After Legitimizing Trump's Election Lies, NY's Congressional Objectors Face Skittish Donors

Hours after violent insurrectionists were finally cleared from the Capitol on January 6th, 147 Republican members of Congress voted to object to the electoral college victory of President-elect Joe Biden, undeterred in their allegiance to President Donald Trump, who had incited the riots.

For the four New York representatives who voted against certifying the election results -- Republicans Nicole Mallotakis, Lee Zeldin, Chris Jacobs, and Elise Stefanik -- their decision may come with financial costs, as some top donors have either backed away from their candidates, halted political donations altogether, or declined to issue any statement of support.

Gothamist/WNYC used data from the Center for Responsive Politics and the Federal Election Commission to identify some of the top institutional and individual contributors to the four New York objectors.

In the immediate aftermath of the insurrection, some corporations announced that they would be suspending their political donations. Raytheon Technologies, UPS, Blue Cross Blue Shield, and Boeing, all gave Stefanik $20,000 or more in the last campaign cycle, and said they have suspended all their political donations.

So has the National Association for Realtors, New York Life Insurance, and the American Bankers Association, who each cut $10,000 checks for Zeldin.

None of the companies explained why they had made the donations to the objectors in the first place, or why they would pull their support going forward.

Some major Republican donors from New York have also said that they are reconsidering their affiliation with the president and his followers in Congress.

Isaac Ash, founder of the New York-based United Legwear, gave $28,000 to help Malliotakis defeat incumbent Max Rose in November, and more than $100,000 to the Trump Victory PAC, according to FEC records, along with several $10,000 donations to the Republican party committees in Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Illinois, Iowa and Kentucky.

Listen to Brigid Bergin discuss the donors with David Furst on WNYC:

Asked about his donations, Ash replied, “My only comment is that I am now politically neutral.” Ash stated that he is suspending his political donations for an “undecided” period of time.

“I'm obviously like everyone else, disturbed and perturbed about what happened. So I'm really taking a step back. And I know, like I said, I'm politically neutral and I have no allegiance to the GOP anymore or to anybody for that matter,” Ash told Gothamist/WNYC.

Peter Kalikow, the New York real estate mogul and former MTA chairman, gave $189,000 to the National Republican Congressional Committee last cycle, more than $10,000 to Stefanik, and $5,600 to Zeldin and Malliotakis. A prolific Republican donor and longtime friend of Donald Trump, who asked the president for transit aid early in the pandemic, Kalikow did not return messages left with his secretary.

Charlie Joyce is the board chairman of Otis Eastern Service, LLC, an oil, gas, and energy company headquartered in the small town of Wellsville in Allegany County. The company’s employees have donated $1.4 million in the last election cycle almost exclusively to Republican candidates and PACs, led by donations from him and his wife, Sherry Walton.

According to the Center for Responsive Politics, individuals at the company gave to 83 House candidates, including Malliotakis, who received a combined $28,039 from Joyce and individuals associated with his firm. Only Republican Senator Pat Toomey received more money from Joyce and Otis Eastern.

Joyce is one of only two New Yorkers who are part of the Republican National Committee. He also gave a record-breaking $350,000 to Catholic Charities in 2019, telling The Buffalo News: “My father was the one who taught me to share from my blessings, to help people in need.”

Four years ago, he also told the paper that he was a Trump supporter only “because he is our candidate.” Still, FEC records show he has donated $844,000 to the Trump Victory PAC since 2019, including a donation of $100,000 in October of this year.

When reached by phone on Tuesday, Joyce said he was saddened by the events of last week, that he thought about them all the time, and would be thinking about how he donated in the future. He declined further comment.

Malliotakis and Zeldin may have taken the biggest political risks of the four by objecting. Both represent swing districts, and New York is poised to lose at least one congressional district following the 2020 census, with a Democratic supermajority in Albany overseeing the redistricting plans.

“I think Malliotakis is taking a risk of having her district dismembered,” said Gerald Benjamin, a political science professor at SUNY New Paltz. Her district covers all of Staten Island and a portion of South Brooklyn.

Malliotakis and her office did not respond to requests for comment. Her campaign and PAC pulled in a total of $3,469,995 last cycle.

“Zeldin is in a competitive district. They have a Democrat as county executive, who is well-established, and the Democratic Party is strong and competitive, state legislative seats have been falling to Democrats to some degree in the [state] Senate,” Benjamin added.

The Pro-Israel America PAC and the Republican Jewish Coalition donated $7,000 and $10,000 to Zeldin last cycle, while their employees donated more than $131,000 and $54,000, respectively. Neither entity responded to our requests for comment. Zeldin and his PAC raised a total of $8,639,872 for the cycle.

