Four weeks out from Donald Trump’s victory in the presidential election, Democrats may soon be launching a few unorthodox, mega-rich candidates of their own.

In three major states with a governor’s mansion up for grabs in 2018, a big-name, politically active billionaire or multimillionaire is taking steps toward a run — donors looking to take matters into their own hands after 2016's gutting losses.


In Florida, it’s John Morgan, a wealthy attorney who has long been one of the Democratic Party’s biggest swing-state fundraisers. In Illinois, it’s J.B. Pritzker, the businessman and philanthropist with a history of pumping cash and Chicago political support toward Hillary Clinton. And in California, it’s Tom Steyer, the hedge fund manager-turned climate activist who used the 2014 and 2016 election cycles to become one of the left's single biggest donors, to the tune of over $140 million. And more may be on the way.

It's an unexpected development that stands to inject new life into the Democratic Party — but it also exposes the lack of clear pipeline for young, rising Democrats after a series of losses, at a time when they are down to just 18 governors across the country, from 29 just eight years ago.

“There seems to be a feeling that we need to look beyond the normal folks we always look to, the normal types,” said Elisabeth Pearson, the Democratic Governors Association’s executive director, who said the party was discussing a “need to look beyond the type of people who have been elected before, and look at who else might be out there."

Devastating losses have led to party shakeups before, some Democrats noted — and positive changes have been the result. They cited past efforts to boost fund-raising and coordinate messages.

“The Democracy Alliance was born out of the ass-kicking we got in the 2000, 2004 elections,” said Ben Pollara, the Florida Democratic consultant who is running Morgan’s political efforts, referring to the liberal donor network. "This could be a new strain of that: not just saying that we can do better than the Democratic infrastructure, but also the [standard] Democratic candidates."

It’s nothing new for a mogul or two to run for office. But what’s unusual this time around is that the trio is made up of some of Democrats’ most generous individual donors, each of whom has longstanding relationships with national party leaders who pushed a failed slate of candidates in November.

Although Morgan, Pritzker and Steyer are all seriously considering runs, they’re at varying stages of political exploration in three states that require immense amounts of money and name recognition to win.

In Illinois, Pritzker and his family name are well-known — particularly in Chicago — and incumbent Republican governor Bruce Rauner is himself a wealthy self-funder, likely making the coming race all the more expensive. An heir to the Hyatt hotel fortune with a career in private equity and venture capital and an estimated net worth of over $3 billion, Pritzker — who ran unsuccessfully for the U.S. House against Rep. Jan Schakowsky in a 1998 primary — has been calling around to political power players to gauge support. The brother of Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker, he became a prominent Barack Obama donor only after Hillary Clinton's loss in 2008's primary.

Steyer, who is estimated to be worth over $1.5 billion, has through his NextGen Climate group substantially increased his own recognition across California by appearing in a series of political television ads after he briefly flirted with a Senate run.

And Morgan is well-known across Florida due to his high-profile law practice and its ubiquitous ads, not to mention his advocacy of liberal causes like 2016’s successful legal medical marijuana ballot initiative. Notorious in Democratic circles as one of the more outspoken and brash major donors, Morgan spent much of 2015 vilifying former Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz for failing to support his marijuana drive. He put out a preliminary policy platform in November.

Tom Steyer, a hedge fund manager-turned climate activist, used the 2014 and 2016 election cycles to become one of the left's single biggest donors. | AP Photo

The potential entry of three big-name barons represents a new front in the Trump-era Democratic Party: the closest analogues in recent memory are Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Wolf — a furniture magnate who funded his own primary effort — and West Virginia Governor-elect Jim Justice — the richest man in his state. But neither was a national figure before running, let alone a major player in the party.

The potential candidacies have already met with resistance, both within their respective states — as they look at potentially crowded primaries — and nationwide, as some progressives chafe at the idea of nominating the “millionaires and billionaires” who were frequently vilified during Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign.

“Candidates like that may be well-meaning, but it leads to a view that the difference between Democrats and Republicans doesn’t go very deep: it may be on an issue here or there, but it doesn’t go beyond a different narrative," said Larry Cohen, the former Communications Workers of America president who now chairs the board of Our Revolution, the group built out of Sanders’ campaign.

"The challenge that we face is, what are alternative mechanisms for supporting different candidates?” Cohen added. Until Democrats build a more grassroots funding model, he said, “you’re going to get this tendency in statewide races in big states.”

The challenges of running while wealthy can be overcome, as Trump himself demonstrated with his claim to be underwriting his own campaign. And Michael Bloomberg, for example, leveraged his lack of dependence on other wealthy individuals into a main talking point as he ran for New York City mayor for the first time. But the very presence of a billionaire in a race can also be enough to turn off other voters entirely.

“Self-funding candidates are a critical part of our party strategy going forward,” acknowledged Mike Gilmore, a longtime Democratic fundraiser. “But my perspective is not that the candidates have to be wealthy — they just have to be able to raise the necessary fundraising."

And, said former DGA executive director Colm O’Comartun, while self-funding is an attractive quality in a candidate, recruiters run the risk of letting that ability overshadow other shortcomings. “There’s more to fundraising than just money, it’s how you meet people, how you present yourself, and how you build your campaign,” he explained. “You can’t get distracted by the money."

Accordingly, none of the three is expected to formally announce his candidacy anytime soon: One of the advantages of being well-known and wealthy is that you don’t have to spend so much time raising money or introducing yourself to donors.

But in the meantime, with another billionaire soon to occupy the Oval Office, they’re inching forward.

“When I first launched this effort, if you’d asked if John Morgan was actually going to run for governor, I’d say, ‘not a chance in hell.’ And now, if you asked me, I’d say, ‘I have no idea,’” said Pollara. "He sounds more like a candidate than any of the other candidates out there."

Scott Bland contributed to this report.