A year ago, Zohran Mamdani barely registered on the political radar screen. Now he’s on the verge of running America’s largest city. His exultant radical supporters are viewing him as nothing less than a catalyst for a nationwide socialist revolution. And given his heavy support from Leftist donor organizations, especially those financed by George Soros, that’s something to worry about. A New York State Assemblyman, 36th District (Queens), Mamdani on July 1 defeated his nearest challenger, former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, for the Democratic Party nomination for New York City mayor by 56 percent to 44 percent in an instant runoff vote after winning round one by a plurality on June 24.
Evidence indicates that Soros’s Open Society Foundations and a related political action committee, Democracy PAC, each chaired by his favored son Alex, helped bankroll Mamdani’s campaign through a sophisticated and legally shady pass-through donation scheme totaling over $10 million. This stands in contrast to repeated assertions by the Left that Mamdani’s victory was a “grassroots” revolt against entrenched elites. According to a series of articles published in the corruption investigation website whitecollarfraud.com, the campaign received over $1.7 million in direct private donations (almost all of it bundled by one source), a whopping $7 million in state matching funds, and nearly $1.5 million in political action committee donations, more than a third of which were sponsored by a pair of PACs spun off by the radical-leaning Working Families Party (WFP), no stranger to Soros philanthropy.
Only 33, Mamdani has come a long way in a short time. Born in Uganda to a Columbia University anthropologist-political scientist (Mahmood Mamdani) and an independent filmmaker (Mira Nair), he grew up from age seven in New York City, graduating from the Bronx High School of Science and then Bowdoin College in Maine. He won his seat in the New York State Assembly in 2020, and retained it without opposition in 2022 and 2024. He appears possessed of a sensibility recalling Barack Obama – a race and gender “rainbow” democratic socialism that plays well in urban neighborhoods, especially those with lots of young adults. But on economics he’s even further to the Left than Obama. Liberty, as opposed to “social equality,” isn’t simply minor a priority; it’s no priority at all. It hasn’t hurt Mamdani’s career that he’s also a Muslim in a city with a large and growing Muslim population.
Mamdani’s proposed policy initiatives almost make one wonder why we fought the Cold War. He’s called for government-run supermarkets, defunding police, “free” bus service, higher property taxes on whites than blacks, a $30 an hour minimum wage, a four-year rent freeze on rent-stabilized apartments, and most dangerously, a commitment to “globalize the intifada,” a dog whistle for Palestinian terrorism. If fully realized, such measures would make the city’s fiscal, transportation, housing and public safety travails under former Mayor Bill De Blasio and current Mayor Eric Adams look tame. Yet the Democratic nominee insists such measures will make the city more “affordable.” In lieu of a strong independent candidate, he’s likely to win the November general election; registered Democrats outnumber registered Republicans in New York City by six to one.
Political leanings of the city’s electorate aside, the peculiarities of city’s “ranked-choice voting” (RCV) system are essential to understanding Mamdani’s sudden rise. Currently, two states – Alaska and Maine – employ RCV for federal and/or state elective offices (Utah has a pilot program), and about four dozen cities, including Salt Lake City, Seattle and Washington, D.C., use this system. Ranked-choice laws vary, but they share two key traits. First, they allow voters to cast a ballot for multiple candidates for the same office in a given primary or general election, and in order of preference. Second, they require an instant runoff in the event that the leading vote-getter wins by a plurality but not a majority. The process is repeated until the leading candidate wins by a majority.
A common rationale for such an arrangement is that it gives candidates more opportunities to reach voters through viewpoints that otherwise might not be aired. Being able to vote for more than one candidate, in this view, is in the best tradition of populist democracy. Unfortunately, being able to vote for more than one candidate on the same ballot has a couple of downsides. It gives “stealth” candidates a greater chance of winning even if their views aren’t acceptable to anything resembling a majority of voters. And it can lead to ranked-choice ballots being tossed out either due to voter failure to follow ballot instructions or to candidate attrition. Such problems might explain why 17 states explicitly ban ranked-choice voting.
