The billionaire activist

‘Unless you support impeachment, we’re not supporting you’

The billionaire activist lays down a 2020 litmus test.

By MAGGIE SEVERNS

Tom Steyer has built a formidable political organization that could give serious help to a presidential candidate in 2020, but the billionaire activist is on his own as the contest begins to take shape.

“In Washington, D.C., talking to pundits and congresspeople — it’s super lonely,” Steyer told POLITICO on Sunday during a visit to the District for a summit of his Need to Impeach organization. “Oh, God, inside the Beltway everybody thinks I’m a low-double-digit IQ.”

That’s because Steyer is continuing to focus his energy on one of the hardest-to-sell issues in Democratic politics today: calling for lawmakers to begin impeachment proceedings against President Donald Trump, an effort that he says should start immediately despite most party leaders’ repeated calls to wait until after special counsel Robert Mueller finishes his investigation.

Steyer, a hedge fund manager and environmentalist who recently chose not to pursue his own presidential bid, plans to spend $40 million in 2019 on the impeachment effort, working to galvanize the email list of 7 million supporters he’s gathered into an active grassroots army capable of pushing politicians up and down the ballot on the issue. But candidates currently exploring bids for president haven’t indicated they’re open to calling for Trump’s impeachment — a fact that doesn’t seem to daunt Steyer, who only grows more animated the more he rails about impropriety in Washington.

Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) and Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) have all stopped short of calling for impeachment when asked about it in recent months, instead focusing their comments on how Congress should protect Mueller’s Russia investigation.

“What I wish to be the highest priority, at least for the United States Congress, is that Bob Mueller be able to finish his investigation,” Harris said when asked about impeachment, shortly after announcing her presidential bid last week.

That kind of answer is maddening to Steyer, who likens it to Democrats trying to ignore “a fire in the kitchen” at a time when he’s seemingly one of the only people on the national stage willing to stand up and try to put the fire out.

“Trump said during the campaign, ‘I can murder someone on Fifth Avenue and it doesn’t matter,’” Steyer said. “It’s true — he can murder someone on 5th Avenue, and unless Robert Mueller says its murder, it doesn’t matter. People are not willing to step up and say, ‘This is absolutely unacceptable and un-American.’ And if you’re not willing to do that, then the president really is above the law.”

Critics say Steyer’s focus on impeachment is damaging Democrats’ reputation with their rank and file.

“I don’t know how many millions Tom Steyer has spent on television at this point on the subject of impeachment, but it’s a lot of millions, right? And I don’t sense any moving of the needle because of it,” said Jerry Crawford, an Iowa lawyer and party operative. “It just sounds like more partisan bickering to the public, which essentially has zero tolerance level for that.”

Warren, who has known Steyer for a long time and appeared with him last summer in a series of videos for his climate group, NextGen, has also explicitly mounted a campaign against money in politics, saying Democrats should say “no to the billionaires whether they are self-funding or whether they’re funding PACs” — an implicit dig at Steyer when he was one of the few considering funding their own campaigns. Her comments reflected a rising debate among Democrats about whether presidential candidates should eschew super PACs and other sources of unlimited money.

Steyer says he’ll see how his political organizing evolves in 2019 before deciding what his process may be for supporting a 2020 candidate, but he is increasingly using impeachment as a litmus test in looking at politicians.

“Unless you support impeachment, we’re not supporting you,” Steyer said on Sunday.

Though Steyer is often at odds with Democrats in Washington, he said everyone from TSA agents to the concession-stand operator at a movie theater have recognized him from his pro-impeachment television ads and voiced their support.

“Human beings who are registered as Democrats are on my side,” Steyer said. “Overwhelmingly.”

A December POLITICO and Morning Consult poll found that 69 percent of Democrats felt Congress should begin impeachment proceedings to remove the president from office, while 38 percent of voters overall agreed.

Need to Impeach is gathering 300 supporters for a training and strategy session in Washington on Monday, aimed at helping activists learn how to put pressure on their representatives and 2020 candidates around impeachment.

Steyer spent $120 million between his political organizations during the 2018 midterms, and had close to 1,000 staff members during the peak of the election cycle. During the government shutdown, the group was adding 25,000 new names a week to its pro-impeachment email list.

During the 2016 elections, Steyer held off on endorsing Hillary Clinton and tried to nudge the candidates to adopt aggressive clean-energy plans, frustrating the Clinton campaign. In building the impeachment organization, Steyer said, he drew lessons from his multi-year push on climate change, when he says he focused too much on waging information battles and not enough on grassroots organizing and correctly framing his message.

“With climate, I thought we had to win the argument,” he said. “I didn’t realize we had to win the fight.”

Steyer has focused intensely on impeachment since Trump’s election. But climate change has only ripened as an increasingly pressing political issue, said Mark Longabaugh, a Democratic strategist. Record heat and natural disasters, along with ongoing warnings from scientists about the potentially disastrous impact of global warming, have helped raise public consciousness.

“If I were him, I think we’re at a critical inflection point on climate and he ought to re-engage that important issue,” Longabaugh said in a recent interview. “And if he were to do that he would have more relevance on the political debate today, rather than being an outlier on impeachment.”