Tom Steyer's PAC paid to air ads that hit the GOP candidate on climate issues. Inside a green billionaire's crusade

Tom Steyer is Virginia’s $8 million man.

The California billionaire spent nearly that much from his personal fortune to make an example of Republican Ken Cuccinelli for his arch-conservative views on the environment. The sum is more than three times the investment that’s been previously reported, and it nearly matched what the Republican Governors Association, the largest GOP outside spender, put into the Virginia governor’s race. It is more money, on a per-vote basis, than the famously prolific conservative donors Sheldon and Miriam Adelson spent in the 2012 presidential election.


Steyer’s political committee, NextGen Climate Action, publicly entered the Virginia race in August by paying to air a wave of television ads produced by Democratic Gov.-elect Terry McAuliffe’s campaign. The spots blistered Cuccinelli for launching an investigation into the research activities of a University of Virginia climate scientist.

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What unfolded in the ensuing months was an overwhelming flood of spending from the coffers of a single donor determined to inject climate into a race in which state education and transportation issues, and a federal government shutdown, almost certainly played a more decisive role. Steyer paid for $3.1 million in TV advertising, $1.2 million in digital ads, 12 different pieces of campaign mail, a field program that hit 62,000 households on get-out-the-vote weekend and even a Cuccinelli impersonator who showed up at public events carrying a briefcase of mock cash to attack the Republican’s ethics.

During the final three months of the race, POLITICO had extensive behind-the-scenes access to Steyer’s shadow campaign. Along with the smaller seven-figure sum Steyer spent in a Massachusetts special election earlier this year, his Virginia campaign represents a down payment on a sustained effort to defeat Republicans who question climate science — and activate voters who want government action on climate change.

Indeed, Steyer and his advisers say this is only the beginning. He has established himself in short order as the closest thing Democrats have to the Adelsons or the even deeper-pocketed conservatives Charles and David Koch. In other words, an individual with essentially boundless resources who is determined to force change upon politicians through the aggressive use of his checkbook.

( Also on POLITICO: Full energy and environment policy coverage)

Steyer told POLITICO after McAuliffe’s 2.5-percentage-point win that he didn’t consider his spending excessive in the least.

“One of my friends who is a Democratic governor and knew what we spent said, ‘I think you overspent on this campaign.’ But it turned out we didn’t,” Steyer said. “We kept going with what we originally thought we needed to do for the turnout, which was our whole goal.”

The Steyer operation wasn’t the only environmentalist outfit that played heavily in Virginia: The Virginia League of Conservation Voters PAC and the Sierra Club both invested money and manpower. Among the groups that cared about climate, however, Steyer’s was surely the most extravagantly financed and the most ruthless.

( QUIZ: How well do you know Terry McAuliffe?)

The animated 56-year-old has exhibited a flair for the theatrical in his political activities: A fan of cowboy Westerns who named his son for a character in “Lonesome Dove,” Steyer challenged a Massachusetts Senate candidate last spring to denounce the Keystone XL pipeline by “high noon on Friday.” In Virginia, he paid to fly an airplane banner reading “Cuccinelli Says Go BYU” over an August football game between UVA and Brigham Young University.

In a memo distributed to potential financial supporters late in the summer, Steyer’s top strategist, former Clinton White House aide Chris Lehane, said NextGen will build on its Virginia campaign by targeting multiple Senate and gubernatorial races in 2014 – and then playing hard in the 2016 presidential primaries.

“We want to establish a real presence in the early states to impact the candidates and make climate a top-tier issue, whereby candidates are forced to put forth comprehensive climate policies and address the issue,” Lehane wrote.

The game plan

From the start, Steyer’s campaign had two stated goals: electing Democrat Terry McAuliffe as the governor of Virginia, and creating a case study for making climate change an issue in high-profile elections.

( Also on POLITICO: U.S. carbon emissions keep falling)

A third, unstated goal has run through all of Steyer’s political activities: turning a hedge fund investor from the Bay Area into a national political figure. Most megadonors prize their privacy. But before Steyer’s team jumped into the Virginia race, it approached POLITICO about providing exclusive access to NextGen’s activities for a feature story after the election. In 2013, the towheaded, all-smiles Democratic financier has participated in major profiles in both The New Yorker and Bloomberg BusinessWeek.

For all the attention his political spending has earned him, Steyer himself took a relatively hands-off attitude toward NextGen’s Virginia campaign, deferring to a roster of blue-chip consultants that included strategists from the TV firm GMMB, the mail firm Mission Control and voter-contact firms Grassroots Solutions and Winning Connections.

One adviser likened Steyer to a “chairman of the board,” who sets big-picture goals more than he dictates operational decisions. During a visit to Virginia in early August, as his consultants urged him to move up his plans to fund TV ads in the race, Steyer repeatedly said he’d prefer to follow Lehane’s lead. “Have you asked Chris?” he asked at one meeting, shrugging: “I don’t think my opinion on this is particularly wise or valuable.”

