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The candidates for New York City mayor, from left to right: Andrew Cuomo, Curtis Sliwa and Zohran Mamdani, who won the general election last month.

An artist and a college professor, Elena Ailes has lived in Chicago for more than a decade, moving here from New York City in 2013 largely for “economic reasons.”

But she still cares about her old haunts, where friends and family still reside, and decided to make a modest campaign contribution — $25 — to New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani leading up to his Nov. 4 election victory, with Andrew Cuomo his biggest opponent.

“I donated for a few reasons,” seeing the contest as something of a “proxy battle for the ‘soul’ of the Democratic Party,” Ailes said. “I don’t think we need to throw trans people, or immigrants, or anyone at all, under the bus to win elections, and Mamdani’s campaign made that really clear.”

What’s more, Mamdani’s messaging — and consistency — on everything from Palestinian rights to housing affordability “really resonated with me.”

And she’s far from alone, as a Chicago Sun-Times examination found more than 800 people from Chicago, the suburbs and downstate Illinois collectively contributed more than $70,000 in campaign money to New York mayoral candidates over the last year.

Nearly 700 of those donors were responsible for giving roughly $36,000 to Mamdani — a democratic socialist who’s been compared to Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson because of their similar far-left stances on income equality and other social issues — while 50 or so Illinois donors altogether gave about $24,000 to Cuomo, a more traditional Democrat who previously served as New York’s governor.

Mamdani beat Cuomo in the Democratic primary in June. Cuomo then opted to run as an independent in the general election last month but was handily beaten. Curtis Sliwa, founder of the Guardian Angels crime-prevention group, was the losing Republican candidate.

About 100 people from Illinois gave a total of $7,700 to Sliwa’s campaign, which overall took in about $1.6 million from nearly 18,000 private donations — which exclude public matching funds and giving by PACs, according to the examination of New York City Campaign Finance Board records.