Democratic presidential candidate Tom Steyer has spent more than $230 million since 2014 on his own efforts to influence policy and elections, and has said he will pour at least $100 million into his campaign. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images 2020 elections Tom Steyer’s mega-millions debate gambit flops The wealthy Democratic presidential candidate wasn't able to spend his way into the DNC's September debate.

Tom Steyer just lost a $16 million bet.

The Democratic hedge fund billionaire leapt into the presidential campaign late with a clear plan: use his mega-wealth to buy his way into the televised party debates, and then use that platform, and his unelected outsider persona, to challenge the front-runners. Steyer spent millions of dollars on TV ads to boost his poll numbers in early caucus and primary states and on digital ads to meet the donor requirements set by the Democratic National Committee.


But after Wednesday’s deadline, Steyer was one poll short of the four 2-percent showings he needed to make the stage, leaving him out of the September debate. He could still make the October stage with one more poll, but his failed fast-track bid to get into the next debate is a signal that Steyer’s young campaign is not gaining traction the way he hoped it would.

It’s the latest example of Steyer dumping tens of millions of his own dollars into an ambitious cause — including turning climate change into the key issue of the 2014 elections, impeaching President Donald Trump and, now, his own, late bid to make the presidential debates — and coming up short. Steyer has spent more than $230 million since 2014 on his own efforts to influence policy and elections, and has said he will pour at least $100 million into his campaign for president. That will give him a massive advantage over other low-polling campaigns — but as Steyer has learned, money can only do so much.

“Tom Steyer is the only one who has been able to spend enough to get the name recognition and the support in the early states” with paid media, said Patrick Murray, director of the Monmouth University Polling Institute, which conducts polls that helped determine which candidates qualified for DNC debates this year. “You can’t turn on a TV in those early states without seeing a Tom Steyer ad.”

But while Steyer has blanketed the airwaves in Iowa and New Hampshire, he hasn’t successfully pitched voters, said Democratic strategist Hank Sheinkopf.

“He didn’t get into the debate because his message is faulty, and with $20 million he should have been able to do it,” said Sheinkopf. “It’s not good advertising: It’s well cut, it’s pleasing to the eye, but it’s not evocative.”

Steyer's campaign said in a statement Wednesday that, "It is clear from public polling that Tom would have easily met the 2% threshold and been on the debate stage if there had been any qualified early state polling in the last few weeks," but that "we understand the rules established by the DNC and respect the process." But Steyer is also criticizing the DNC referees in a new round of Facebook ads — which helped take his total spending on the platform above $4 million since he launched his campaign on July 9.

“There has only been one DNC debate-qualifying poll in Iowa in nearly a month,” Steyer says in a Facebook ad that ran this week in Iowa, a state where Steyer spent $3.2 million on the airwaves in July and August in an attempt to increase his standing in in-state polls to 2 percent or above, which meets the DNC’s debate requirement. “Your voice matters, but it’s not being heard -- voters like you in Iowa should get a say before the deadline on Wednesday.”

In the two DNC-approved Iowa polls conducted since Steyer entered the race, Steyer scored 2 percent and 3 percent, respectively — good enough to count toward debate qualification, but far from establishing him as a major factor in the caucuses after his TV ad blitz.

“I mean no disrespect to Mr. Steyer at all, but it makes me proud of Iowa that it’s not for sale,” said Jerry Crawford, a lawyer and Democratic operative in Iowa. “Massive paid media strategies have rarely been a defining move in a winning campaign here where organization and person-to-person contact means a lot more — it’s why the Iowa caucuses were started back in 1972.”

Unlike other candidates, Steyer will never have to drop out of the presidential race because he has run out of resources. But he has not had as much time to introduce himself to voters this election, and the debates are the biggest platform he could score to make his case in the last few months of 2019, before voting begins early next year.

Since entering the race in early July, the Steyer campaign began working to make the debate stage: Despite having an estimated net worth of $1.6 billion, Steyer’s Facebook ads asked donors to chip in small amounts — “Can you contribute even one dollar?” asked one —- to help him meet the minimum requirement of having 130,000 unique donors, a threshold he crossed in August.

And in four key states, Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina, Steyer poured money into advertising in order to meet the DNC’s polling requirement.

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But if his fledgling campaign was expecting a spate of early-state polls to catapult him onto the debate stage, it didn’t arrive. Since he entered the race, there have been seven qualifying polls from the early states, and he scored 2 percent or better in three of them. But his relative weakness nationally — he failed to earn 2 percent in any of the eight national polls in which he was included — crippled his chances.

Even though the qualifying polls conducted since Steyer’s launch were almost evenly split between national and early-state surveys, Steyer’s failure to get over the top left his campaign asking the DNC “to expand [its] polling criteria to include more qualifying polling” at the state level. But the DNC didn’t budge.

Ten candidates will be on the debate stage on Sept. 12. Five of them have polling averages in the low single digits: Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey (3 percent), Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota (3 percent), entrepreneur Andrew Yang (3 percent), former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julián Castro (3 percent) and former Texas Rep. Beto O’Rourke (3 percent). Another candidate who narrowly missed the cut, Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, questioned the DNC’s debate rules in a memo this week that called on the DNC to revise its rules.

Steyer’s ubiquitous TV ads mostly feature himself clad in his standard uniform of jeans and a button-down shirt, sans tie, speaking straight to the camera, talking about the need to oust President Donald Trump and rid Washington of career politicians. In one ad airing in Iowa this month, Steyer takes aim at Trump’s “racist rhetoric” and attacks Congress for “going on vacation for six weeks” when the country is “in a crisis.”

“Business as usual is not working for the American people,” Steyer says in the ad.

It’s a standard political message at this point, said Ian Russell, a Democratic media consultant, at a moment in the race when time is running short to qualify for the debates and candidates need to take risks to stand out.

But Steyer has had significant moments of success in tapping into energy of the Democratic electorate in the past, Russell noted, such as his Need to Impeach organization building an email list of more than 8 million people focused on impeaching Trump.

“Sometimes the dog just doesn’t like the dog food. I don’t think Steyer is at that point. I just don’t think he’s taken many risks or taken many shots to make his case” to voters, said Russell. “There are some in the party who will be dancing on his grave, but I think it’s premature to count him out.”