With an 80-degree summer heat hanging thick, perspiring attendees bite their nails at Dustin Reidy’s campaign watch party. They have gathered at Orchard Tavern West, a restaurant just outside of Albany, New York. It’s 9:00 P.M. on June 25th—the night of the long-awaited Democratic primary for New York State’s 109th Assembly district, which encompasses the capital city of New York and neighboring suburban communities.
Dustin Reidy began his political career campaigning for Barack Obama in 2008. He founded an organization that helped elect Antonio Delgado (D-NY)—now New York’s Lieutenant Governor—to Congress in a rural upstate district. He now works as campaign manager to Congressman Paul Tonko (D-NY) and as an Albany County Legislator.
In this race, though, Reidy is not a campaign manager—he is the candidate. In February, he announced his candidacy for the New York State Assembly at the SEIU1199 headquarters. The Democratic primary saw Reidy’s candidacy and a competitive field of five other candidates, all currently serving as elected legislators in Albany County.
It wasn’t a contentious debate or a controversial mailer that defined the character of this competitive primary, but rather changes to New York State campaign finance law designed to reduce the influence of large out-of-district donors. For residents interested in contributing to the political process, and for the candidates running to represent them, the law has radically changed how local campaigns operate.
To amplify the power of in-district donors, the law introduced “matching funds” into campaign finance vocabulary. Once candidates running for statewide office meet eligibility, donations from within their district are matched using taxpayer money at a set ratio—$10 turns into $130, $50 becomes $650, and so on.
“It has made a huge difference,” Reidy said. “If you are someone that has a very big network of supporters that are in-district, which I am, then it multiplies your fundraising by a significant degree. I raised about $20,000 in-district and then maybe $25,000 beyond that, but I was over $200,000 raised on March 11th [because of the matching funds].”
The concept stems from a 2020 law that laid out the creation of the New York State Public Campaign Finance Board, which governs the system for augmenting the power of donations made within the district. 2024 is the first election cycle in the state in which the system has operated.
If a resident of the 109th district donated the maximum of $250 to a statewide campaign, the donation would actually be worth $2,550, courtesy of payouts from the Public Campaign Finance Board using state taxpayer money.
For Dee Burkins, a politically active resident of Albany who donated to Reidy’s campaign, that prospect was a game-changer.
“Being a person that is strictly on a social-security income, I have to be very frugal with how I budget my money. For someone like me that doesn’t have the opportunity to give larger donations, I was very happy to be a part of that […] the campaign finance matching program really incentivized me to donate. I’ve donated to [Reidy] several times through the matching funds.”
But the transition to this novel system has not been without hiccups. For grassroots campaigns, the change has been difficult and anxiety-inducing at times. Meredith Briere, campaign finance manager to Reidy, voiced some initial frustration with the program.
“This is the first time that public financing has been available. Not only are those of us who’ve never financed a campaign bumbling through it for the first time, but the Board of Elections is bumbling through it for the first time.”
In turn, the Board of Elections and the Public Campaign Finance Board struggled to understand how the program would operate in practice. Early in the race, Briere was told that Reidy’s 2024 campaign was ineligible for matching funds because donors who contributed to his 2023 re-election campaign must be aggregated with their 2024 contributions, a requirement that uniquely disadvantages him.
It turned out that the language in the law that differentiated “committee” from “candidate” made this information incorrect—thereby keeping Reidy on the same playing field with the other candidates—but the process to resolve the confusion was fraught with needless distress.
“We can’t always get straight answers,” said Briere. “You could get two different answers from two different people. It was really difficult, because even the Board of Elections and our representative at the public financing commission didn’t know certain things and gave us misinformation.”
To be eligible to receive the campaign finance matching funds in the 109th Assembly district (thresholds vary district to district), candidates must have 75 unique individual in-district donors.
Reidy initially had anxieties about that requirement. “I was so scared about getting the matching [funds] to begin with. I felt like I had a two-week stretch where I was really struggling to get folks and then it just snowballed.”
Once the slow stretch ended, Reidy blew past that individual donor requirement. All of the Democrats running in the 109th district who applied for the matching funds also met criteria, but only two, including Reidy, eventually received the matching funds maximum amount of $175,000.
Maximizing the potential of the matching funds can be an interesting—and sometimes counterintuitive—challenge. Briere, for instance, found the web of rules so complex that she sometimes had to turn donations away.
“If you get cash, it’s different rules than a check, it’s different rules to an online processor. People were bringing me $250 in cash and I had to give $150 back and say that I needed a check or some other form of payment.”
Briere was also concerned about meeting eligibility requirements and receiving the funds given that some of Reidy’s individual in-district contributors donated to his previous campaigns for the Albany County Legislature.
“All of that was unclear at the beginning. It is in the handbook, but there’s always areas for improvement on language,” said Briere. At one point, she was “furious” after being told by the Board of Elections that donations to Reidy’s campaign in 2023 would hinder his ability to meet eligibility in 2024. A week later, Briere got a call from the Board of Elections. They were wrong. “That was one of the very stressful situations we dealt with.”
