By: Fern Sidman

In a dramatic infusion of late-stage campaign cash, former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has emerged once again as the single largest political donor of the election season, channeling $5 million this week into super PACs opposing Democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani and backing independent candidate Andrew Cuomo, according to a report that appeared on Friday in The New York Daily News.

The twin donations—$1.5 million to Fix the City and $3.5 million to a newly created committee called For Our City—bring Bloomberg’s total spending on the 2025 mayoral race to a staggering $13 million, making him the most consequential financial force shaping what has become one of the most ideologically polarized contests in recent New York history.

Bloomberg’s cash infusion, reported by The New York Daily News, lands just days before voters head to the polls on Tuesday, November 4, and reflects the billionaire’s determination to blunt Mamdani’s surge in the polls. The Queens assemblyman—running as the Democratic Party’s official nominee—has captured the imagination of progressives with calls to raise taxes on the wealthy and corporations to fund expanded social safety nets, while promising to “reimagine” policing, housing, and education.

Yet Bloomberg, who governed as a pro-business centrist from 2002 to 2013, sees in Mamdani’s rise the potential for a sharp ideological turn that could destabilize the city’s fiscal health and investment climate. “Being mayor of New York City is the second toughest job in America, and the next mayor will face immense challenges,” Bloomberg said in a statement released Wednesday, cited in The New York Daily News report. “Andrew Cuomo has the experience and toughness to stand up for New Yorkers and get things done. I hope you will join me in supporting him.”

According to campaign filings obtained by The New York Daily News, Bloomberg’s dual donations have transformed the financial landscape of the race. Fix the City—already the largest anti-Mamdani super PAC—has spent aggressively on television, digital, and radio ads portraying Mamdani as “dangerous and inexperienced.” On Tuesday, one day before Bloomberg’s latest contribution, the PAC dropped $1.1 million on a hard-hitting television spot showing images of urban unrest, graffiti-covered subway cars, and shuttered small businesses.

“Sit this one out at your own peril,” warns the narrator in the ominous ad, before a bold headline flashes across the screen: “Mamdani Means Mayhem.”

Bloomberg’s contribution ensures that Fix the City and For Our City will remain flush with cash through Election Day. The latter group, For Our City, was formed quietly in September by a coalition of real estate developers and business executives aligned with Cuomo’s centrist message of fiscal discipline and public safety. Its leaders told The New York Daily News that the PAC intends to focus its final-week spending on “voter turnout operations in moderate and outer-borough neighborhoods.”

With his latest contributions—$1.5 million to Fix the City and $3.5 million to For Our City—Bloomberg surpasses all other donors in the general election cycle. This comes after he poured $8 million into pro-Cuomo efforts during the June Democratic primary, most of it directed to Fix the City. Then, too, Bloomberg was the largest single contributor.

All told, the former mayor has now spent $13 million backing Cuomo’s comeback bid, transforming the race into a referendum on Bloomberg’s own legacy of technocratic governance versus Mamdani’s vision of democratic socialism.

The stakes are personal for Bloomberg, whose twelve-year tenure as mayor emphasized public-private partnerships, crime reduction, and fiscal austerity—the very policies Mamdani has railed against as instruments of inequality.

“Andrew Cuomo has the experience and toughness to stand up for New Yorkers and get things done,” Bloomberg reiterated, as reported by The New York Daily News. That endorsement, coming from a former mayor who remains influential among the city’s business elite, is seen by many as an effort to rally moderates and independents wary of Mamdani’s economic agenda.

Cuomo, who is running as an independent after losing the Democratic primary to Mamdani by a wide margin, has positioned himself as a bulwark against what he calls “ideological extremism.” His campaign has leaned heavily on Bloomberg’s support, both financial and symbolic.

Still, despite the massive influx of money, The New York Daily News noted that Cuomo continues to trail Mamdani by double digits in most public polls. A Siena College survey released last week put Mamdani at 52% to Cuomo’s 41%, with Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa languishing at 6%.

