Michael Bloomberg, the Kochs and Tom Steyer have upended otherwise obscure races. | AP Photos Billionaires swamp local races

It was a gut-punch moment for the local lawman: Already sweating a tough reelection race, he’d just received word that one of the country’s most powerful billionaires was trying to oust him from the Milwaukee County sheriff’s seat.


David Clarke’s provocative rhetoric on guns had made him a political enemy of former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg — as he learned last week from reading the newspaper.

“I was like, ‘Wow, this is big-time now,’” Clarke recalled.

( Also on POLITICO: Hitting Las Vegas' politico jackpot)

With Bloomberg’s effort to defeat him, Clarke joined a growing throng of municipal officeholders whose political careers have been rocked or extinguished by lavish spending from the nation’s ultrarich. A rare black Democrat fiercely allied with the National Rifle Association, Clarke barely squeaked through a Democratic primary vote this week in the face of powerful outside spending, including nearly $200,000 from Bloomberg.

Other officials and candidates haven’t been so lucky.

Frustrated by paralysis at the federal level, the nation’s wealthiest activists have set their sights with increasing frequency on state and local elections as a new route for effecting policy change. The influx of cash from outside billionaires — namely Bloomberg, the industrialist Koch brothers and environmentalist financier Tom Steyer — has upended what would otherwise be bite-size campaigns for obscure municipal and state offices.

If the races are typically ground-level, retail affairs — the kind in which the candidate who personally knocks on more doors often wins — the issues these tycoons care about have national significance.

( Also on POLITICO: GOP aims to shake loose more Wall Street cash)

From opposing a Franklin County, Ohio, tax hike that would have helped pay for the local zoo, to targeting local candidates in a rural Wisconsin county board race with mining issues at stake, David and Charles Koch have spent unknown sums to oppose the growth of government and support resource-extracting industries.

Steyer has treated local races as an extension of his national campaign against global warming: Last year in Washington state, the Californian put $275,000 toward flipping a county board into the hands of environmentalist candidates whom he expected to oppose construction of a new coal export terminal. He spent nearly as much – $250,000 – in an unsuccessful effort to defeat a single GOP state Senate candidate there.

Bloomberg, meanwhile, has engaged both as an individual donor and through several political committees to boost candidates who support education reform and gun regulation.

Special interest groups with local agendas, including labor unions and real estate developers, regularly spend big sums on small-scale races. But this level of investment from deep-pocketed national figures is something new.

( Also on POLITICO: URGENT: Democratic emails a fundraising bonanza)

Bloomberg adviser Howard Wolfson said the former mayor’s local spending reflected “a growing acknowledgment that a lot of policy is made at the local level.”

“When Congress is essentially gridlocked and very little is coming out of Washington, much of what impacts the lives of everyday Americans is being determined at the local level,” Wolfson said. Of the decision to get involved in Milwaukee, he explained: “There are very few municipal law enforcement officials in this country that say people should arm themselves instead of calling 911. And so we wanted to highlight that.”

The Milwaukee race was only Bloomberg’s most recent venture into the political minor leagues: In 2013, the former mayor spent $350,000 seeking to rescue Democratic state legislators in Colorado from recall campaigns fueled by their gun-control votes.

Since 2011, the New Yorker has also donated — with somewhat greater success — to education-reform candidates in school board and superintendent elections. He has cut four- and five-figure checks to candidates in Indianapolis, Oakland and Santa Clara, California, as well as legislators across the country. In Louisiana, the business-information mogul put more than $100,000 into swinging the state board of education into the hands of supporters of the Common Core education standards.

For the candidates running in these once-obscure races, the experience of suddenly becoming a national target — or a figurehead for a wealthy stranger’s ideological crusade — is a dizzying experience. They say the billionaire cash floods into the electoral arena without warning, wresting the terms of debate away from voters and redefining the race along national lines.

Even some candidates who have benefited from out-of-state political spending express unease at the impact these national-scale operations can have when they descend on a local election. They describe the experience as a disorienting circus, like a Hollywood film crew swarming over a small town it has decided to cast in the role of Anyplace, USA.

Rud Browne, a Steyer-backed candidate who now serves on the Whatcom County Council in Washington state, said he realized big money was supporting him when a paid canvasser knocked on his door and began urging Browne to vote — for himself. “The guy had no clue I was one of the candidates,” Browne said.

“The thing that I think was frustrating to everybody, probably on both sides of the political spectrum on this, is — you know — this is a local election. The coal issue is important but it’s just one issue,” Browne said. “This community’s No. 1 priority is not the approval or disapproval of the coal terminal.”

Asked if he’d ever spoken with Steyer, Browne answered: “I’ve never met him. Never talked to him. Wouldn’t recognize him if I saw him.”

In some cases, there’s a clear reason for a billionaire’s sudden involvement: Steyer, for instance, is closely allied with Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, and a state-level environmental group, Washington Conservation Voters, raised the alarm to Steyer’s aides about the coal terminal project in Whatcom.

Bloomberg’s engagement in Milwaukee County followed a well-funded local effort to oust Clarke, a nationally known figure among gun advocates thanks to a radio ad he ran last year suggesting his constituents enroll in firearms classes rather than rely solely on emergency responders.

The Koch-backed group Americans for Prosperity, meanwhile, maintains an active, continuous presence in numerous states, including Wisconsin and Ohio, and regularly ramps up activity during contentious, state-level policy debates. Eli Miller, who runs AFP’s affiliate in Ohio, said that no election is too localized to send a message to political leaders up and down the ballot.

Even the Koch-backed campaign against the Franklin County zoo-funding referendum — an effort that drew national late-night mockery — clearly left an impression. “At any level — the local, the state, the federal — you’re going to hear from us. If you don’t want to hear from Americans for Prosperity Ohio, don’t raise taxes,” Miller said. “We fight at all levels.”

But even a far-sighted candidate may never be fully prepared for the experience of having tens of thousands of dollars — or more — dropped on his or her head in an election typically fought with all the firepower of a student council race.

Jo Ann Taube was a member of the Kenosha County, Wis., school board who maintained friendly relations with teachers’ unions — until AFP came after her earlier this year. As she was running for a new term, the former schoolteacher started to notice unusually high turnout at political forums. Then came the radio ads and political fliers.

“The nastiness, the negative tone changed — and the money,” said Taube, who lost her reelection fight. “Races are costing a lot more than they used to. People are being forced to spend more and more.”

Washington state Sen. Jan Angel, who won her race last year in spite of Steyer’s hefty spending, summed up the campaign in one word: “painful.”

“It was a huge infiltration of people and mail and TV, all paid for by this one guy,” Angel said. “They can literally buy these seats.”

Yet Angel and Clarke aren’t the only down-ballot candidates to survive despite an onslaught of big money from the outside.

When AFP tried to swamp an Iron County, Wis., local board election, several candidates whom the organization opposed won anyway. In Colorado, local conservatives and national gun activists defeated Bloomberg-backed incumbents in last year’s state Senate recalls.

In some instances, the intrusion of an out-of-town billionaire becomes an issue on its own: In Milwaukee this past week, the former New York City mayor’s involvement rippled through the sheriff’s race and prompted the NRA to run digital ads urging voters to “tell Bloomberg to stay out of Milwaukee.”

Having survived the takedown effort, Clarke chose to look on the bright side about the whole ordeal.

“Hey, I took down Michael Bloomberg’s money,” Clarke said. “It could have inflicted some real damage on me, but I have a reputation in this town that’s not going to be easily changed.”