Tom Steyer has directed his political group to spend heavily on behalf of Terry McAuliffe. | AP Photos Steyer goes big in Va. gov race

Tom Steyer, the environmentalist billionaire who has mounted a national campaign opposing the Keystone XL pipeline, has directed his political operation to spend heavily in the Virginia governor’s race in support of Democrat Terry McAuliffe, POLITICO has learned.

Steyer, a California-based financier, instructed advisers on Friday to launch television ads starting this week. The paid-media blitz from his group, NextGen Climate Action, will be the opening salvo in what’s expected to be a much larger effort aimed at mobilizing and turning out climate-oriented voters in a key off-year gubernatorial race.


The enterprise will be a test both of Steyer’s individual influence in electoral politics, and of the impact of heavily-funded advocacy politics within the Democratic Party. The bet, for Steyer, is that making climate issues a prominent part of the Virginia election will nudge the center of national politics in a greener direction, shaping the political landscape for 2014 and 2016 and giving environmental interests a stronger hand to play in Washington policy debates.

( PHOTOS: Terry McAuliffe’s career)

It will be Steyer’s second major foray this year into electoral politics, after he funded a turnout operation in Massachusetts on behalf of now-Sen. Ed Markey in the special election to replace Secretary of State John Kerry. In 2012, he put about $30 million into a successful home-state ballot initiative, Proposition 39, which will require multi-state companies to pay higher taxes in California and put a percentage of the proceeds toward energy efficiency.

Plans for Steyer to play in Virginia have been in the works for some time now: his consultants have already polled the state and drawn up plans for an extensive voter contact and turnout effort. But the timetable for spending money on television accelerated last week in reaction to stepped-up advertising on the Republican side.

In a lengthy interview with POLITICO, Steyer outlined the thinking behind his decision to engage in Virginia, calling Republican nominee Ken Cuccinelli an environmentalist’s nightmare and describing the 2013 election as an opportunity to send a national message about the power of climate-oriented politics.

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“I would say there’s a very clear choice on this topic between these two candidates, and I think the citizens of Virginia deserve to understand both what the truth is and what the implications of that are,” Steyer said, in a wide-ranging conversation that began during a visit to Richmond and continued through his drive up to Washington D.C.

Climate has already become a flashpoint in the race between McAuliffe, the former chairman of the Democratic National Committee; and Cuccinelli, the sitting state attorney general. McAuliffe has run ads accusing Cuccinelli of a “witch hunt” against University of Virginia climate scientist Michael Mann, who was the subject of a probe by Cuccinelli’s office into whether Mann manipulated climate data. The Virginia Supreme Court later ruled that Cuccinelli did not have the authority to investigate Mann’s research, and other reviews cleared Mann of wrongdoing.

Cuccinelli, meanwhile, has said on the campaign trail that McAuliffe is an instrument of national liberal interests, including environmental groups hostile to Virginia’s historic connection to the coal industry. In addition to charging that McAuliffe will put fossil-fuel jobs at risk, Cuccinelli and his allies have attacked McAuliffe’s role in founding and promoting the company GreenTech Automotive, an electric-car manufacturer that has not produced the jobs or the cars it initially promised.

( Also on POLITICO: Terry McAuliffe’s rainmaker days)

Steyer’s involvement in the Virginia race is likely to raise the already-significant stakes in the debate over energy and the environment, elevating a set of issues that reflect the left-right cultural gap between McAuliffe and Cuccinelli.

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“It’s no surprise Terry McAuliffe is depending on yet another rich, national Democrat — instead of grassroots support from Virginians — in his campaign for governor,” Cuccinelli press secretary Anna Nix said. “Radical environmentalist Tom Steyer will be a strong addition to McAuliffe’s War on Coal, which will raise electricity prices on every Virginian and destroy the economy of Southwest Virginia. Unlike Ken Cuccinelli who has a long history of defending the coal industry and putting the needs of Virginians first, Terry McAuliffe once again shows that his loyalties lie with advancing the agendas of his campaign donors instead of doing what’s best for the Commonwealth.”

McAuliffe communications director Brennan Bilberry responded to Steyer’s planned entry into the campaign by taking aim at Cuccinelli’s “crusade against UVA, which drew rebukes from fellow Republicans and reflects a unique hostility toward science he doesn’t understand.”

“Cuccinelli’s harassment of the University of Virginia showed he was willing to waste taxpayer money and embarrass Virginia simply because climate science offends his personal ideology,” Bilberry said.

While Steyer’s first overt move in Virginia comes in the form of paid television advertising, he told POLITICO repeatedly that he views get-out-the-vote efforts as a better overall investment, along with digital advertising and other, less-traditional independent expenditure methods.

“Our going-in assumption is that the bulk of what we’re doing is field – is enabling the citizens to literally speak to each other,” Steyer said. Referring to the Prop. 39 fight, he explained: “Our sense in California was that technology enabled a lot of viewers to just skip our ads.”

