A tabloid scandal bankrolled a Long Island Democrat, mostly with out-of-district money. A Hollywood-linked tycoon backed a Republican who beat him.

Résumé détaillé

Leaked bondage photos sparked a fundraising surge for Democrat Chris Gallant. Fortune's review of FEC filings found most of it came from Manhattan, California and the Hamptons.

Leaked photos were supposed to end Chris Gallant’s campaign. Instead, they bankrolled it. After the New York Post published archived images of the Democrat modeling bondage gear for a San Francisco leather retailer, his fundraising took off.

In the quarter the photos surfaced, Gallant raised more than the incumbent. His October quarterly FEC report shows $929,825 in receipts for July through September. Rep. Nick LaLota reported about $609,000 for the same period.

The money bought a close loss, not a win. LaLota won a third term in New York’s 1st Congressional District last Tuesday, 51.1% to 48.9%, a margin of nearly 7,000 votes with 560 of 561 election districts reporting. Gallant first held out for absentee ballots, then conceded Wednesday. LaLota’s margin shrank from about 11 points in 2024 to about two, in a year Democrats swept to control of Congress.

Nor was the money especially local. A Fortune review of both campaigns’ raw 2026 FEC filings through Oct. 14 found that in-district donors accounted for about 16% of LaLota’s money from named individuals and just over a third of Gallant’s.

The post-leak surge followed the same pattern. In the 32 days after the Post story ran on Sept. 13, Gallant reported $276,055 in itemized contributions. Only $65,997 of it, about 24%, came from individuals inside NY-1, and almost half of that came from 62 donors in the Hamptons. Donors in Manhattan and California gave $73,606 combined, more than every donor inside NY-1 put together.

In NY-1, the people who funded the race and the people who voted in it were often different. Both campaigns were bankrolled mostly by donors outside the district, including major Wall Street, Hollywood and tech names. Even the men on the ballot live beyond its lines: both reside near Amityville, on Long Island’s South Shore, which means neither could vote for himself.

NY-1 runs from Suffolk County’s North Shore villages to the East End, with vineyards and farms on the North Fork and the Hamptons on the…

Each…

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