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Of course Steyer’s opinion, as his PR consultant Mike Casey reminded him, is of great consequence to the group he funds. And in the big picture of the Virginia race, the onetime Obama campaign bundler handed down a few clear directives to his team:

Win the race by turning out apathetic voters. Force climate change into the campaign and seize a “mandate” on the issue. And don’t just rely on television ads (“The whole thing about paid TV is you feel like you’re doing something,” Steyer mused skeptically to POLITICO over the summer, before going on to make TV ads the largest piece of NextGen’s budget.)

From the outset, the challenge for Steyer’s strategists was to make climate part of the Virginia conversation in a way that was relevant to voters in an off-year election. NextGen commissioned a poll over the summer from Benenson Strategy Group that tested 2,500 voters to reveal a stark conclusion: Virginians care about climate, but probably not enough for the issue to turn them out singlehandedly in a governor’s race.

To reach the voters Steyer wanted to turn out – Virginians who may have voted in the 2012 presidential election or the 2009 governor’s race but couldn’t be counted on to vote this year – pollster Amy Levin urged the billionaire to put climate in terms that related to the daily lives of Virginians. She suggested talking about the effects of climate on asthma rates and food prices, and eschewing activist buzzwords like “climate denier” in favor of the charge that Cuccinelli “denies basic science.”

( Also on POLITICO: Tom Steyer defends Terry McAuliffe’s green credentials)

Erin Lehane, the field marshal of the NextGen turnout program, put it in these terms: “We’ve got to hit [voters] on a place where they have an emotional response, and their emotional response is to [the message], ‘This guy’s a wild man and we’ve got to do something.’”

Nuking Cuccinelli

When the NextGen digital and mail campaigns ramped up in September and October, that kitchen-sink approach was immediately evident, as the Steyer gang’s message tore at Cuccinelli on multiple issues with climate at the center. “From wasting taxpayer money in a failed lawsuit against UVA because he disagreed with their climate change research to opposing birth control, Ken Cuccinelli is out of touch,” read one mailer that went out in mid-September.

Multiple mail pieces that went out in mid-October noted not only that Cuccinelli disputes climate science “even though NASA and 98% of climate scientists agree that it is a real danger,” they also said he wants “to eliminate all forms of birth control” and wanted to “let criminals, even those convicted of sexually abusing children, buy guns at gun shows.”

( QUIZ: How well do you know Ken Cuccinelli?)

Digital ads explicitly appealed to voters who may not have considered themselves especially climate-conscious. At a post-election briefing for Steyer on Wednesday, digital strategist Tara McGowan showcased a series of Web ads beginning with the text: “I’m no environmentalist …”

In each case, the sentence ended with something like: “… but droughts are ruining my farm” or “… but science doesn’t lie.”

All the while, Erin Lehane’s turnout operation was going door to door, particularly in Virginia’s coastal Hampton Roads area and on six college campuses throughout the state, hammering away at the message that Cuccinelli is an extremist on the environment and, well, everything else.

By the end of September, they were sending out 50 canvassers a day along the Virginia coast, recruiting military veterans and African-Americans representative of the local community. By the end of the race, the field component of NextGen had collected 10,000 pledge cards on college campuses — asking voters to commit to participating on Nov. 5 — and hit 62,000 doors in the days immediately before the vote.

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“We are not talking to people with a climate-exclusive message,” Lehane explained on Sept. 30. “We’re saying, this guy is not representative because he denies science and then we kind of follow it up with, ‘He opposes all forms of birth control and he does this and he does that.’”

Climate issues were the backdrop for all of NextGen’s messaging — one mailer featured a huge image of a smokestack, while another pictured a churning hurricane — but they also fit into a larger, McAuliffe-approved frame for the Virginia race.

And whatever hesitations Steyer personally might have about the efficacy of television, the commercials his admakers produced were a smash hit: They savaged Cuccinelli for his connections to the fossil fuel company Consol, a major contributor to the Republican that also received furtive advice from the attorney general’s office in a gas royalty dispute with Virginia voters in the state’s rural Southwest. McAuliffe’s campaign liked the ads so much, they slapped a McAuliffe disclaimer on them and used their own money to run the spots in higher rotation.

McAuliffe campaign manager Robby Mook praised NextGen for having helped “turn the tables” on an issue where Democrats have more often been on the defensive. “They kept Cuccinelli on defense — and defined him — over the gas royalties scandal and his witch hunt against climate change science,” Mook said. “They made climate change denial and favoring out-of-state energy companies a powerful character statement and political liability.”

The Consol issue was also perhaps the one point in the race where NextGen tripped up.

On its face, the subject was a slam dunk for McAuliffe and his allies: Cuccinelli’s office was tied directly to an out-of-state fossil fuel company seeking to avoid paying money to Virginia voters. In the balance of the race, it was a huge help to McAuliffe, whose campaign was determined not to lose a debate on personal ethics with Cuccinelli.

But Steyer’s team drew a quick rebuke from the McAuliffe campaign when they hired a Ken Cuccinelli impersonator to go out and talk in public about being a shill for a politically active energy company. It was a tactic Steyer expressed discomfort with from the start, suggesting in August that it could “look like a dirty trick.” When the impersonator made a very public debut in September, Cuccinelli’s campaign cried foul — and a McAuliffe spokesman told The Washington Post the tactic “seems like a bad joke, and it’s not something we think is funny.”

