If you're looking for major differences on policy issues between the three Democratic candidates vying to replace Congresswoman Nydia Velázquez in New York's 7th District, you might have to squint.
Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso, City Councilmember Julie Won, and State Assemblymember Claire Valdez are all running to tax the rich to fund social welfare programs; they want to freeze the rent and to abolish ICE; Reynoso and Valdez, at least, have been highly critical of Israel's siege of Gaza; and all three have spoken out against the Trump administration's foreign policy.
To give voters in the "Commie Corridor" a little more information to work with, Hell Gate has plumbed the most-recent Federal Election Commission fundraising data from December 2025 through March 31, 2026, to see what these three campaigns are made of, donor-wise.
But before we get into that, some notes on these numbers: All candidates are required to file reports on donors who gave them $200 or more, including their names, addresses, occupations, and employers; these are known as "itemized individual contributions," that we'll call "high-dollar donations." Donations under that threshold also have to be reported to the FEC, but without all the paperwork—those are "unitemized individual contributions" that we'll call "small-dollar donations."
The maximum any individual can give to a congressional race is $3,500 for a primary election, and $3,500 for the general. You're allowed to write a $7,000 check during the primary, but if the candidate loses the primary, they have to return the $3,500.
Also: This rundown is coming from "raw" data files—they contained duplicates, missing forms, and weird glitches when they were submitted to the FEC, but we've done our best (yes, with the help of Claude) to clean them up.
ANTONIO REYNOSO
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The Beep has raked in a total of $630,000, with 7.7 percent of that being small-dollar donations ($48,650) and the rest being high-dollar contributions ($565,966) plus another $15,000 from PACs. The average high-dollar contribution is $970, and there are five people who gave the max ($7,000). Of the high-dollar donations, $97,210 came from people who live outside of New York, which is less than Valdez's out-of-state tally but a little more than Won's.
Who are the top contributors, and why are two of them lawyers from Atlantic City?
Some of Reynoso's rainmakers are who you might expect—including Reynoso's former colleague, City Council Speaker-turned-lobbyist Corey Johnson ($5,000); Luis Miranda Jr. ($6,000), the ex-lobbyist (and father to Lin-Manuel Miranda); and Edward Suh ($3,500), the president of the parent company that owns the Food Bazaar supermarket chain.
But then there are Joe Jacobs ($7,000) and Melissa Rosenblum ($7,000), who are both Atlantic City lawyers.