The Independent View: NYC Mayor de Blasio Hires Sanders Donation Team

Despite not endorsing Bernie Sanders for President, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio certainly has many things in common with the Senator from Vermont, a kinship that has led to several private meetings between the two, including a dinner in Vermont during a family vacation last month.

Now the men have another thing in common: Mr. de Blasio has hired the Senator’s digital fund-raising team, seeking to bring some of its small-donor smarts to his 2017 re-election campaign in New York.

The consultant, Revolution Messaging, sent out an initial fund-raising email on Saturday, adding to the flood of solicitations for political donations that many New Yorkers are getting from the Presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald J. Trump.

Mr. Sanders, an independent who ran for President as a Democrat, became a political phenomenon in part because of his ability to raise millions of dollars on the internet, much of it in small contributions. He was fond of saying that the average contribution to his campaign was $27.

Mr. de Blasio, a Democrat, has collected far more small donations from contributors across the City this year than he did last year, when the donations he received tended to be larger and concentrated in Manhattan.

“We’ve already shown that you can power a campaign through these kinds of grass-roots donations, and we’re trying to double down on that here,” Dan Levitan, a spokesman for the Mayor’s Campaign, said.

The average donation received from individual contributors to the Mayor’s re-election fund during the first six months of this year was $685, compared with $2,228 in the last six months of 2015, according to the City’s Campaign Finance Board.

Mr. Levitan said that more than two-thirds of the contributions received in the first half of 2016 were less than $250.

While the Mayoral Election is still more than a year away, political insiders have increasingly been chattering about whether Mr. de Blasio will face a challenger from within his own party.

As City Hall has become the focus of multiple Federal and State investigations into the Mayor’s fund-raising, his donors and some of his administration’s actions, speculation has grown that other Democrats might be emboldened to mount a challenge.

Several Republicans have also declared their intent to run against the Mayor, but there are no political heavyweights yet.

Bradley Tusk, a political consultant who has been running a high-profile campaign to recruit a viable challenger to the Mayor, so far without success, said the shift to smaller donations was a response to the investigations arising from Mr. de Blasio’s solicitation of donations from unions and wealthy contributors, including developers and others who have business before the city.

“He has a hard time getting big donations because every time he does they’re from someone connected to some city contract or with interests before the city and he gets in trouble,” said Mr. Tusk, a former aide to Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg. He said he did not think that any potential rival would be scared off by Mr. de Blasio’s digital push for money.

Tim Tagaris, a Partner at Revolution Messaging, said that even though a digital fund-raising campaign has the potential to bring in donors from far and wide, the consultancy’s efforts will focus on City residents.

The city’s Campaign Finance law provides matching funds for the first $175 in contributions from individual City residents, at a rate of six to one. That means that a donation of $175 from a voter living in the City would generate an additional $1,050 in funds for the candidate. The money for the matching-funds program comes from the City budget.

Michael Whitney, who also works with Revolution Messaging, said the database of donors and supporters that will be created as part of this effort can be used once the Mayor is re-elected to help produce support for his agenda.

After he was elected in 2013, Mr. de Blasio created a nonprofit group, the Campaign for One New York, that raised millions of dollars from labor unions and other big donors to support his policy initiatives, and then became a focus of investigators.

The digital fund-raising brings up the possibility that the Mayor could be seeking another way to accomplish his goals, while avoiding potential conflicts of interest.