At a debriefing meeting on the day after the election, Steyer asked his consultants if the impersonator was “received as campaign hoopla, just for fun.” Casey assured him that the answer was yes.

Steyer’s takeaway

The impersonator, however, was a minuscule expense compared to the $4.3 million NextGen spent on TV and digital ads, or compared to the $1.3 million Steyer spent on phone contacts and field canvassers and the $1.1 million he put into campaign mail. Steyer’s PR consultants said he also spent $150,000 building a climate voter model and $400,000 on earned-media stunts — he paid for a plane to spend 110 hours in the air flying anti-Cuccinelli banners — as well as half a million dollars in donations to Virginia partner groups.

On Election Day, Steyer was ebullient about the results of his campaign. The billionaire video-chatted with volunteers beamed in from a McDonald’s in southwest Virginia (“Was doing it fun?” he asked. “My rule is, it has to be fun.”) He handed out fliers at George Mason University, competing for students’ attention with an engineering fraternity midway through a “pie the pledge fundraiser,” and dined with clean-tech executives.

Steyer took time between events to call the leaders of several groups that helped NextGen organize in the state and thank them for their help. “The thing that’s true from the polling is that denying basic science is over,” he told the head of a Virginia environmental group.

He even filmed a post-election video touting his work in the state and assuring his supporters that no climate-denying candidate can escape his wrath.

“If they don’t believe climate change is real, we can’t trust them,” a cross-armed Steyer said before an aide told him to do another take with his hands in his pockets.

The only thing missing was a “Mission Accomplished” banner.

The actual verdict on climate in Virginia is murkier: NextGen clearly damaged Cuccinelli as a candidate for the governorship, but it’s hard to say how much of that was thanks to climate issues rather than a larger message about personal extremism.

Those brutally effective Consol ads, for example — did they really hurt Cuccinelli because they punished him for his ties to a fossil fuel company, or because they raised questions about his ethics that would have been equally relevant if Consol manufactured dolls or motorcycles?

And in the myriad phone calls NextGen placed to Virginia voters — the group claims to have had more than 400,000 conversations with voters via phone — there were reminders that climate is not a risk-free issue in Virginia.

“Ken Cuccinelli says that climate change is not real,” an operator said on an October call POLITICO listened in on — before a man quickly cut the operator off: “I’m a Republican, so you might want to stop.” On another call, one man said simply: “No, that’s not true. You’re lying.” On a call in November, one woman, perhaps exhausted by the steady stream of election-related messaging, said simply, “No, no, no, no, no. Don’t call me anymore.”

The next battlegrounds?

Even Steyer’s strategists acknowledge that the full lessons of the campaign will come into sharp focus only in the coming weeks, as they unpack the results of their efforts through data analysis. Early indications are that Democratic turnout rose in targeted areas, such as Hampton Roads and Richmond, but NextGen was hardly alone in working coastal GOTV targets and it remains to be seen how much impact the climate issue had, specifically.

In both the mail and digital arms of the campaign, Steyer’s consultants experimented with a range of environmental messages to see which fine-tuned climate pitch would work best with different groups of voters. McGowan said in early October that digital ads had already shown that targeted female voters responded most strongly to a message about corporate pollution, more than messages about droughts or NASA-endorsed climate science. Those kinds of best-practices lessons will trickle out as NextGen performs its internal review of the Virginia race.

“A lot of the foundation that we need to build in each of these states and across the country at some point is really trying to make climate change a top-tier issue,” McGowan said in early October. “My program has to be sustainable beyond Election Day.”

Thanks to Steyer’s personal largesse, it almost certainly will be. The founder of Farallon Capital Management said he remains committed to his climate crusade, focusing on races where there is a meaningful contrast between the candidates on climate and where his money can make a difference.

“If we go against [the candidate] and the argument we make is he’s been sleeping with sheep, that’s not quite good enough,” Steyer said. “We need to have a public conversation about what we think is an incredibly important issue and have that be the reason, or a major contributing reason, why somebody wins or loses.”

The Virginia governorship, in that sense, was a surprising race for Steyer to engage in. Unlike the Massachusetts Senate election earlier this year, in which the Democratic nominee was Ed Markey, a longtime climate change foe whose name was on the 2009 cap-and-trade bill, Virginia did not feature an environmental activist at the top of the Democratic ticket. McAuliffe said in this year’s campaign that he would support offshore drilling in Virginia and hesitated for days this fall before giving his support to the EPA’s proposed emission regulations for new power plants.

In a September interview, Steyer defended McAuliffe’s green credentials and sniffed at the suggestion that he might prefer candidates with Markey-like records.

“We’re not going to end up with candidates all around the country who are exact replicas of each other,” he said at the time.

Asked this week whether he might one day use his ample resources and rising public profile to run for office himself, Steyer answered equivocally.

“Everybody I work with hates my answer. What they want me to say is, ‘I love what I’m doing now.’ What I would say is this, look, I have no intention of doing that,” he said. “I am willing to do a lot of things to address the generational challenge we face. I will say that.”