He added on a wry note: “The other thing that’s true, as I’m sure you know, is the traditional way for consultants to get paid is through a percentage of the TV buy … So it’s like you say, you know, ‘There’s a flood in Afghanistan.’ And they’ll say, ‘We need a bigger TV buy.’”

The billionaire freely acknowledged that he was a newcomer to Virginia, but in a whirlwind tour of Richmond last week, he introduced himself to a number of prominent figures in the state political and clean-energy communities.

Steyer met in Virginia’s capital city Thursday with a collection of climate activists and another group of about 20 energy executives. One of those executives – Mike Healy of Skyline Innovations, who invited Steyer to Richmond in the first place – delivered a letter signed by several colleagues asking that Steyer use his financial firepower in the governor’s race.

The consensus in that meeting, Steyer said, was that the advanced-energy sector could pack a much bigger punch in state politics if it were better organized politically and more deliberate about pushing the message that green policies can translate into jobs. (And, it goes without saying, if a deep-pocketed out-of-state figure would be willing to deliver a nuclear-level strike against a politician like Cuccinelli.)

The cheerful hedge fund executive-turned-activist said he came away from Richmond convinced that Virginia is a “business-oriented state” that is primed to move in a greener direction. Voters, Steyer said, would be more persuaded of the value of environmentally safe energy if they heard about the number of jobs that Virginia’s clean-tech and energy efficiency firms can create, relative to the coal and fossil-fuel sector.

“Our experience has been that having a business voice talking about jobs is an essential part of talking about any economic change,” Steyer said. “If you get away from that, then you get away from what the human beings in this society care about.”

The Virginia coal sector, he said, gets “amazing deference for a whole bunch of reasons, including the fact that there’s very high unemployment there, that there’s not a second job if those jobs go away, the … toughness of that job and how painful it’s been for everybody involved.

“But there’s no sense of, what are the alternatives? How many jobs are we giving up by doing that? If we start going in a different direction, how much growth are we going to engender?”

Steyer and his advisers emphasized that the groups he met with in Richmond made it clear that his involvement in the state would be welcome – an important hurdle for Steyer, who said it’s his perception that parts of Virginia have “a really strong insider-outsider culture.” He explained that in his view, political advocacy only works when it matches up with authentic local sentiments.

“People in California do not want people in Virginia to come in and tell them what to do. I bet the same is true of Virginia, for people from California,” Steyer said. (In parts of coal country, in particular, Steyer said: “It doesn’t matter if you’re telling them to tie shoes; it’s a very strong, independent culture that wants to make up its own mind and the people don’t want to be told what to do. Hasn’t that been the cliché since they were shooting IRS agents?”)

Still, even before the visit to Richmond, Steyer’s team had laid the groundwork for a sustained and expensive investment in the governor’s race. On his car ride to Washington, Steyer placed a phone call to Democratic state Sen. Donald McEachin and made it plain that he intended to leave a big footprint in the 2013 election.

“We’d like to win with the message being clear, so that there’s a discussion coming out of it and a mandate of what the right things to do are,” he said, sitting feet away from a POLITICO reporter. “We have spent a lot of time thinking about this. It’s not like we’re coming from a standing start.”

During the same Richmond-to-D.C. trip, Steyer’s political advisers, including Tigercomm PR consultant Mike Casey and GMMB ad man John Rimel, urged their client to consider moving up plans for TV advertising to counter a new wave of ads from the Republican Governors Association. The RGA ads, which were booked early last week, totaled over $400,000 in broadcast and cable airtime statewide, according to two media-tracking sources.

The next day, Steyer convened a meeting of the various consultants working on his Virginia efforts. They included strategists from the media firm GMMB and the polling firm Benenson Strategy Group, which both worked for President Barack Obama in 2012, as well as the voter targeting and GOTV firms Grassroots Solutions and Winning Connections. His chief adviser, California-based Democratic strategist Chris Lehane, was not present at the meeting Friday but has steered Steyer’s political operation from the opposite coast.

After reviewing the full battle plan for the fall campaign, Steyer gave the go-ahead for immediate TV advertising, citing the RGA buy, and green-lighted the larger-scale effort for the Virginia general election.

For as much as he’s determined to make Virginia a test case for his brand of pro-business, pro-environment, left-of-center politics, Steyer had relatively little to say about McAuliffe, a man Steyer said he has met but does not know well.

“I think he would be a good governor,” Steyer said in the interview. “I think he’s pretty much a business Democrat. I hope it’s what Virginia wants. I’m a business Democrat.”

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story partially mischaracterized the effect of California’s Proposition 39.

CORRECTION: Corrected by: Nick Gass @ 08/06/2013 05:47 PM CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story partially mischaracterized the effect of California’s Proposition 39.