In many ways, last weekend was a typical July jaunt to the Hamptons among the collecting crowd, packed with gallery openings and cocktail parties and dinners, excuses for the tycoons of industry and patrons of the arts to get out of the house. Meghan Markle was in town, and she hit up a party at the East Hampton home of hedge funder John Griffin and his wife, Amy Griffin, the influential investor and member of the board of The Met. Financier Robert Soros, the brand-new chair of the board of MoMA PS1, hosted a party for the institution at the Southampton mansion of Eleanor Heyman Propp—her mother, the longtime MoMA board chair and Palm Beach doyenne Ronnie Heyman, gave remarks. The Watermill Center brought back its performance-art-filled gala for the first time since 2019. Art dealer Adam Cohen had a dinner at his woodsy Sag Harbor home on behalf of his gallery and Broadway, the Tribeca outfit with a summertime popup on Newton Lane in East Hampton. The artist David Salle took a break from finishing his memoirs to have a reporter over for an early afternoon studio visit, and discuss a new series of paintings he’s debuting at Gladstone Gallery in September—they use AI, I can’t say much more, but they’re amazing.
Eventually Salle and I talked politics—it was inevitable. All anyone wanted to talk about on the South Fork of Long Island was the fact that days earlier, Joe Biden dropped his bid for the presidency and Kamala Harris effectively became the Democratic nominee for president…and when the hell is she going to come out to the Hamptons and let its monied liberals fête her to the tune of millions in campaign cash? Or even send the second gentleman, or the running mate, or anyone? The Hamptons are ready for it.
“There is an enormous amount of energy and excitement to elect Vice President Harris in the Hamptons—whether she shows up, or a surrogate, or it’s just us eating overpriced lobster salad under a tent,” said Robert Zimmerman, a longtime Hamptons party organizer and a Democratic National Committee member from Suffolk County.
Zimmerman, who has a house in Southampton, also ran for US Congress in 2022 and lost narrowly to the Republican nominee: George Santos.
“You can always take that photo later—the first priority is getting her elected, and the Hamptons get that,” Zimmerman went on.
Sources have indicated that the vice president is probably not going to personally make it to the Hamptons this summer, for logistical reasons—she started a campaign just over 100 days before an election, an incredibly condensed time frame, and she is very much needed elsewhere. And it’s not like she can’t raise cash without hitting up the masters of the universe on the beach. When asked for comment, a campaign spokesperson referred me to reams of campaign material indicating the sheer windfall of cash that’s come in from small donors—$200 million total, 68% from first-time supporters—without a single shindig yet hosted by the Hamptons plutocrats.
“Ours is a people-powered campaign,” Harris said during a campaign stop in Atlanta Tuesday. “In fact, after I announced my candidacy, we saw the best week of grassroots fundraising in presidential campaign history.”
But that doesn’t mean there isn’t an opportunity to fundraise from longtime donors as well. Each year, come late August, there’s a critical mass of wealthy and politically motivated patrons of the arts who decamp to their beach houses with not all that much to do, eager to get involved in whatever they can to bundle funds for the party.
“Because of the time of year, it’s close to the election, it’s close to the convention, it is where you have a lot of passionate Democrats who are all together in one place, who really, really care,” said seasonal Hamptons resident Lisa Perry, a longtime Democratic Party supporter, fashion designer, and art collector who described herself as “passionate that Donald Trump loses.”
“And I think that that’s the reason why [Hamptons fundraising] has been so successful,” Perry went on. “And I think it’s practical, to be honest. And I think that it really is about passion and getting the highest number of people in this small area.”
Though let’s not count out the competitive nature of those who can afford a manse out east—just the jockeying for proximity to the Democratic machine can prove infectious. Sources indicated that, during election cycles, locals want to brag about getting face time with the person who in a few months could be the next congressional rep, or senator, or president. It becomes way more fun than the usual fancy parties on enormous well-manicured lawns.
“It’s a little boring out there,” said Ken Sunshine, a longtime public relations consultant and Democratic activist who has a place in the Hamptons. “For us, the fundraisers are more of a social scene than the pretentious parties that I try not to go to like I used to.”
And, yes, there are plenty of Republicans in the Hamptons too. Southampton has long been a red-voter enclave, the land of country club conservatives, Ford family and Koch brothers territory—one local paper estimates registered Democrats didn’t outnumber their counterparts until 2017. Mitt Romney had a number of big-ticket appearances in the area during the summer of 2012, including one at Griffin’s place. And the former president is planning to attend a $25,000-a-head fundraiser tomorrow at the Bridgehampton home of Cantor Fitzgerald CEO Howard Lutnick—he’s a Bitcoin guy, and now Trump’s a Bitcoin guy. He claims the event could raise more than $10 million.
“It’s gonna be a great chicken—it’ll be really great chicken for $25,000!” Lutnick told Bloomberg TV on Wednesday. “What an honor to have President Trump come over to the house.”
But it’s more prominently a place where Democrats like the Clintons have relied on donors to replenish the coffers at the homes of longtime supporters. In 2012, then vice president Biden showed up to stump at an event called East End for Obama at former BlackRock general counsel Matthew Mallow’s big pad on Ocean Road in Bridgehampton. (A few months later, Mallow sold the 7.4-acre estate, reportedly listed for $32.5 million, to former Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, making it the biggest Hamptons purchase of the year, according to Curbed.)
Then came 2016, when a who’s who of collectors and cultural Brahmins opened up their homes for big-ticket rubber chicken dinners. Perry and her former hedge funder husband, Richard Perry, have over the years hosted a number of events at their Sag Harbor home overlooking Noyack Bay in North Haven, which is dotted with works of contemporary art—they are serious collectors who installed Jeff Koons’s gigantic sculpture Diamond (Green) (1994–2005) on the patio of their Sutton Place penthouse. Koons even attended a fundraiser the Perrys hosted for Hillary Clinton in 2016, where he was spotted chatting with the candidate as Larry Gagosian walked around in a yellow coat. (Gagosian later held his own Clinton fundraiser, but at his Manhattan gallery, not his sprawling modernist Amagansett home.)
That same year, a dinner for Clinton at Lizzie and Jon Tisch’s art-filled Bridgehampton home a stone’s throw from Sagaponack Pond raised a reported $6 million for the candidate. Adam Sender, the phenom hedgie who assembled a massive conceptual art collection before selling the bulk of it at Sotheby’s amidst the dissolution of his his fund and marriage, hosted a Hillary shindig that August at his bucolic, farm-animal-filled 50-acre estate in Sag Harbor—which he just listed last month for nearly $40 million. From pictures in the listing, he managed to keep his hands on a few works: There’s some Jenny Holzer, a Maurizio Cattelan, a Sarah Lucas, and a Lawrence Weiner installed directly on the wall.
It’s unclear if any of these active Democratic donors will once again be welcoming Vice President Harris, or aspiring first gentleman Doug Emhoff, or the as-yet-unannounced running mate.
