By Sam Ozer-Staton

Andrew Cuomo has been called “The Master of the $50,000 fundraiser.” The Governor of New York, who has said that he will step down on Monday, has long had a reputation for fundraising prowess. In recent years, as other high-profile Democrats built online fundraising operations that relied on small-dollar donors, Cuomo kept it old school: heading into his last re-election campaign in 2018, he raised over 99% of his campaign funds from donations larger than $1,000.

That year, Cuomo built a war chest totaling over $25 million. At the time, the New York Times said of his haul: “[T]his monument to his prodigious fund-raising strength also reveals one of his greatest vulnerabilities, especially if he harbors presidential ambitions. He has virtually no small donors.”

Cuomo rode that same strategy of high-dollar fundraisers — including a $1 million event held just last month — to a $18 million war chest for his planned 2022 re-election campaign. Now that Cuomo has resigned, a chorus of New Yorkers (including some of those very same big-dollar donors) are asking: What happens with all that cash?