Zeldin’s district covers Suffolk County on the east side of Long Island. In 2015, the four-term congressman was criticized for meeting with the Oath Keepers, a right-wing militia group whose members participated in the Capitol riot.

On Wednesday afternoon, in a speech before he voted against impeaching the president, Zeldin said he was “sickened and angered” by last week’s violence, but denounced “the double standards that exist inside of this chamber,” and heaped praise on Trump.

“Thank you to the president for his efforts to defeat MS-13 in my district,” Zeldin said.

Zeldin’s office did not respond to requests for comment.

Chris Jacobs was elected in October 2019 to represent the suburbs of Buffalo and Rochester as well as some more rural portions of western New York. He replaced Chris Collins, President Trump’s first supporter in Congress, who was forced to resign for insider trading.

Jacobs can rely on support from his deep-pocketed family, which is interwoven with another western New York political family, the Paladinos. His uncle, Jeremy Jacobs, is the billionaire chairman of the massive Delaware North Companies, a food and beverage company that operates a sprawling array of concessions, dining, lodging and gaming facilities, owns the TD Garden in Boston and the Boston Bruins hockey team, and runs catering operations in large facilities across New York.

Between individual donors and company PACs, Congressman Jacobs received $96,110 last cycle from entities affiliated with the company. A spokesman for Delaware North did not respond to a request for comment. Jacobs and his PAC raised a total of $2,081,716 in the most recent election cycle.

Jacobs spoke to WBEN radio on Sunday, and refused to rule out potential fraud in the election, saying, "I have not said in this discussion at all, definitively, there is fraud because I don't have the information for that. But the issue was it caused a lot of questions." In fact, several courts have found that no evidence exists that there was any significant voting fraud in the election.

A spokesman for Jacobs replied to a request for comment by sending links to the Congressman’s previous statements on his vote and the attack on the Capitol.

Elise Stefanik, whose district covers Saratoga, the Adirondacks and the North Country, has in some ways been the most defiant of New York’s objectors. The four-term member of Congress has won her elections handily and has not faced any serious challengers from either party. Stefanik’s national stature has risen with the creation of her PAC that supports Republican women seeking office, and with her unbreakable fidelity to Trump. Stefanik and her PAC raised $13,875,663 last cycle (Another high profile Representative from New York, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, garnered more than $19 million.)

Earlier this week, Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government announced that they had removed Stefanik from their senior advisory committee, after the congresswoman continued to make “incorrect” statements about the 2020 election “that have no basis in evidence.”

Stefanik, a Harvard alum, released a statement saying it was a “badge of honor” to be “cancelled” by her alma mater.

The congresswoman has repeatedly declined to assign any blame to the president for last week’s riot, and voted against impeachment on Wednesday, calling it “a partisan ploy with no basis in the Constitution.”

Stefanik’s representative did not respond to our questions.

One of Stefanik’s biggest supporters in her district is Gary Dake, the president of the popular gas station/ice cream chain Stewart’s Shops. Dake’s third-generation family business employs 5,000 people, and Dake has boasted that his profit-sharing model has made 90 of his workers millionaires over the years.

Dake gave Stefanik and her PAC $17,800 over the last campaign cycle. A spokesperson for the company said Dake declined to comment for this story.

Stefanik, who sits on the Armed Services committee, also received $20,000 from the defense contractor L3Harris Technologies. The Florida-based company did not respond to requests for comment.

“Members of Congress are dug in, they don’t know how to get out. Even if they wanted to get out, they don’t know how to do it because they view their voters as dug in as well,” explained Scott Minkoff, an associate professor at SUNY New Paltz who has written a book on the local politics of polarization. “This is the wreckage of Trump.”

Minkoff said the objectors had probably made peace with the fact that their votes would cost them large donations in the short-term.

“I think corporate donations matter a lot less than they have in recent years because of how much free media is out there, how exposure works so fundamentally differently,” Minkoff said. “On the political side, I doubt they’re too concerned about it.”

Minkoff said he believed that the votes would have a detrimental impact on the system as a whole. “Democracy is literally based on public confidence. If people are operating in just completely different political realms, that’s not good for the stability of the system.”

Tom Doherty, a Republican strategist, had an even more blunt assessment of the objectors’ actions.

“For a Republican in New York, you may be protected by the walls of your district, but I think once you go outside that area, that is going to have really, really, long term effects,” Doherty said.

“This will be a vote they will live with forever. They will be stained with this vote forever.”