Articles for Geoff Kelly

Jul 19

2021

Brown campaign still violating election law

After a delay his campaign attributed to “technical difficulties,” Mayor Byron Brown’s July campaign finance disclosure was posted to the New York State Board of Elections website on Saturday. Here’s what the filing revealed: After a flood of donations received the week before the June 22 primary, the mayor’s fundraising has been anemic compared to that of India Walton, who beat him to win the Democratic Party line in the November general election. As previously reported, Brown’s campaign continues to rely on donations from City Hall employees, patronage hires, city vendors, big real estate developers and a variety of well-to-do[...]

Posted 3 years ago

Jul 16

2021

Surge in donations for Walton after win

Considering the odds against her, India Walton’s fundraising was pretty good prior to last month’s Democratic primary. It’s gotten a lot better since. Walton’s campaign raised nearly $178,000 in the three weeks after she beat incumbent Byron Brown in the Democratic primary for mayor of Buffalo, according to her campaign’s July 15 filing with the New York State Board of Elections. That’s more than she raised in the six months leading up to the June 22 election. And the total amount she raised in the current reporting period — just shy of $199,000 over the past 33 days — surpasses[...]

Posted 3 years ago

Jun 30

2021

What the primary vote tells us

The math of Byron Brown’s loss in the June 22 Democratic primary is simple. The mayor’s traditional base of voters on the East Side stayed home, while voters on the other side of Main Street — from the Lower West Side and Allentown to the Elmwood Village — turned out in comparatively high numbers and overwhelmingly chose India Walton. The result: Walton beat the four-term incumbent by 7 percent. Ken Kruly is a political analyst for WGRZ-TV, publisher of Politics and Other Stuff and author of Money In Politics for Investigative Post. In an analysis for Investigative Post, Kruly compared Brown’s[...]

Posted 3 years ago

Jun 29

2021

Geoff Kelly writes for The Nation

On the evening of last Tuesday’s primary election, I was reporting from Poize, a bar in Riverside where the India Walton campaign was holding a watch party. I’d just called my boss, Jim Heaney, to tell him it looked like Walton would win. A roar came from the crowd inside as another wave of ballots was reported. I checked my phone: Walton had surpassed 10,000 votes. An email popped up from the editor of The Nation: “Hey Geoff. If India Walton pulls off an upset, can you get us 1000 words by Thursday explaining how she did it—and what it[...]

Posted 3 years ago

Jun 25

2021

Rallying to save their patronage jobs

Wondering whether Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown is giving serious consideration to mounting a write-in campaign to keep his job in November? The answer might have been in plain sight Thursday night at Sahlen Field, where Brown threw out the first pitch before the Toronto Blue Jays went on to drop the Baltimore Orioles, 9-0. Outside the park, a crowd of Byron Brown supporters gathered in front of the main entrance to make a pitch of their own. They wore T-shirts bearing Brown’s name and carried signs reading “Keep Byron Brown.” This was no extemporaneous, grassroots expression of support for the[...]

Posted 3 years ago

Jun 23

2021

Walton’s campaign outworked Brown

The night before the Buffalo mayoral primary, India Walton’s campaign made nearly 19,000 calls to Democratic voters in the city, reminding them to vote and making the case for Walton over four-term incumbent Byron Brown. The campaign sent almost 100,000 text messages, too, while more than 150 Walton supporters stationed themselves at polling sites across the city on election day. The campaign fielded enough people, a campaign spokesperson said, to make a last-minute pitch to half the people who showed up to vote Tuesday as they walked in, and to take their temperature on the race as they left their[...]

Posted 3 years ago

Jun 20

2021

Wealthy last-minute donors to Brown campaign

Updated: 1:42 p.m. Maybe the race for mayor of Buffalo is tighter than most believed it would be. Or perhaps the last-minute flurry of campaign activity by Mayor Byron Brown — who has been running a stealth campaign for the past five months — was forthcoming regardless of whatever internal polls told the four-term incumbent. Whichever the case, the Brown campaign has come alive in the last week. And big donors have poured money into the re-election effort, helping to underwrite a blitz of TV advertising and get-out-the-vote efforts as the countdown to election day approaches zero. Tuesday’s Democratic primary[...]

Posted 3 years ago

Jun 15

2021

Judged unfit for re-election

The Bar Association of Erie County rated Diane Wray a poor choice for a Buffalo City Court judgeship when she first ran in 2011. Its members rated her “not recommended,” the lowest score they can give. She won anyway. A decade later, local attorneys haven’t changed their opinion. Two weeks ago, the Bar Association’s members rated Wray “not recommended” for reelection. It’s the only time in the past 10 years the Bar has advised voters not to return an incumbent judge to the bench. The Bar Association does not comment on its judicial ratings, which are made by a bipartisan[...]

Posted 3 years ago

Articles for Geoff Kelly

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