SAN FRANCISCO — The main super PAC supporting Hillary Clinton’s White House bid is struggling to persuade Silicon Valley’s megadonors to cut the $1 million-plus checks it says it needs to lay the groundwork for what’s expected to be the most expensive general-election fight in history.

The challenges facing Priorities USA Action, according to a dozen people closely involved in the PAC’s California efforts, are manifold: Some of these liberal Democratic tech moguls are more interested in their own self-funded political groups; others cite ideologically fueled distaste for super PACs; and more still point to residual bad blood after a messy Silicon Valley congressional race in 2014.


No matter the reason, it all adds up to one thing: Priorities is simply not a priority for the Bay Area’s wealthy few who Democrats believe are necessary to fund a winning presidential effort.

“The fear is that once the [Republicans] decide to turn the guns on, they’re not going to stop,” explained one high-ranking swing state Democrat, warning that Priorities needs to have the big-money reserves to counter such attacks before they start. A mad rush to collect those checks would be chaotic at best, he said: “You never want to scramble.”

The pro-Clinton super PAC surprised many party insiders in June when it rushed to prove itself by pulling in eight separate $1 million checks. Coming shortly after a leadership shakeup at the organization, that midyear financial report showed nearly $16 million in cash collected since January and included some of the party’s most generous big-money donors. (The group had raised $25 million more by mid-September.)

But the list was missing many of the bold-faced names from the campaign-cash hotbed of northern California — from Tom Steyer, Democrats’ biggest backer in the 2014 cycle, to a handful of tech titans who helped fund the group when it supported President Barack Obama in 2012.

Qualcomm co-founder Irwin Jacobs, Zynga co-founder Mark Pincus, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and Sun Microsystems co-founder Vinod Khosla all held out. So did Google’s Eric Schmidt and Laurene Powell Jobs, the widow of Apple’s Steve Jobs and an early backer of Ready For Hillary in 2014.

That hasn’t changed in the second half of the year, despite Priorities’ gradually intensifying efforts, which have included parading out Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta to make the case that the super PAC needs funds to sustain a relentless ad campaign through Election Day.

“There’s no heat around Priorities. There’s no sense of urgency,” said one California fundraiser who is close to the super PAC’s efforts in the state, nodding to some Democrats’ whispered worries that more big spenders won’t chip in until next summer. “Once there’s a single nominee there will be. Nothing motivates donors like an email that says, ‘Hey, Marco Rubio’s super PAC spent $30 million.’"

But fundraisers think that for Priorities, the big checks need to roll in before then.

People close to the group worry that Democrats’ inability to build a reliable political culture among Silicon Valley’s most influential figures will make it tough for the group to call on these megadonors once their money is sorely needed. If even struggling Jeb Bush is sitting on a $100 million super PAC, the thinking goes, then why should the front-running Clinton have to enter the general election without support from the party’s biggest potential investors?

Still, Priorities publicly insists that it’s confident such backers will come around. “We’re excited about how we’re doing so far and that donors are beginning to understand how important early support is to our efforts,” the group’s communications director, Justin Barasky, told POLITICO in response to questions about Priorities’ activity in the region. “We fully expect to engage in a number of donor communities to elect Hillary Clinton president."

Certainly, some of the San Francisco area’s richest residents have already found their wallets, and the group is better funded than most of its Republican counterparts. In the first half of 2015, former Golden West Financial executive Herb Sandler gave $1 million to the super PAC while philanthropist Laure Woods, Innovative Interfaces co-founder Stephen Silberstein and private equity director Mark Heising wrote six-figure checks.

Down the coast, DreamWorks executive Jeffrey Katzenberg gave Priorities $1 million in June and is working to find more Los Angeles-area contributors, according to Southern California fundraisers. He remains one of the state’s relatively few committed megadonors, along with Steven Spielberg, who also gave $1 million in June, and director J.J. Abrams and his wife, Kathleen McGrath, who each chipped in $500,000.

But Democrats worry that the reluctance emanating from Silicon Valley this year to commit to Priorities signals a serious financial weakness for Clinton, especially since her group is the lone major Democratic effort while Bush, Rubio and Ted Cruz each have potent super PACs of their own. One California Democratic strategist called it the “good progressives’ principled yet impractical distaste with super PACs,” a posture that’s particularly common among technology industry influencers, and one that’s dogged party officials since super PACs were created in 2010.