New York State is a special case. It allows not only ranked-choice voting, but also “fusion voting,” which refers to balloting in which a candidate can be listed under more than one party. In this way, the candidate can capture a larger portion of the electorate and elevate the status of the minor party. The Working Families Party (WFP) is a far-Left version. Founded in 1998 and based in Brooklyn, N.Y., the WFP thrives in ranked-choice, fusion-ballot Democratic Party-majority states. Its main function is driving Democrats ever leftward. In its own words, it is “a progressive grassroots political party building a multiracial, feminist movement of working people to transform America.” Accomplishing this requires electing politicians committed to making the transformation happen.
It’s been happening for some time. It was the Working Families Party’s New York Chapter, for instance, that in 2004 launched the political career of current New York State Attorney General Letitia James, whose radicalism is exceeded only by her contempt for rule of law. She ran on the WFP ticket in campaigning for a seat on the New York City Council, 35th District (Brooklyn), though four years later she ran as a Democrat in a successful reelection bid. Nationally, the WFP endorsed Bernie Sanders for president in 2015, backing Hillary Clinton only after she’d won the Democratic Party nomination in 2016. They also recruited radical Democrats to give responses to the Presidential State of the Union addresses during 2019-25 (Joe Biden, like Donald Trump, was too conservative for their liking).
Where is the Working Families Party getting the money for its organizing and campaigning? Not to be too obvious, but George Soros, along with family and friends, loom large. They’ve been delivering for a long time, too, accompanied by a habitual blind spot for New York State election laws. Back in 2009, the late Henry Stern, who served two terms on the New York City Council and then two terms as parks and recreation commissioner for each of Mayors Ed Koch and Rudy Giuliani, explained in an article:
“Some of the [Working Families Party] Fund’s financial supporters were the same as those for the Working Families Organization, including the biggest single named donation from 2006 (visible on a ‘Donations by Deposit’ form filed with the state attorney general’s office): $200,000 from the Open Society Institute of billionaire philanthropist George Soros, who also wrote a $150,000 personal check to the Working Families Organization that year. Those donations are far larger than the $94,200 limit that the Working Families Party is bound to hold under state law.”
Apropos of the latter point, why wasn’t there an investigation?
The Soros family still supports the Working Families Party. But they’re thinking bigger these days. According to a report last fall published in the Washington Examiner, the WFP raised $16 million in contributions between January 2023 and August 2024. Fully $2 million of this sum came from Democracy PAC, a political action committee founded by George Soros during the 2019-20 election cycle and managed by his son Alex. The WFP spent almost $6 million of that $16 million on independent expenditures, such as TV and web ads to promote Democratic candidates including Kamala Harris, during the 2024 election cycle.
The outcome was a disappointment, but the Working Families Party remains determined to build a winning socialist coalition. Its current marquee candidate is Zohran Mamdani. A victory in the 2025 New York City mayoral race, the WFP surmised, would register high on the political Richter scale. As such, the party plowed a portion of the 2023-24 donation windfall into a pair of political action committees, WFP National PAC Support and WFP National PAC Anti-Cuomo. WFP National PAC Support spent $60,955; WFP National PAC Anti-Cuomo spent $539,616.
All that money paid off handsomely. The Working Families Party assembled a five-candidate slate, putting Zohran Mamdani as the number one choice, followed in order by City Comptroller Brad Lander, City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams, State Senator Zellnor Myrie and State Senator Jessica Ramos. Mamdani defeated Cuomo by seven percentage points in his plurality victory – “a political earthquake,” noted WFP officials. In the July 1 instant runoff, Mamdani picked up far more first-preference votes from other candidates than Cuomo did, clinching his win.
A new and little-known dark money group, New Yorkers for Lower Costs PAC, also got Mamdani over the top. This PAC gathered $847,046 for his campaign, noted the website whitecollarfraud.com. And it spent all that and then some. According to the New York City Campaign Finance Board, the organization spent $1,320,446 on Mamdani and Cuomo, almost all of it promoting Mamdani or opposing Cuomo. Its spokesperson, Howie Stanger, serves as treasurer of AllVote, an ethically-challenged PAC whose mailing address is a UPS store in Los Angeles, and as head of an accounting firm in that city, Pocketbook Strategies. During the 2023-24 election cycle, Pocketbook Strategies was paid tens of thousands of dollars for services from a Washington, D.C.-based PAC which in turn had received generous subsidies from the Kamala Harris-allied Movement Voter Project PAC.
