Peter Thiel supports deregulation; Sheldon Adelson cares about defending Israel. | Reuters Photos What do mega donors want?

If the GOP presidential primary were defined by its biggest donors, it would be about a host of other things besides the economy — like creating floating cities, containing Sharia law, protecting landowners from oil spills and defending Israel.

Some of these and other big-donor pet issues are already getting prominent treatment in campaign 2012, just as super PAC benefactors kick in six- and seven-figure gifts.


The mega-donors and their friends say their donations are about their favored candidates’ existing positions and campaigns say they aren’t for sale.

But regardless of which came first, a look at the candidate’s stump speeches and super PAC ads shows the potential for the signature issues of mega-donors to get major play, even if they aren’t a top priority with voters.

Take Foster Friess, for example. The 71-year-old retired mutual fund manager has been a key donor to the super PAC keeping former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum’s campaign alive, the Red White and Blue Fund. Friess considers the threats of Islamic extremism, Iran and Sharia law among his top political issues and primary reasons for backing Santorum.

Friess — who provided the seed funding for the super PAC and has donated at least $1 million — suggested he may have urged it to focus on those issues. The group has spent $6.2 million boosting Santorum, including with ads casting him as “a resolute leader of the fight against radical Islam.”

Though Friess said he doesn’t set the super PAC’s strategy, he told POLITICO: “I can still encourage an ad, give a suggestion. Let’s say on the issue of violent Islamic extremism. I don’t think it’s out of the order to point out that Rick Santorum has been studying this for like five years. He knows the names. He not only can pronounce Ahmadinejad (but) he knows what he’s doing with Chávez in Venezuela.”

Friess has been a friend and financial backer of Santorum since 1995. It’s unclear which man first came to consider radical Islam an important political issue.

But by 2005 — after Friess had emerged as a major donor to Santorum’s Senate campaigns and the groups supporting them — Santorum was sponsoring legislation to allocate $10 million to facilitate regime change in Iran.

Friess said he gives to help candidates when “I believe they have the best interest of our country at heart. And I never ask anybody for anything. I don’t want any special legislation.” He cracked, though, that “maybe if things go well” and Santorum reaches the White House, “I can hold off for an ambassadorship to Zimbabwe.”

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich also has a longtime connection with his biggest backer, Sheldon Adelson, the 78-year-old casino mogul and billionaire.

Adelson, who reportedly has donated as much as $20 million to the pro-Gingrich Winning Our Future super PAC, cares first and foremost about defending Israel.

And Winning Our Future officials in recent emails and TV appearances highlighted Gingrich’s “staunch support” for Israel, a stance that over the years has become more hawkish.

Winning Our Future won’t rule out highlighting Israeli security in future ads, said the group’s top strategist Rick Tyler, who cast the issue as central to the debate on energy and gas prices.

Tyler declined to comment, though, when asked whether Adelson’s support influenced the campaign’s focus.

But someone close to Adelson said he had “no involvement whatsoever with strategic decisions, including [the recent Israel focus], made by the super PAC.”

The gambling magnate met Gingrich in the mid-1990s when Adelson traveled to Washington to lobby to relocate the American Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem — a position Gingrich endorsed.

On the campaign trail, Gingrich has promised that among his first executive orders as president would be one to relocate the Embassy.

Adelson said his support for Gingrich is based solely on his longstanding friendship with the former House speaker and asserted he has never used the political clout that comes with being a high-level donor for profit.

“Listen, I’ve taken the position in my own business against my business interests, regarding Internet gaming,” he told POLITICO in a recent interview. “And I’m prepared to testify in Congress, that I’m against it.” He asserted that he’s “liked in the Republican [Party] in Congress and in the government for one reason: I never, ever ask for anything. There’s nothing I need or want from the government.”

Still, other candidates and their allies have worked to display common ground on Israel with Adelson. Mitt Romney early last year appeared with Adelson at a Las Vegas meeting of the Republican Jewish Coalition, while Friess told POLITICO he had several conversations with Adelson about Santorum’s hawkish Middle East foreign policy.

