After Labor Day’s unofficial kickoff of the campaigns, September now sees the action fully commence as door-knockings, fundraisers, and campaign appearances will consume local and social media from now until Election Day.
The Messenger intends to keep up with the candidates on the campaign trail as best as we can. We have also introduced a forecast for this year’s elections for Suffolk County Legislature, Town Supervisors, and Town Council races where applicable. As of our current forecast, the GOP is poised to pick up two Legislative seats and Brookhaven Town Supervisor Ed Romaine (R-Center Moriches) appears to be in the driver’s seat in the County Executive race.
The race for the open County Executive seat continues to head the top of the ticket this year. The result of this race could have down ballot effects on all other races across the county. Both major candidates, Supervisor Romaine and Dave Calone (D-Setauket) have recently aired their first campaign advertisements on television and social media.
While Ed Romaine is well-known across Suffolk County from his two stints representing the North Fork in the Legislature, to serving as County Clerk, and most recently as Brookhaven Town Supervisor since 2012, his opponent, Dave Calone, is less known within the lines of Suffolk.
The Messenger examined his donations and expenditures.
The July campaign finance reports show Calone with $2.3 million cash on hand and Romaine with $1.5 million.
What’s more is that a large amount of his contributions is from himself, clocking in as of July at $800,000. His largest contribution after those to himself is from Glen E. Tullman, CEO of the San Francisco-based consumer-direct healthcare platform Transcarent. Tullman, of Chicago, chipped in $50,000 to Calone’s campaign.
Furthermore, the website Crunchbase, a company that provides funding and investment information for private and public companies, shows Dave Calone as the President and CEO of Jove Equity Partners, LLC, a private equity and venture capital firm which invests in companies operating the healthcare, real estate, digital media, software, transportation, energy, and Internet sectors.
Crunchbase and the Transcarent website list Calone as a board member of Tullman’s Transcarent; Calone has been a board member since October 2020.
Crunchbase also provides a summary of a Series C round of fundraising for Transcarent in which Calone’s Jove Equity Partners is listed as an investor. The amount given to Transcarent by Jove is unlisted. Series C fundraising is a type of venture capital investment that seeks to raise large amounts of money to fund growth and expansion. The point is to acquire funds to grow the company as quickly and successfully as possible.
This is not to insinuate a conflict of interest, but rather a road map as to what connections Calone’s largest individual contributor – besides himself – has to the county executive candidate. This is also not to diminish the missions of the companies, namely Transcarent, in which he is currently involved.
While it’s estimated that about 30% of Calone’s donations come from outside Suffolk, nearly 20% of his contributions come from a common location: Colorado.
According to the chart obtained from the New York Open Government website, of the 1,269 lines in Calone’s contributions sheet, fifty-three show Colorado addresses. Each of the 1,269 lines represents a unique donation, but not necessarily a unique donor.
This seems like a paltry amount, except those fifty-three Colorado donations account for $149,399 of Calone’s $868,925 in contributions. The lion’s share of the Colorado addresses is based in Boulder and Denver.
So, even though the Colorado addresses account for just 4% of Calone’s total unique donations, those same addresses account for 17% of his total contributions, again, omitting the $800,000 Calone loaned himself.
The top donations are two $25,000 contributions from Larry Mizel, with one occurring on July 5 and the other on July 9. Mizel is the founder and executive chairman of MDC Holdings, a Denver-based home construction company. The company ranked 12 out of the annual Builder 100 list published by Builder Magazine in 2021. Builder is one of the United Kingdom’s oldest business-to-business magazines.
MDC and its subsidiaries have operations in fourteen states; New York is not one of them.
Mizel helped fund incoming Governor Jared Polis’ (D) 2019 inauguration committee.
Additionally, the Colorado governor is also involved in Calone’s county executive campaign.
Jared Polis donated $20,000 to Calone’s campaign on December 12 of last year.
Calone and Polis began their political tendencies while serving on the student body at Princeton and have been friends ever since.
Newsday reported on July 10 that the Colorado governor was set to headline a Manhattan fundraiser on July 11 for his former classmate. The Calone campaign was hoping to raise as much as $100,00 dollars at the event to which the press was not invited.
According to his contribution reports, July 11 resulted in a $367,082 gain for the Calone campaign, $250,000 of which was financed by a loan to the campaign from Calone himself. Another $10,000 came from Richard Sapkin, Founder and Managing Principal at Edgemark, a Denver-based affordable housing firm. The firm lists geographic focus across twenty-four states, from which New York is excluded.
Another $10,000 came from Jonathan Crystal, an insurance and technology investor at Crystal Venture Partners, a New York City-based insurance brokerage firm that has been listed as top-twenty-five nationally. Crystal’s LinkedIn also shows him as an alumnus of Princeton University.
Calone also received $10,000 from none other than Randy Altschuler, a two-time Congressional candidate who carried the Republican and Conservative lines 2010 and 2012 against then-Congressman Tim Bishop (D). Bishop defeated Altschuler narrowly both times. Altschuler is the founder and CEO of Xometry, Inc., a Maryland-based industrial parts marketplace. Altschuler now lives in Potomac, Maryland.
Altschuler is also an alumnus of Princeton.
Calone’s numbers from July 11 show donations from Greenwich, Connecticut; Miami, Florida; Cambridge, Massachusetts; Greeg, South Carolina; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; and Washington, D.C., along with several New York City addresses. This isn’t to say all of this money was necessarily obtained from his Governor-induced fundraiser in Manhattan; these are just reports from that day.
Additionally, Jared Polis isn’t the only gubernatorial figure to donate to Calone’s campaign. Disgraced former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer is also on record as having pitched $10,000 to Calone’s county executive run. Spitzer, elected in 2006, resigned in 2008 after he was found to have patronized a prostitution ring. He was married at the time and is father to three children.
These are some of the donations at the top of Calone’s contributions list. But there is the other side of the campaign finance coin: expenditures.
Unlike his opponent Romaine, whose expenditures are documented as having been put towards fundraising and paying staff, Calone’s numbers have gone primarily to consultation, all of which appears to be outside Suffolk County.
According to the July report, $48,500 has been paid to Global Strategy Group (GSG), a New York City-based public relations firm. According to their website, GSG has worked as “top Democratic pollsters” who worked for “dozens of winning campaigns and political organizations.” They claim their work was “pivotal” in securing Democratic majorities in the U.S. House and Senate in 2020.
The Threshold Group website lists Tucker Green as its founder and president. His first job was for the presidential campaign of Vermont Governor Howard Dean (D) in 2003. He has served as the team’s leader since its founding in 2011, “working for candidates and organizations across the tri-state area and country.” Green lives in Westport, Connecticut.
$129,943 has been paid to Gusto, a San Francisco-based payroll and human resources firm, whose website claims it to be the “#1 rated HR platform for payroll, benefits, and more.”
A total of $42,262 has been paid to Shane Wolfe, Calone’s campaign manager. The address associated with the payments is listed as Old Greenwich, Connecticut.
Finally, Calone has also been endorsed by DemocratsServe, a hybrid Political Action Committee (PAC) whose activities, according to their website, include: “Recruiting and training candidates to run for federal, state, county, and municipal level office; delivering logistical and strategic support to put candidates in a better position to win; providing access to fundraising tools and networks to bolster financial support for the campaign; making direct contributions to candidates; supporting candidates through independent expenditure efforts.”
Calone has continued on the campaign trail, most recently appearing in Patchogue with former Legislator and Presiding Officer Rob Calarco (D), who was famously defeated in an upset in 2021 by Dominick Thorne (R-Patchogue).
