The worst nightmare for Democrats would be replicating the 2012 GOP primary. Rogue donors not ready for Hillary?

Hillary Clinton is facing the beginnings of a backlash from rich liberals unhappy with her positions on litmus test issues and her team’s efforts to lock up the Democratic presidential nomination before the contest starts.

Elizabeth Warren says she’s not running, but donors are pledging big money to get her to reconsider. Joe Biden, Martin O’Malley and Jim Webb have found polite and occasionally receptive audiences among potential sugar daddies. Even Bernie Sanders has support from some wealthy donors.


Clinton is seen by some liberals as too hawkish, too close to Wall Street and insufficiently aggressive on fighting climate change, income inequality and the role of money in politics. Those are animating causes for many rich Democrats, and some are eager for a candidate or candidates to challenge Clinton on those issues, if only to force her to the left.

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“I have talked to large donors who are not happy with what Hillary represents,” said Guy Saperstein, a San Francisco lawyer and part owner of the Oakland A’s. “But they’re not going to stick their heads up above the ramparts right now and get shot at.”

Saperstein provided seed funding to a super PAC launched this summer to try to draft Warren into the presidential race and pledged $1 million if the Massachusetts senator decides to run. The super PAC is hiring staffers in key primary states and recently enlisted a fundraising firm to solicit donors.

It’s just one example of the big-money Democratic presidential jockeying taking place almost entirely behind the scenes. The results will go a long way toward determining whether the party will maintain unity in 2016 or tumble headlong into the sort of costly super PAC-funded internecine skirmishes that have confounded Republicans.

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The worst nightmare for Democrats would be replicating the 2012 GOP presidential primary. It was thrown into chaos by a pair of super-rich activists — Sheldon Adelson and Foster Friess — who each poured millions of dollars into super PACs that propped up the long-shot campaigns of Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum, respectively. The cash helped both candidates remain in the race for months longer than they likely would have been able to do otherwise, inflicting serious damage on the front-runner and eventual nominee, Mitt Romney.

With over two decades’ worth of carefully cultivated connections to the Democratic Party’s deepest pockets, Hillary Clinton is in some ways the ideal candidate for the mega-check brand of politics that has come to dominate American elections.

Yet the former first lady, New York senator and secretary of state is also uniquely exposed in the new landscape, where rogue billionaires can use their checkbooks to buck or shape the party line if they’re unhappy with its candidates or positions.

Like Romney in 2012, Clinton is the early consensus choice for her party’s presidential nomination among elites who believe she gives them their best chance to win a general election. And, as she has inched closer to entering the race, her backers have worked to avoid Romney’s fate by trying to neutralize potential Adelsons and Friesses on their side and convince them there are no viable alternatives.

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Using a network of big-money groups laying the groundwork for a presidential campaign, including the super PAC Ready for Hillary — which has raised more than $10 million since January 2013 (including at least $1.7 million over the past three months) — Clinton’s allies have collected contributions and pledges of support from an impressive roster of the party’s most generous donors, including Houston trial lawyers Steve and Amber Mostyn, billionaire financier George Soros and medical device heir Jon Stryker.

“I think it’s un-American,” declared Ben Cohen, the co-founder of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream and a significant donor to progressive candidates and groups — particularly those working to diminish the role of unlimited cash in politics. “The big problem with politics is big money in politics. … I’m talking about the undue influence of corporations and the wealthy. We’ve got them controlling the general elections, we’ve got them controlling the primaries, and now we’re talking about them controlling the pre-primaries.”

Clinton’s backers are assiduously courting top cause-oriented liberal donors like San Francisco hedge fund billionaire Tom Steyer. He has pledged to spend more than $50 million in the 2014 midterms supporting Democrats with aggressive stances on environmental issues, including fighting climate change.

Yet Steyer — who supported Clinton in 2008 and in July had her over to his San Francisco home for an informal get-to-together — thus far has resisted Ready for Hillary’s entreaties to formally commit to her in 2016. Sources say Steyer raised eyebrows in Hillaryland last month when, on the sidelines of a climate change awareness march in New York City, he told MSNBC that she could benefit from a primary challenge.

“Being forced to refine what you say and think is a good thing,” said Steyer.

Former Virginia Sen. Jim Webb, who’s flirting with a run for the nomination, met recently with major donors in New York, and some came away thinking that he could convincingly run as an economic populist to Clinton’s left.

“Donors on the left — progressives — don’t think she’s divorced herself from Wall Street, and they’re bothered that she never cut the cord with people like Larry Summers and Laura Tyson,” said one New York donor who met with Webb. There are a number of major liberal donors who would support a Webb campaign, but are fearful of vocally opposing Clinton before the campaign even starts, asserted the donor.

“A lot of people give money to be recognized and when the Clintons turn against you, you’re dead to them and that hurts these people,” said the donor. “Do I want her to be the president over any Republican? Sure. But a lot of donors are actually thrilled that Bernie could go, and that Webb and O’Malley are probably going to go, because they are going to force her to answer questions.”

O’Malley, the outgoing governor of Maryland, has been methodically laying the groundwork for a presidential campaign for more than a year. But in meetings with major donors, he’s been reluctant to contrast himself with Clinton, and has even been offering himself as a fallback choice, according to multiple sources familiar with his pitch.

“He’s saying ‘I don’t know if she’s going to run, but, if she doesn’t, I would like to be your second choice,’” said one fundraiser.

Another fundraiser said O’Malley is in a tough spot. “The fact that he’s telling people that he wants to be their second choice really undercuts him, but he has to, because 80 to 90 percent of his donors are the Clintons’ donors.”