Bloomberg is not alone in his campaign to stop Mamdani. Other high-profile figures in the financial and tech sectors have also opened their wallets to support Cuomo and oppose the socialist nominee.

As The New York Daily News reported, Joe Gebbia, the Airbnb co-founder and informal adviser to President Trump, has donated $3 million to pro-Cuomo groups, while hedge fund manager Bill Ackman—a vocal Trump supporter and frequent critic of left-wing economics—has contributed at least $2 million.

Together with Bloomberg’s latest outlays, that means roughly $20 million in independent spending has been deployed in just the final six weeks of the campaign, almost all of it targeting Mamdani’s credibility and policy proposals.

Political strategists cited in The New York Daily News report say the unprecedented deluge of outside money is a sign of anxiety among the city’s business establishment. “There’s genuine fear of what a Mamdani administration would mean for New York’s economy,” one Democratic consultant said. “Bloomberg’s intervention is less about Cuomo personally and more about preserving the city’s centrist, pro-growth DNA.”

The super PACs’ messaging has been relentless and often incendiary. Fix the City’s ads have focused on crime, disorder, and economic uncertainty, contrasting Bloomberg’s era of stability with Mamdani’s rhetoric about redistribution and de-policing.

One widely aired spot, reported by The New York Daily News, juxtaposes scenes of boarded-up storefronts and subway assaults with clips of Mamdani speaking at an anti-police rally, warning that his policies would “turn back the clock to the 1970s.” Another digital ad campaign funded by For Our City frames Mamdani as “a threat to working families,” accusing him of supporting “radical experiments that will bankrupt New York.”

The Mamdani campaign, for its part, has dismissed the ads as fearmongering funded by “billionaires who are terrified of accountability.” In a fiery response on social media, Mamdani accused Bloomberg and Cuomo of “buying democracy to protect their class interests.”

“They are throwing millions at this race because they know a new kind of politics is coming,” Mamdani wrote. “No amount of money can stop a movement.”

But Bloomberg’s allies argue the former mayor is defending not class privilege but competence. As The New York Daily News reported, longtime Bloomberg adviser Howard Wolfson deflected questions about the latest $3.5 million donation to For Our City, directing reporters back to Bloomberg’s earlier statement about Cuomo’s qualifications and the challenges facing the city.

With just days remaining before the election, Bloomberg’s financial firepower could reshape the final stretch of the campaign—but whether it will alter the outcome remains uncertain.

Analysts told The New York Daily News that the influx of anti-Mamdani spending might tighten the race but is unlikely to overcome the Democratic nominee’s entrenched lead, particularly given the strength of his progressive grassroots organization in Queens and Brooklyn.

Still, Bloomberg’s intervention has ensured that the closing arguments of the race revolve around familiar themes from his own tenure: fiscal responsibility, public order, and managerial competence. In this sense, the 2025 mayoral contest has become a proxy battle between two eras of New York politics—Bloomberg’s technocracy and Mamdani’s populism.

“Bloomberg has effectively reframed this race,” one City Hall insider told The New York Daily News. “It’s no longer Cuomo versus Mamdani—it’s Bloomberg’s legacy versus the socialist left.”

If Mamdani wins, it will mark a seismic ideological shift in City Hall—a first in modern history for a self-identified socialist to lead the nation’s largest city. If Cuomo, buoyed by Bloomberg’s millions, manages an upset, it will represent a vindication of centrist pragmatism in an era of political polarization.

Either way, as The New York Daily News report has observed, the 2025 mayoral race has already broken records for outside spending, signaling a new phase in how billionaires, tech founders, and financiers shape urban politics.

In the closing hours before Election Day, Bloomberg’s message—repeated across the city’s airwaves and streaming feeds—is clear: New Yorkers, he insists, must choose stability over ideology.

“Sit this one out at your own peril,” warns the voice in Fix the City’s final ad—a line that, as The New York Daily News wryly noted, could just as easily sum up Bloomberg’s own attitude toward the future of the city he once led.