This week’s biggest Winners & Losers

His party may be red, but Republican gubernatorial candidate Bruce Blakeman may soon have a bunch more green thanks to a state court ruling. The state Public Campaign Finance Board had previously denied Blakeman potentially millions in matching funds in a vote along partisan lines. But he quickly went to court over the decision, and a judge agreed the state board erred in denying the funds – though the board is appealing.

It’s Zoh-ver, validators for New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and members of his own administration are claiming: Mamdani is a financial wizard who has closed a budget deficit the likes of which the city has never seen. Socialists CAN govern! If the praise is overblown at this stage, predicated on the administration’s own budget narrative and some still precarious proposals, it’s not entirely unearned. The City Council is relatively happy and budget watchdogs are crediting Mamdani with more realistic budgeting than his predecessor.

With the help of failed mayoral candidate Jim Walden, Republican Council Member Vickie Paladino walked away from her clash with the City Council’s Standards and Ethics committee largely unscathed. She stopped it from disciplining her over her Islamophobic tweets, and the resulting settlement let her off fairly easily. All she had to do was delete a few tweets, put out a public statement – not an apology – and take “council member” out of her social media display name.

Does Jack Schlossberg even want to be in Congress? The New York Times reported this week that the Kennedy scion/influencer blows off meetings and flakes on events to nap or swim in the Hudson River, and his campaign in disarray. The good news for Schlossberg is he’s still leading in most (but not all) polls; the bad news is if he wins the race, he might have to do some actual work.

Ex-Brooklyn Supreme Court judge Edward Harold King, who  recently resigned from the judiciary, was arrested and charged this week with stealing more than $4.3 million from investors. He’s accused of acting as a lawyer who offered fake investment opportunities in New Jersey real estate and swiping money from an escrow account he and a realtor set up on a real estate deal in the Garden State. He agreed to resign from office last December as federal authorities intensified their probe. 

NYU Langone Health CEO Alec Kimmelman is stuck in the middle of Trump and New York Democrats, much like university presidents before him. NYU Langone ended its gender-affirming care program in February, under financial threats from the Trump administration, only to be ordered to resume this care by the state attorney general’s office. Now, the U.S. Department of Justice has launched a criminal probe, the first of its kind seeking private medical data about transgender children.