SAN JOSE — My Mai peered through her sunglasses at the Democrat vying to become her state’s next governor and decided to be brutally honest.
“It’s hard to vote for a billionaire.”
Tom Steyer, a former hedge fund manager turned major liberal financier, had just stopped her on her walk home from lunch to make his case. The 37-year-old tattoo specialist would have been convinced more easily were it not for the contradiction weighing on her:
How could a man who can splurge millions at will serve people worried about paying their next bill?
This was the question dogging Steyer during a recent weekend of campaigning in the Bay Area to lead a state where the rich are getting richerand income inequality runs rampant.
As Steyer launched an affordability-focused bus tour trailed by an entourage of cameramen and staffers, skepticism about his billionaire status also followed him. Voters pressed him about it at town halls. Demonstrators denounced it on signs they held at a workers rights rally he attended.
As one of the leading candidates to helm the bastion of liberal politics, Steyer represents a persistent tension for the Democrats. The party that promises to fight for the working class and bashes billionaires as the poster children for wealth disparities embraces affluent candidates.
When asked about his wealth, Steyer recounts growing up the son of a teacher and lawyer and becoming the odd one out in his family when he started a hedge fund. He says he turned his business acumen to advocacy on combating climate change and advancing progressive politics because wanted to help his community, the way his family taught him to.
“The biggest challenge for me will be to convince people that somebody everybody’s trying to label as a billionaire actually cares about them,” Steyer said in an interview.
Mai listened to him, her hands folded over the handle of the stroller holding her 9-month-old son. As a camera crew filmed their exchange, Steyer explained himself like this:
He didn’t inherit money. He made it on his own through a business he turned his back on over a decade ago. Since then, he and his wife have given much of his fortune away, and they plan to keep doing so.
“I see, okay,” Mai replied.
Mai’s concerns are characteristic of many Californians. They despise Trump. Health care is getting pricier. Buying a home in the state seems out of reach.
Running to address those woes, being a billionaire is a liabilityfor Steyer. His strategy relies on voters stomaching a billionaire if they see him as a class traitor.
After stepping down from his hedge fund, Farallon Capital Management, in 2012, Steyer turned his attention to the environment. He dedicated his spending to climate change ads and Democratic candidates who wanted to combat global warming. In 2017, he rebranded his four-year-old NextGen Climate organization to NextGen America as a broader liberal advocacy group.
He then spent millions to star in his own commercial urging Trump’s impeachment. That one call grew to a series of ads and town halls demanding the president’s impeachment, boosting Steyer’s political profile at the same time.
In 2019, he launched a longshot presidential bid, spending more than $260 million of his own money before losing to Joe Biden in the South Carolina primary and dropping out. Another billionaire, Mike Bloomberg, also competed in the race.
Now, Steyer has spent $175 million and counting on his California campaign. The money helped him blanket the state with advertising and poll second in a crowded pack despite having no government experience, according to a late-April CBS News-YouGov survey, though the largest share of voters were undecided.
Ballots are being mailed to voters ahead of California’s June 2 primary, where the top two vote-getters advance to the general election regardless of their political party. Alongside Steyer in the field are Republicans Steve Hilton and Chad Bianco, and a slew of Democrats, including former U.S. health secretary Xavier Becerra, former California congresswoman Katie Porter and San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan. There is no clear front-runner among them.
At one point, Eric Swalwell led the Democratic field. But the congressman’s withdrawal from the race following sexual misconduct allegations left Democrats scrambling to pick up his supporters and pull away from the pack.
Each candidate carries baggage. Voters and rival candidates have raised concerns about Porter’s temperament, Becerra’s support from oil companies and Mahan’s Silicon Valley donors.
Those opponents have hammered Steyer on his wealth. In their most recent debate last Wednesday, Mahan said the state doesn’t “need the leadership of a billionaire who’s now against everything he made his money in.” When discussing whether California was the best place for business owners, Porter declared: “I guess it was for him, because he became a billionaire off it, but for the rest of California businesses, it’s been a real struggle.”