O’Malley recently has focused at least partly on major donors who bucked Clinton in 2008 by siding with Barack Obama in the Democratic primary, and, as such, are seen by some in Democratic finance circles as potential 2016 wildcards.

Among those with whom O’Malley has recently met: San Francisco real estate developer Wayne Jordan and his wife Quinn Delaney, venture capitalist Ryan Smith of Salt Lake City, and Wall Street titan Robert Wolf.

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Jordan, Delaney and Smith did not return calls seeking comment on O’Malley’s prospects, while Wolf, a close Obama confidant who was traveling in Turkey on a presidential export mission, emailed to say he hasn’t “really focused on the 2016 campaign yet.”

An O’Malley spokeswoman declined to comment on his recent donor meetings. But fundraisers interviewed for this story pointed out that often, when O’Malley meets with donors, he’s raising money for the Democratic Governors Association. A source familiar with his meeting with Wolf said it was not related to the DGA — just O’Malley’s own political ambitions.

Likewise, Vice President Biden’s private meetings with major donors often are related to his fundraising for the Democratic Party, so he wouldn’t necessarily have to make the case for himself vs. Clinton. But a fundraiser who has been briefed on Biden’s meetings with top donors said he often leaves little doubt about his own presidential ambitions and is not shy about comparing his prospects to Clinton’s.

“He is the most aggressive in making the case for why it should be him, as opposed to her,” said the fundraiser.

Yet the donors interviewed for this story mostly viewed Biden, whose spokeswoman did not respond to a request for comment, as indistinguishable from Clinton on their pet issues — and much less viable as a candidate.

Still, Clinton’s backers are carefully monitoring the donor courtship by all her prospective rivals. Even Vermont independent Sen. Bernie Sanders’ open exploration of a long-shot run for the Democratic nomination reportedly is causing anxiety in Hillaryland. Sanders, who spent the weekend in Iowa and is headed to New Hampshire on Friday, has made inroads with wealthy liberals for whom campaign finance reform is a top issue and has signaled to them that he is all but certainly going to run, according to multiple sources.

Longtime Sanders backer Cohen, of Ben and Jerry’s fame, stopped short of endorsing a Sanders presidential bid because he said he didn’t want to jeopardize the nonpartisan status of a nonprofit he’s financing to the tune of “hundreds of thousands of dollars” called Stamp Stampede. It’s working to rally support for campaign finance reforms ahead of both party’s 2016 presidential primaries.

But, Cohen said, “there are major donors that would support Bernie” for president because of his support for campaign finance reform, which has not been among Clinton’s core causes. “And if it ends up hurting the Democrats’ chances, so be it, because the most important thing is to get money out of politics,” said Cohen.

By far the candidate who most worries Clintonites — and most excites the anybody-but-Hillary donors — is Warren, whose tough posture toward Wall Street and on reducing income inequality thrill liberal activists and donors. They’re hoping that she can be persuaded to make the race if they can demonstrate enough support for her.

“I think the wiggle room is that she doesn’t have to make the decision now,” said Deborah Sagner, a New Jersey real estate executive and philanthropist. She sided with Obama early in his 2008 Democratic primary against Clinton, later raising more than $500,000 for his reelection, and now is raising money for the Warren super PAC, Ready for Warren Presidential Draft Campaign.

“I was never really been inspired by the Clintons, either of them,” said Sagner, who wrote among the first checks — $20,000 — to the Warren super PAC, the very name of which has been interpreted as a swipe at Ready for Hillary.

Sagner said she’s been “delightedly surprised” by how many donors have offered to contribute. “Obviously, I’m not necessarily saying to this to people who I know from ’07 have been for Hillary. I’ve mostly been talking to people who in ’07 were looking for an alternative to Hillary.”

Among them, she said, there is the sense “that a rigorous primary in the Democratic presidential primary is very healthy for the party.”

Sagner is a former board member of the influential Democracy Alliance club of wealthy liberals. Its membership — which skews anti-war, anti-money in politics and economically populist — largely turned away from Clinton and toward Obama in 2008. Sources say the club’s current donor pool again includes an ardent anybody-but-Hillary wing. This time around, its underdog rival of choice is Warren, who demurred when she was urged to run after speaking to the club’s annual winter meeting late last year.

Warren’s lawyer has even gone so far as to disavow Ready for Warren. But it’s proceeding anyway, with the two-pronged goal of demonstrating to Warren that there would be sufficient financial support for her campaign and also building political infrastructure around the country that could be tapped by any such campaign. It’s a model similar to — but on a much smaller scale — than the one that Ready for Hillary pioneered early last year.

“We’re not just trying to get Sen. Warren to run, we’re also building a network that can support her when she does,” said Scott Dworkin, a Democratic fundraiser whose firm Bulldog Finance Group was retained late last month by Ready for Warren.

The super PAC — which is run by Erica Sagrans, who worked for the Obama Democratic National Committee and reelection campaign — recently posted job listings for a deputy director, as well as state coordinators in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina.

“We want to get away from the storyline that everyone knows what’s going to happen,” she said. “We want to show that it’s not inevitable, it’s still very early and that there’s still room to push for someone we’re really excited about to get into this race, and we think that Warren is that progressive champion.”

If Ready for Warren catches hold, but its hero ultimately doesn’t run, Sagrans said the group would consider supporting another progressive candidate in the primary or pushing the field on “progressive issues around income inequality, student debt — the kind of issues Warren champions.” But, Sagrans added, “we think she has a credibility and passion and fearlessness around those issues that not a lot of folks have.”

Asked whether she was referring to anyone in particular, Sagrans laughed. “No one in particular. Just anybody.”