving and cut it roughly in half at affected firms, and that there was more room to donate locally, with about $19M in donations to viable candidates in close 2025 races left on the table.
I’m looking at campaign contributions as an imperfect but concrete proxy for involvement in political campaigns. The point of this analysis isn’t necessarily to get more folks to donate locally, and it certainly isn’t just to get large federal donors to contribute more locally. My aim is to make the gap legible in the hope that more of us will do more locally.
As a New Yorker, I’ve found getting involved and contributing to local campaigns has strengthened my own connection to how our city is run and inspired me to share that enthusiasm with others. And in that spirit of community, the methodology on the page has the public repo with all the code used for this analysis.
Key findings on the federal vs. local political contribution gap in New York City
The federal vs. local contribution gap is huge. Only 13% of the 130,002 New Yorkers who gave at least $200 to a federal campaign in 2024 gave to any city political campaign (primary or general) in 2025.
The gap got larger in the most recent election cycle. The city campaign contribution rate was higher at 16% in the 2020 federal to 2021 city cycle.
The gap is larger at New York’s largest firms. NYC donors who work at some of NYC’s largest employers are even more exclusively focused on DC: only 8% of these 2024 federal donors gave to a 2025 city campaign.
Some industries are much more locally involved. The federal donor contribution rate to local campaigns was 34% in commercial brokerage firms, 18% in Big Law, and 12% in Software / Internet firms, compared to the Partnership for NYC firm average of 8%.
Compliance restrictions cut local giving roughly in half at affected firms. Employees at firms with direct pay-to-play restrictions give locally at 5%, vs. 9% at unaffected firms. Employees at such firms may be prohibited from donating to local officials such as the city comptroller (who oversees the pension fund and its allocations to investment managers), and compliance policies can more broadly restrict local giving.
There’s more room to give. Across city council, borough, and city-wide primary and general election races in 2025, 28 campaigns in close races (initial vote margin within 15 percentage points) didn’t meet their public matching cap, with about $19M of unused capacity collectively.
As far as I could tell, there has been no prior research that looked at how often federal campaign donors contributed at the local level too. I hope this work to understand that gap spurs more exploration of how engagement varies across the city and inspires more involvement in local politics to keep building a magnificent city worthy of the mighty woman with a torch in our harbor.