Of course, the super PAC supporting Romney, a former Massachusetts governor, also has plenty of million-dollar donors, but no single giver has buoyed Romney’s run like his three competitors.

Peter Thiel is by far the biggest financial supporter of Paul’s long-shot campaign, and the Texas congressman’s support for deregulation seems to jibe with both Thiel’s business interests and his personal views.

But they don’t have a personal connection, and it’s unclear whether Thiel’s specific causes are getting a second look from the candidate.

Thiel, who co-founded PayPal and was the first major investor in Facebook, has donated $2.6 million to a pro-Paul super PAC.

And, according to Jim O’Neill, a partner in Clarium Capital, Thiel’s San Francisco-based hedge fund, Thiel’s main reason for supporting Paul’s campaign is that “big government [is] stifling tech innovation” through over regulation — an assessment that jibes with Paul’s antiregulation libertarian positions and with Thiel’s focus on tech start-ups.

Thiel has a long history of supporting libertarian causes — including Paul’s 2008 presidential campaign and the Cato Institute — and, O’Neill suggested, intends to continue giving to Endorse Liberty.

But Thiel also penned a 2009 proclamation essentially disavowing American politics.

He asserted that “the prospects for a libertarian politics appear grim,” partly because of “the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians.” Declaring his intention “to find an escape from politics in all its forms,” he proposed libertarians focus on creating their own worlds in cyberpace or outerspace, or by “settling the oceans,” creating floating, autonomous libertarian colonies — a hobbyhorse of his called “ seasteading.”

Thiel’s views on politics haven’t changed, asserted O’Neill, pointing to a joint statement Thiel issued late last month railing against government spending and urging that “men and women who want freedom and growth should take action. A good place to start is voting for Ron Paul.”

Many Paul fans have embraced seasteading, but Paul doesn’t seem to have taken a stance on it. And he has raised concerns about what he called “world planning” activities that occur at secretive Bilderberg meetings that Thiel has attended.

Thiel declined repeated interview requests, and a woman who answered a cell phone linked to him through public records said, “He’s a really hard guy to get in touch with. He’s very important.”

For other donors, the motivations are even less clear.

Take William Doré. The low-profile Louisiana energy executive last month donated $1 million to the super PAC supporting Santorum’s presidential campaign, and he is believed to have given more after Santorum swept the Feb. 7 contests in Colorado, Minnesota and Missouri.

Doré, 69, did not respond to interview requests. A source familiar with the donation said it wasn’t motivated by any specific issue but likely stemmed at least partly from Doré’s friendship with Santorum and their shared commitment to Catholicism.

Yet the super PAC was caught off guard by Dore’s initial donation, which it hadn’t solicited, according to Friess.

“None of us had ever heard of him before. It just suddenly appeared,” Friess told Bloomberg TV this month, adding “I’ve never met him” and “don’t know what industry he’s in.”

Doré, who is semi-retired, owns an eponymous energy consulting firm and made his fortune at the helm of a company called Global Industries that’s involved in the pipeline and offshore drilling equipment business.

So he could potentially benefit from Santorum’s support for expanded oil drilling and hydraulic fracturing to extract natural gas — which has been an ongoing theme in his campaign.

But Doré has never given a contribution with his business interests in mind, asserted Butch Gautreaux, a former Democratic Louisiana state senator to whom Doré gave $2,500.

“At this point in his life, there’s nothing that Bill could want in terms of personal financial [gain],” said Gautreaux, who says he’s “good friends” with Doré. “He looks at candidates on an individual basis, and he looks for people that he thinks have conscience and are in it for the right reasons.”

About half of the $637,000 in federal and state contributions Doré had given before this year went to Democrats. And he donated to groups pushing legislation in the Louisiana Legislature sponsored by Gautreaux to help landowners whose properties were sullied by oil and gas drilling waste — an effort that put him at odds with the industry and could potentially have hurt his companies’ bottom lines.

“He’s an oil and gas environmentalist,” said Gautreaux. “He must have seen something in Rick Santorum that got him to make that contribution. It may be something religious, or it may be that he sees him as the steward of the budget.”