Case in point: Alan Patricof — a New York-based venture capitalist who spends substantial time in San Francisco and who regularly hosts Clinton fundraising events as one of her most prolific fundraisers — has chosen not to donate to Priorities.

The group keeps donors like Patricof apprised of its meetings and strategies, not entirely giving up on ideologically opposed individuals who might write checks once the political landscape gets messier in the general election.

But “I’ve met with them, they know my feelings. I’m certainly not adversarial, I’m just not participating,” Patricof explained. “I don’t want to, in any way, diminish the efforts of Priorities and what they’re trying to accomplish. Unfortunately, they have no choice but to participate in this inexorable bribe caused by Citizens United, to raise money."

It’s a problem Republicans will not have. The GOP’s wealthiest donors — from Sheldon Adelson to Paul Singer to Robert Mercer and the Ricketts family — are committed to funding this contest, in both the primary and the general, and they’ll use super PACs to do it. If Democrats were going to identify their own version of Adelson, said multiple fundraisers and party leaders, he or she would likely come from Silicon Valley.

Other area Democratic donors are busy with other projects. Steyer, who spent $74.3 million in the 2014 cycle according to a December POLITICO analysis, is funding his own environmental super PAC, NextGen Climate Action — to which he has already given $5 million in 2015. The former hedge fund manager hosted one of Clinton’s first campaign fundraisers last spring, but he has not given to any of her associated groups, aside from $250,000 sent from NextGen to American Bridge 21st Century, an opposition research group with ties to Clinton’s political machine.

Others still are skeptical of the urgency because they are simply not yet engaged with the election: Clinton’s primary challenger, Bernie Sanders, actively chose not to set up a fundraising presence in Silicon Valley at all.

And some tech world moguls are looking to the example of 2012 in justifying their own resistance to writing early checks, explained fundraisers and strategists briefed on their thinking. The big donations from Pincus, Khosla and Hoffman, for example, came only in the closing moments of that race, when the fever pitch was highest.

Meanwhile a handful of the tech luminaries who made rare forays into politics to fund Ro Khanna in his 2014 primary challenge of Silicon Valley Rep. Mike Honda were so turned off by the mudslinging against Khanna that they’re resisting the pro-Clinton effort’s pitches.

Khanna got support from local leaders, including Google’s Schmidt, Yahoo’s Marissa Meyer, Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg, and Salesforce.com’s Marc Benioff, but he and his backers were on the receiving end of whispers from pro-Honda forces that painted the donors as trying to buy a ongressional seat. Honda allies also reveled in the fact that Marc Leder — the Florida investor who hosted Mitt Romney for his infamous “47 percent” comment, but who has also given to other Democrats — contributed to Khanna, making some Democratic tech leaders feel tarred and less likely to jump back into the political fray in 2016.

Searching for donations of at least $1 million, Priorities has also found itself increasingly slowed by the campaign itself, which can now ask donors for checks of over $360,000 for its joint venture with the Democratic National Committee and state parties thanks to 2014’s McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission Supreme Court ruling.

The political operation surrounding Clinton has often encouraged contributors to give the legal maximum in “hard” campaign dollars before sending Priorities a large amount, so the field of people who can still afford to give $1 million to Priorities — after funding the campaign’s committees to the tune of $360,000 — is even smaller: Woods was the only donor to write six-figure checks to both the Hillary Victory Fund and Priorities as of the groups' most recent public disclosures.

But a handful of big ticket Democratic contributors who have yet to chip in for Priorities gave to the campaign’s fund in its opening days, including San Francisco’s Susie Tompkins Buell, a co-founder of Esprit and a close personal friend of Clinton’s. Even more donors have written the campaign’s committee six-figure checks since then.

“Tech folks will only give so much,” explained a Bay Area fundraiser who works directly with many of the region’s wealthiest Democrats. “And a lot of folks are saying, ‘If the Hillary campaign directly is asking for this money, I’ll give it to them. That way I’ll [hand] it to her, I can see her when I give it to her. I can sit next to her at the dinner party.'"