Groups tied to Steyer, Bloomberg and Zuckerberg have spent over $25 million this year. | AP Photos 2013: Year of the liberal billionaire

Democrats and liberal interest groups spent much of 2012 bemoaning an avalanche of outside spending from billionaires on the right, warning that ideological tycoons like the Koch brothers and casino magnate Sheldon Adelson could threaten the legitimacy of the American electoral system.

What a difference a year makes.


In the off-year campaigns of 2013, liberal and Democratic interests have enjoyed a decisive advantage in the billionaire spending bracket. Indeed, groups tied to just three billionaires — New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, California investor Tom Steyer and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg — have spent well more than $25 million this year pushing progressive candidates and causes.

Their arrival on the political scene, at the same time as many conservative donors remain disheartened from the GOP’s 2012 defeat, represents a shift in power in the arena of big-money campaigns. And it’s the clearest sign that Democrats have abandoned their initial revulsion about outside money in favor of a recognition that they have to play and win by the same political rules as their opponents.

( PHOTOS: Mark Zuckerberg with pols)

The left’s swift embrace of outside money is disheartening to campaign finance reformers and maddening to Republicans, who argue that the media and political community hold wealthy progressives to a different standard than donors like the Koch brothers.

Democratic strategist Chris Lehane, Steyer’s top adviser, predicted that more liberal super-donors would come forward over the next election cycle and ante up for progressive causes.

“Based on the conversations we’ve had and the interest we’ve had, I think there’s no question that’s going to happen,” Lehane said. “People have looked at what’s happened over the last three or four cycles, and it seemed to them that it’s very important to get involved.”

The current election in Virginia is a case in point: Bloomberg’s Independence USA PAC is on track to spend $3 million by Election Day, targeting the Republican candidates for governor and attorney general on the issue of gun control. Steyer, a hedge fund executive, has spent millions through the group NextGen Climate Action on digital and turnout programs, as well as countless negative ads against GOP gubernatorial nominee Ken Cuccinelli.

( WATCH: Michael Bloomberg's super PAC ad: Outlaw)

Both Bloomberg and Steyer have been ubiquitous in other 2013 elections: Bloomberg spent some $2.2 million against a National Rifle Association-linked House candidate in Illinois earlier this year, and about a million dollars boosting now-Sen. Cory Booker in a New Jersey special election. He also cut a $350,000 check to a group defending two Colorado state legislators facing recall elections over their support for gun control.

Steyer, meanwhile, put more than $1 million of his own money into the Massachusetts Senate special election that resulted in victory for Democrat Ed Markey, attacking both the Republican nominee in the race and Markey’s primary opponent, Rep. Stephen Lynch, whom he viewed as insufficiently committed to fighting climate change.

All the while, the group FWD.us — which receives a majority of its funding from Zuckerberg — has put about $15 million into advocating for comprehensive immigration reform, according to a source tracking the group’s activities. Those activities have included TV and radio ads boosting legislators in both parties who sign on to the White House’s legislative priority.

( Also on POLITICO: Mike Bloomberg ad hits Ken Cuccinelli on guns)

Lehane argued that there’s a categorical difference between big spenders like Bloomberg and Steyer, and the ultra-prolific donors on the GOP side in 2012: “The folks who are involved on the Democratic side are not necessarily folks who have a direct financial interest in the policies they are advocating for.”

“The fossil fuel industry spends, probably, more in an hour influencing the political process than Tom has over the course of these campaigns,” Lehane added. “The best solution here is to actually have a political situation where access to resources does not determine who wins and loses. That’s just not the situation right now.”

That mindset — shared by many politically pragmatic Democrats, who are delighted to get their share of outside-spending cash — represents a head-snapping reversal from 2012, when progressives tarred GOP super donors as threats to the Democratic process.

Last year, Obama strategist David Axelrod warned of the “Koch brothers’ contract killers in super PAC land,” while the pro-Obama outside group Priorities USA ran ads branding Republican Mitt Romney as “the $200 million man” because of the Koch brothers’ plans to spend on his behalf.

Democrats haven’t yet turned up any donors quite as prolific as the Koch brothers or Adelson. What’s more, the super-donors of 2013 haven’t been as purely partisan as their 2012 forebearers: Bloomberg also has spent money against Democratic Sen. Mark Pryor in Arkansas, attacking his opposition to strict background checks, and the Zuckerberg-funded FWD.us has aired ads supporting Republican immigration reformers such as South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham.

Still, Bloomberg and Steyer represent a scale of individual giving within the left-of-center community unseen since the 2004 election, when liberal billionaire George Soros plowed money into groups aimed at defeating then-President George W. Bush.

Republican strategist Michael Goldfarb, who has worked with a number of conservative super-donors, pointed out that spending by liberal-leaning billionaires hasn’t done much to advance their issues at the federal level, regardless of how much cash and soft media coverage their efforts have generated.

“I don’t begrudge Democrats doing whatever they can get away with, but the press hasn’t just given them a free pass — they actually give them favorable coverage for trying to buy elections,” Goldfarb said. “Gun control, immigration, global warming — the GOP is losing everywhere and liberal billionaires still can’t move the ball an inch.”

Chris Cox, who heads the National Rifle Association’s political arm, wondered where the media outrage is about Bloomberg using his personal fortune to wipe out the contributions of small donors in the pro-gun community.

“It’s very clear that if the financial backers’ agenda fits the agenda of the national media and those on the left, there’s one set of rules,” Cox said. “Somehow, we’re an outside group and should be ashamed of ourselves. When Mayor Bloomberg spends at least six figures, that’s OK.”

Even as other Democrats and his own administration’s agenda continue to benefit from the spending of highly motivated billionaires, Obama himself has not entirely discarded his opposition to huge individual election spending.

In an Oct. 8 news conference, Obama answered a question about the upcoming Supreme Court term by taking a whack at the Citizens United case that opened the floodgates of independent spending by corporations and nonprofit groups.

“There aren’t a lot of functioning democracies around the world that work this way, where you can basically have millionaires and billionaires bankrolling whoever they want, however they want — in some cases undisclosed,” Obama said. “Democrats aren’t entirely innocent of this in the past, and I had to raise a lot of money for my campaign, so I — there’s nobody who operates in politics that has perfectly clean hands on this issue.”

Several senior Obama 2012 campaign officials did not respond to requests for comment on the flood of billionaire money boosting Democrats and Democratic causes this year.

But the tension Obama outlined — between the conventional liberal conviction that money in politics is morally repugnant, and the practical recognition that losing the money race is electorally problematic — is only likely to deepen for Democrats, going forward.

Bloomberg, Zuckerberg and Steyer are probably not the last progressive-aligned billionaires to open up their personal fortunes, especially since the prospect of a Hillary Clinton 2016 campaign already has donors fidgeting with their checkbooks.

Center for Competitive Politics head David Keating, an advocate of unrestricted election spending, pointed out that both parties have flip-flopped with expediency on the political activities of the ultra rich. Republicans tried to reform so-called 527 groups after wealthy Democrats funded them in the 2004 election, only to benefit themselves from outside spending in the 2010 and 2012 elections.

“A lot of the swings in spending come about because people get concerned about what the other side is doing,” Keating said. “If they think a law gives more speech for things they agree with, they tend to agree with it.”

Election reform advocate Nick Nyhart, who runs the group Public Campaign, warned that elections are becoming “a parlor game that only millionaires and billionaires can play at — and frankly, the millionaires are getting less important.”

“Right now, we have a system where having the money empowers people in a different way than not having the money,” said Nyhart, whose group supports public funding of elections. “When politics is a proxy war for billionaires, you’ve lost democracy.”