Steyer enters presidential race with bid
Billionaire intends to spend ‘at least $100M’ on cause
Tom Steyer, the former hedge fund investor turned impeachment activist, announced Tuesday that he will challenge President Donald Trump in 2020, reversing a previous decision not to enter the race.
In a video announcing his campaign, Steyer positioned himself as a populist outsider, railing against corporate interests that he described as holding too much sway over the political system.
“Americans are deeply disappointed and hurt by the way they’re treated by what they think is the power elite in Washington, D.C.,” Steyer said in the video. “And that goes across party lines, and it goes across geography.”
Included in the video were images of men who, Steyer seemed to imply, represented the excesses of corruption and greed, including Paul Manafort, Trump’s incarcerated former adviser; Bernard Madoff, the notorious Ponzi schemer; and Jeffrey Epstein, the investor who was indicted this week on charges of sex trafficking.
Steyer said in an interview he would hit the campaign trail quickly. After speaking at the liberal Netroots Nation conference in Philadelphia, he said he would campaign in the early primary state of South Carolina. He said he would unveil a plan for “structural changes” in the campaign finance system in the next few weeks and pledged to release his tax returns, though he did not set a deadline for doing so.
Steyer might be a questionable vessel for a populist message, as a billionaire financier in a party increasingly defined by concern for economic inequality and as a 62year-old white man in a Democratic Party preoccupied with racial diversity and gender equality.
Yet his candidacy instantly transformed the financial shape of the primary. Alberto Lammers, a spokesman for his campaign, said Steyer planned to spend “at least $100 million” on the race, starting with a round of television ads in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina.
That figure exceeds the total fundraising over the last three months by Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders and Kamala Harris combined. A $100 million budget would represent about half the cost of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 primary campaign. Most candidates who run for president spend a fraction of that sum.
Steyer’s opening message represents the latest incarnation of a figure who has played a highly unpredictable role in Democratic politics. In his announcement video, he made no mention of the issue that has consumed his political activities for the last two years — impeaching Trump — and instead borrowed from the rhetoric of leading Democratic candidates like Sanders and Warren.
Among the targets in his announcement video: fossil-fuel companies that he accused of torching the planet for short-term profits, drug companies he blamed for the opioid crisis and “banks screwing people on their mortgages.”
In the interview Tuesday, Steyer endorsed several policy stances that aligned him squarely, though not uniformly, with the progressive wing of his party. He said he supported decriminalizing unauthorized border crossings and expanding the size of the Supreme Court, and endorsed the creation of a government-backed health care option but not the elimination of private health insurance. People should shift toward government-backed care “by choice, not by fiat,” he said.