It is entirely conceivable that the Soros family’s Open Society Foundations and/or Democracy PAC are the crucial points of origin in this circuitous maze of financial transfers. That’s the point of “dark money” – to create mazes, to make money trails opaque. We know this much: Until 2020, Stanger was chief operating officer for the Sunrise Movement, a radical nonprofit that National Legal and Policy Center identified this past May as receiving large donations from the Soros-run Democracy PAC and a Soros-supported dark money operation, the Sixteen Thirty Fund. Sunrise, which runs two nonprofits and a PAC, also has received money from the San Francisco-based Tides Foundation, which in turn has received large sums from the Open Society Foundations.
Yet another potential Soros connection concerns the over $1.7 million in direct private donations that triggered $7 million in 4-to-1 state matching subsidies – the matching grant program is a scandal unto itself, albeit legal. Every single dollar from nearly 28,000 individual contributions had been routed to the Mamdani campaign by professional fundraisers. And nearly 95 percent of the bundled money – slightly over $1.6 million – came from a single source, Jerrod MacFarlane, a development associate at a taxpayer-funded nonprofit called the Action Lab, or formally, the Center for Law and Human Values, Inc. Here’s the rub: This operation is swimming in Soros cash. The Open Society Foundations’ Form 990 tax returns show that the OSF donated separate sums of $20,000 and $30,000 to the Center for Law and Human Values, Inc. in 2022, and an eye-popping $1.5 million in 2023.
Tellingly, MacFarlane used some creative bookkeeping to disguise his role. The whitecollarfraud.com website managed to secure screenshots and other documentation of the original campaign disclosures that make denial on MacFarlane’s part impossible. Here’s some damning evidence:
There’s a moment in every investigation when the subject realizes they’re caught. For Zohran Mamdani’s campaign, that moment came on Wednesday, July 2nd, when former Lt. Governor Betsy McCaughey contacted the Campaign Finance Board for her New York Post op-ed following our investigative reporting, asking pointed questions about a single name: Jerrod MacFarlane.
Within hours, something extraordinary happened. Campaign finance records that had shown MacFarlane bundling $1,603,331.85 – 94 percent of all campaign contributions – were quietly altered not once, but twice, without any public announcement or acknowledgment that the original records had been wrong.
First, MacFarlane’s attribution vanished completely. Then, as if someone realized that looked too suspicious, he reappeared credited with just $5,807.
The $1,597,524.85 difference? Suddenly reclassified as donations with “no intermediary.”
We don’t if we’re witnessing a real-time coverup or the correction of systematic false reporting that had been on the books for an unknown period. Either scenario represents serious violations of campaign finance law. And both raise fundamental questions about the integrity of New York’s election system. Either way, his [Mamdani’s] inability to maintain accurate financial records raises serious questions about his honesty and competency if elected mayor – especially considering the campaign spent $82,000 on compliance costs that apparently failed to catch this massive error until our investigation exposed it.
While the Action Lab itself does not appear to have been involved in the donation bundling, the organization has received hefty public subsidies in recent years. The whitecollarfraud.com site observes:
Crucially, the Action Lab also receives direct government funding: a $6.2 million grant from New York State in 2023 to acquire a building for its Brooklyn center; $30,000 in “Government grants (contributions)” in 2023; over $400,000 in additional NYS grants from 2024-25 (including a $200,000 contract from the Division of Criminal Justice Services); and $15,000 in pending NYC discretionary grants for 2024.
While there is no evidence that the Action Lab is directly bundling money for Mamdani’s campaign, the sheer volume of funds consolidated through MacFarlane’s individual efforts points to a highly organized, professional endeavor, likely benefiting from the extensive resources, staff time, organizational structure, and strategic guidance available through his professional context and allied works.
