Blakeman’s Campaign Finance Disclosures Riddled With Holes

This story originally appeared in New York Focus, a nonprofit news publication investigating power in New York. Sign up for their newsletter here.

By Nick Garber, New York Focus.

Bruce Blakeman, the Republican candidate for governor, has failed to disclose more than $1 million that his campaign has spent and more than $500,000 worth of donations it has received, according to an analysis of his campaign’s bank statements.

The Blakeman campaign’s bank records, which were obtained by New York Focus, show dozens of payments the campaign made or received from last December through September 2026 that never appeared in public disclosures filed with the Board of Elections.

That includes at least two dozen undisclosed expenditures totaling more than $1.3 million, and 13 contributions or transfers to the campaign totaling $518,500. Among the unreported donations are two large transfers from the Republican Party in Blakeman’s home county, Nassau, as well as donations from a politically connected lawyer and a wealthy investor.

The cause of the discrepancies is unclear. Blakeman’s campaign finance reports have been rife with errors, which his aides have blamed on the state’s online filing system. The repeated bookkeeping issues raise questions about the functioning of a campaign that is also receiving millions of taxpayer dollars through the state’s new matching funds program.

New York Focus reported in September that Blakeman improperly requested public matching funds from more than 2,600 donors who don’t qualify for the state program. Following the report, the New York State Democratic Party filed a complaint with the state’s elections watchdog requesting an investigation.

Blakeman never disclosed two transfers totaling $436,000 that his campaign received from the Nassau County Republican Committee in April and September, according to the bank statements. Blakeman’s public disclosures do show more than $6 million in other transfers he has gotten from the Nassau GOP through a fundraising maneuver that has allowed both him and his rival, Governor Kathy Hochul, to take advantage of their parties’ looser donation limits.

Blakeman also failed to disclose an $18,000 donation in July from Lori and Howard Fensterman, a politically connected Long Island couple. Howard, who co-founded the law firm Abrams Fensterman, is serving as Blakeman’s campaign finance chair; the Nassau County government that Blakeman oversees awarded the firm a $730,000 contract this year.

Fensterman’s son, law partners, and the firm itself have donated heavily to Blakeman this year, but Fensterman’s own donation had escaped public notice because of the omission.

Blakeman also omitted another six donations, including a $350 donation from the tech investor Lee Fixel, and significantly understated four others. For example, a $9,000 wire from the billionaire investor Gregg Hymowitz shows up under the same May 6 date on the campaign filing, but is listed as just $50.

On the other side of the ledger, Blakeman’s biggest undisclosed expense was a $1,150,000 wire transfer on September 25 to McLaughlin & Associates, a GOP-aligned polling firm. The expense appears nowhere in his recent Board of Elections filings, although his campaign has disclosed $11.4 million in other payments to the company.

Other payments that appear in the bank records but not in Blakeman’s public filings include a $59,867 payment last month to Ask Ilysa LLC, an event planner; a $15,512 check to a Virginia-based firm called Mercury Acquisition; $487 spent in August at Villa Roma Resort in the Catskills; and more than a dozen other checks paid out to recipients who are not named in the bank statement.

A Blakeman campaign spokesperson did not respond to questions about the specific discrepancies or what might have caused them. The spokesperson, Madison Spanodemos, said in a statement: “It’s no surprise Kathy Hochul would rather talk about New York’s outdated campaign finance system instead of explaining why she hiked taxes by $8 billion, raised utility rates 48 times, and put criminals first.”

Spanodemos did not provide a basis for those claims. Hochul has lowered taxes on middle-income earners during her tenure, and extended a previous tax increase on individuals earning over $1 million.

Blakeman’s campaign bank records are not public but can be requested from the Board of Elections through the Freedom of Information Law. As Politico first reported, the campaign’s bank account balance at the end of September was far higher than the amount it publicly reported having on hand.

Blair Horner, senior policy adviser for the New York Public Interest Research Group, argued that Blakeman should be capable of filing more accurate reports, given his decades-long career in New York politics.

“Yes, the BOE needs to be better, yes, New York’s disclosure laws need to be better, and yes, the enforcement needs to be better,” Horner said, “but he knows how the rules work, so he should be reporting his stuff accurately.”

Blakeman’s campaign will be audited after the election, along with all other statewide campaigns participating in the matching funds program.