While billionaire Tom Steyer remains noncommittal on 2020, his ad buy and upcoming town halls are the clearest sign yet that Steyer is preparing a presidential bid. | Jewel Samad/AFP/Getty Images Elections Steyer takes step toward 2020 presidential bid

If he can’t impeach Donald Trump, he may try to oust the president the old-fashioned way.

Former billionaire investor, climate activist and impeachment agitator Tom Steyer will take several steps toward a 2020 presidential bid Tuesday.


That will include a six-figure web ad buy on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and Instagram, along with a full-page ad in USA Today and other Gannett newspapers outlining a political platform, a revamped TomSteyer.com and the announcement of five town halls across the country, the first of which will be in the crucial early primary state of South Carolina, according to copies of the ad and platform provided to POLITICO.

The first town hall is set for Dec. 4 in Charleston, S.C., and the next will be in Fresno, Calif., sometime in December, according to Aleigha Cavalier, senior communications adviser for TomSteyer.com, who also works for Steyer’s climate-focused group NextGen America. There will be one town hall for each of the “5 rights" on Steyer's platform: the right to an equal vote, to clean air and water, to learn with pre-K education through college, to a living wage, and to health.

“These rights should be the basis of the Democratic Party’s platform,” Steyer wrote on his updated site in what was referred to internally as a "preamble." “Together, we will achieve these rights for all Americans.”

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Although Steyer remains noncommittal on 2020, and Cavalier says he is focused on pressuring Democratic lawmakers on his platform, the moves are the clearest sign yet that Steyer is preparing a presidential bid after playing coy over the past two years. Armed with the 6 million-plus person email list gained from his $50 million Need to Impeach campaign, NextGen America’s grass-roots resources and lists, and an estimated net worth of $1.6 billion to dig into, Steyer would immediately start out with a potentially potent political machine.

But before that can happen, Steyer wants to define himself beyond calls for impeachment and lay out a proactive vision for what he wants the world to look like, with Tuesday being the beginning of that process.

Perhaps anticipating that the left will be skeptical of a billionaire former hedge fund manager, Steyer presents himself as something of a disillusioned traitor to his class.

“Over time, I saw private greed overcome public good,” Steyer writes in his preamble. “The time arrived when I could see that our economy was rigged to funnel virtually all the enormous benefits of our growing productivity to the wealthy and their large corporations, while the vast majority of Americans — the people who do the work — gained little or nothing.”

After Steyer left his investment firm in 2012, he and his wife promised to give away most of their wealth in their lifetimes. On top of his philanthropic spending, Steyer became the most generous donor in Democratic politics, with more than $280 million doled out over the past three election cycles. He has given millions to candidates and the party’s committees, but he has poured most of his political money into NextGen America and Need to Impeach.

Steyer has always been front-and-center with those groups as he toured field offices, visited college campuses (often with a rented food truck in tow), conducted over 40 town halls the past year, and spoke direct-to-camera in national ads. That activism led to speculation, even among his own staff, that he ultimately wanted to run for office himself. Most of that prognostication centered on statewide office in California, but now he is laying out a national agenda.

“We are a country divided,” he writes. “But we have the power to reunite and, once united, the people are unstoppable.”