Notwithstanding the struggle to adhere to the law’s requirements, the nascent campaign finance system has fulfilled its purpose. It allows candidates to spend less time dialing for dollars and more time engaging with voters—and it’s shaken up the race in the process.
Reidy said that candidates who receive matching funds will “have enough money for some mail, and probably for some digital ads. Maybe it won’t be TV ads for everyone, but it has basically turned an open primary into almost every candidate having enough to get a message out there.”
Briere turned her attention from fundraising to voter engagement early in the campaign. “Public matching made it possible to say, ‘I’m gonna leave fundraising at the first third or half of the campaign process.’ In the beginning, it’s all about financing. It’s all about getting the money in so that the end of the campaign trail can be about the voters.”
In the primary race, the matching funds program provided the six candidates in the 109th district over half a million dollars total in additional campaign cash.
The campaign finance law permits candidates to use the matching funds on staff and messaging, from TV to mailers. Practically, that meant that every polling place was filled with a deluge of signs in support of each 109th district candidate by the June 25th election day.
While the matching funds system has effectively shifted fundraising hours toward direct voter engagement, some legislators in Albany have advocated for reforms to the campaign finance law. In fact, just last year, Democrats in the New York State Legislature advanced a bill that would have completely overhauled the program before Governor Kathy Hochul (D-NY) vetoed it.
This year, James Skoufis, a Democratic state senator for parts of the Hudson Valley in New York, attempted to resurrect the effort. His bill would have increased the number of donors and cash necessary to fulfill the matching funds’ eligibility requirements. Skoufis’ bill sought to prevent candidates with near-zero chances of winning from soaking up taxpayer money.
The Brennan Center for Justice and the New York Working Families Party criticized Skoufis’ effort, not for its substance, but for its timing. They argued it was irresponsible—even bizarre—to reform the law when the 2024 election cycle, the first in the public matching funds history, had not yet concluded.
“Now is not the time,” their memo of opposition reads.
While Reidy agreed the system could be fine-tuned in the interest of fiscal responsibility, he also agreed that the timing could have been improved. “I certainly share their concerns about looking to reform this before we even had the first shot at it. I think a lot of time was put into making this system happen. There’s a balance. I [still] think this gives a much better chance for candidates to challenge incumbents.”
Finance manager Briere thinks that the reform efforts underscore the complicated nature of the system in its inaugural election year.
“I think people like me that have [navigated the system] once who would be interested in doing it again, we’ll learn from the experience. People will specialize in this. And just like any type of contract law, it’ll grow, and it’ll change, and they’ll tweak it here and there,” Briere concluded.
Most stakeholders acknowledge that the policy is far from perfect, but not all believe that the New York State Legislature should modify the law again. Reidy thinks there is more work to be done on the federal side.
“I think the best part about public financing is elevating the impact of in-district donors, and it deflates the financial power of giant, wealthy contributors. I think the biggest campaign finance work we need to do, unfortunately, is at the federal level […] rebalancing the Supreme Court by adding more members and getting rid of Citizens United.”
Citizens United is a landmark 2010 Supreme Court decision that held that corporate funding of independent political broadcasts were protected by the First Amendment, thereby allowing unlimited spending by corporations on political campaigns.
Reidy compared the situation to the primary in New York’s 16th Congressional district, where progressive incumbent Congressman Jamaal Bowman lost in an upset to Westchester County Executive George Latimer.
“We’re going to have 700, maybe 800 to a million dollars spent on [the 109th district race]. You compare that to the Congressional primary in NY-16, where you’re talking about $35 million, and about 31 of that is super PAC money. That’s the real behemoth that needs to be taken on.”
The Bowman-Latimer primary did not take in any matching funds, because the law only applies to statewide, not federal, races. Even if it did, the funds likely would have had little impact, given the unprecedented amount of national recognition and money circulating in the race.
As supporters, journalists, and Dustin Reidy himself anxiously studied the tavern’s television sets awaiting election results over pizza and wings, the race for New York State’s 109th Assembly district was called. Reidy ended up losing in the crowded June primary to Gabriella Romero, a Working Families Party-endorsed public defender based in Albany—the only other candidate in the field to also max out their matching funds.
11,585 votes were cast in the primary. Whether a voter walked into their polling place on June 25th for Romero or for Reidy or for any of the six candidates on the ballot, they witnessed the impact of a campaign finance law that they may never have known existed. The sharp increase in lawn signs or the countless mailers that got to their doorstep were thanks to public campaign finance.
The law intended to counter the Citizens United Supreme Court decision that green-lit the influx of corporate money into the American political atmosphere. For Reidy, in these hyper-local, crowded, energetic races, it has done much more.
“The public matching is making it so every candidate has the ability to get the message out there. It gives everyone a shot.”