On the trail, Steyer repeatedly says he favors taxing himself more and will vote for a November ballot measure imposing a one-time 5 percent tax on billionaires. He touts his endorsement from progressive groups including Our Revolution, the Bernie Sanders-founded group that opposes billionaires. At the worker’s rally he attended, he slipped on a red T-shirt that read: “Workers over billionaires.”
Still, the scrutiny has gone beyond the billionaire label to the investments that got him there.
Mai, the voter in San Jose, asked about stock he bought 22 years ago in a prison company that now runs Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention centers. How could he have done that and say on the campaign trail that he is in favor of abolishing ICE?
Steyer told her he’d messed up and sold that stock within a year.
“I thought that maybe we could do a better job than the public prison system in a time of mass incarceration,” Steyer said about the same investment at a town hall in Walnut Creek the day after speaking with Mai, a wealthy suburb in the East Bay. “Wrong.”
While he spoke there with a senior community, Susan Bennett typed copious notes on her phone.
Bennett, a 78-year-old retired nurse, saw the state’s biggest nurses union endorse Steyer weeks earlier. It made her curious to hear out a candidate she would have otherwise written off because of his wealth.
As he ticked off the ballot measures he helped pass in California, the climate change advocacy he funded, and laid out his stances on housing and health care, Bennett found herself clapping, nodding her head.
“He has an understanding of the problems that we’re facing,” she said.
Bennett left the town hall still undecided. She wanted to do her research and hear from Becerra, because she believes he has a better political résumé and that a Hispanic son of immigrants may be a better fit for a diverse state.
Still, Steyer’s wealth weighs on other voters.
Rebecca Nunez, 65, stood in the back of at a packed town hall in San Jose waiting to hear Steyer’s plan for housing. She thought of her three daughters, ages 26, 37 and 41, who she fears will never own a California home when they’re 10 times as expensive as they were when Nunez and her husband bought their Santa Clara home decades ago.
Steyer, she believes, can’t relate to such anxieties.
“That’s the itch that I got with him,” said Nunez, a retired library clerk. “He has money.”
At that town hall and others, Steyer frequently tells people there’s a zero percent chance he will die as a billionaire because of his philanthropy. He also argues that funding his own campaign means that he “can’t be bought,” that he doesn’t have to rely on funding from corporate interests and other groups that want something in return.
Steyer has called out his opponents for taking corporate money, singling out Becerra for donations from oil giant Chevron. Becerra has leapfrogged other candidates after Swalwell’s exit to hover near Steyer in the polls.
As he kicked off an affordability tour, Steyer rode a turquoise bus with the phrase “A California You Can Afford” splashed on the side in orange. The back of it displays his endorsements, including major labor unions and environmental advocacy groups.
He sat on a beige couch wearing his go-to campaign outfit: A baby-blue button-down shirt, black jeans hoisted by a beadwork belt he bought in Kenya and Nike Air Force 1 sneakers.
The television on the bus played a CNN news segment with the chyron: “Price of U.S. gas climbs to $4.39, experts expect another spike.”
“Did you see?” a staffer sitting across from him asked Steyer.
“I watch them every day,” he replied. “Multiple times. I do.”
After a 15-minute ride, Steyer stepped out into San Jose’s rally marking May Day, also known as International Workers’ Day, a celebration of workers and a call to strengthen workers’ rights. He walked through the rally, surrounded by signs held up around him that pilloried people like him.
“Billionaires rig the system,” one read, referencing oil.
Another one read “Boycott Billionaires, Takedown Trillionaires, Obliterate Oligarchs!!” in black marker.
A third, handmade on cardboard: “There are no ethical billionaires,” with red droplets dripping from the letters of “billionaires,” as if the word were bleeding.
Jamie Carriker, a high school physics teacher, made it herself to join her students at the rally.
“I’m hopeful that he’s not just here for the publicity and that he actually cares about what’s happening,” she said after spotting Steyer.
His showing there swayed her at least a hair: She hoped he saw her sign and would give him a chance. She’d already overheard that he was supportive of raising taxes for billionaires.
She planned to go home and look him up.
The post He’s a billionaire running as a class traitor. Will Democrats buy it? appeared first on Washington Post.