The summation makes sense. It strains the imagination to believe that a single person, however experienced, can direct millions of dollars toward TV and web advertising, print literature, payroll and consulting costs, polling, event planning, promotional merchandise, office rent and property insurance in a mayoral primary in a city of 8 million people. Jerrod MacFarlane simply had to have had professional partners. And he did.
The Action Lab was founded back in 1981 as Bailey Farms, an upstate New York conference site for left-of-center nonprofits. In 2016, it was taken over by the Center for Popular Democracy (CPD), a nonprofit formed by top leaders of the by-then defunct (and corrupt) Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN. The CPD renovated the property with state grants. The Center, in fact, had been heavily funded by George Soros. Related, in May 2017 the CPD’s Soros-funded, 501(c)(4) political arm, the Center for Popular Democracy Action Fund, announced that it would be heading a new $80 million anti-Trump network, with 48 partner organizations, many of them also Soros-funded, spread across 32 states. One of the group’s top priorities was rolling back what they saw as the first Trump administration’s “voter suppression” of minorities. That was a top priority of the Open Society Foundations as well. A hacker organization called DC Leaks released documents at the time revealing George Soros’ desire to add 10 million voters by 2018.
The Center for Popular Democracy managed the Action Lab until 2020, when the latter decided to become independent again. It’s not as if the CPD has needed the money. Since then, it’s gotten financial aid from such sources as the Ford Foundation, the Jessie Smith Noyes Foundation, late far-Left pop singer Harry Belafonte, and, as if one might have guessed, George Soros’ Open Society Foundations. In 2023 the OSF provided a $180,000 grant to the Center for Popular Democracy, plus two separate grants of $200,000 and $500,000 to the Center’s political affiliate, the Center for Popular Democracy Action Fund. There can be no doubt that Soros money laid the infrastructure for the Action Lab, which is to say, private fundraising for Zohran’s Mamdani’s recent primary victory.
The Open Society Foundations also enabled Mamdani’s win by subsidizing the 501(c)(4) political arm of another radical group, the Make the Road Action Fund, with a three-year grant of $1,650,000 in 2023. That’s plenty of money for any mayoral campaign. In fact, the Make the Road Action Fund, the political arm of 501(c)(3) nonprofit Make the Road New York (which has received a prodigious $27 million in taxpayer funds since 2010), worked in tandem with the Working Families’ national political action committee to provide the smoking gun revealing criminal activity.
An analysis of campaign finance records by whitecollarfraud.com showed that on June 11, 2025, the Make the Road Action Fund contributed $45,697.14 to WFP National PAC, and on that very same day, WFP National PAC reported an identical $45,697.14 in-kind expenditure back to Make the Road Action for “phone bank” services. To dramatize the improbability this apparent self-dealing being a “coincidence,” the website states: “For this sequence of contribution and exact-amount reimbursement to be legitimate, WFP would need to process the contribution, determine they needed phone services, negotiate a contract, and execute payment – all within hours, for exactly the same amount calculated to the penny. The odds of coincidence? Astronomical.”
Zohran Mamdani may be New York City’s next mayor. But the election is not set in stone. His biggest stumbling block so far is his “intifada” advocacy directed at the U.S., Israel and their allies. The city, after all, is home to 1.3 million Jews. A great many of them, certainly older ones, are likely to vote in large numbers for his opponent(s). Pro-Israel Senator Charles Schumer, though a hardcore liberal, is alarmed. Even far-Left New York Governor Kathy Hochul, facing a tough reelection campaign next year, is disassociating herself from Mamdani’s proposed huge tax hikes on wealthy individuals and corporations. Hopefully, his biggest stumbling block will be his apparent apathy toward self-dealing in his own campaign.
New York City is still great. There are good reasons why it remains a national center for commerce, culture, education and architectural wonder. That said, most of its political culture has become intolerably corrupt, dogmatic, and hostile toward American identity and interests. And it is advancing, not retreating. Philanthropists of the Left, including the Soros family and those close to them, stand ready to subsidize further advances. That’s something that should concern all Americans, not just those living in New York.
Carl Horowitz is an NLPC senior fellow.
