Left-wing billionaire mega-donor and impeachment crusader Tom Steyer entered the 2020 Democratic presidential primary on Tuesday, and launched the first major television advertising blitz of the campaign on Wednesday.
Politico reports that Steyer is running two ads for two weeks, focusing on the first four primary and caucus states: “The pair of ads are backed up by $1.4 million dollars in spending, according to details of the ad campaign shared first with POLITICO. They will run nationally on CNN and MSNBC and locally in the four early states — Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada — for two weeks, from July 10 to July 23.”
Steyer is helped by his massive wealth. His estimated net worth is $1.6 billion, according to Forbes. He “made a fortune, in part, by investing in fossil fuels” while at California-based Farallon Capital Management, Forbes adds.
As he burst onto the political scene five years ago, Steyer re-invented himself as a climate change activist. According to OpenSecrets.org, he was the Democrats’ single largest individual contributor in the 2014 midterm elections, a cycle in which they lost the Senate. He was also the top donor in 2016, and the third-largest in 2018. Partly at his urging, Senate Democrats — then in the majority — held an all-night talkathon in 2014 urging action to fight climate change. His NextGen Climate Action Committee super PAC has registered millions of voters, focusing on younger voters.
In the two-and-a-half years since Trump took office, Steyer has led a campaign to encourage Democrats to impeach the president. He launched the “Need to Impeach” super PAC and, together with NextGen, planned to spend over $100 million and hire 1,000 staff in that effort. He decided not to run for president earlier this year, and spend $30 million to defeat Republicans instead.
Steyer has since had a change of heart.
His first new commercial, “Money Where His Mouth Is,” casts Steyer’s career as one of self-sacrifice for the cause:
His second ad, “Keeping the Promise,” says that he is running to make democracy serve the people, not the powerful:
A longer, four-minute video on Steyer’s YouTube channel, “Fundamental Change,” attacks “big-money interests”:
Other candidates have run limited television ad campaigns, but nothing on the scale of Steyer’s initial ad buy.
It is not clear whether Steyer has qualified for the next Democratic Party presidential debate, scheduled to be held in Detroit at the end of July and hosted by CNN. The Democratic National Committee required candidates to meet polling and donor goals by June 12. Further debates will be held in later months but have not yet been scheduled.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He earned an A.B. in Social Studies and Environmental Science and Public Policy from Harvard. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. He is also the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, which is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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