Billionaire Tom Steyer, who had been polling near the top of the leaderboard for California governor, sank more than $213 million of his own money into what now increasingly looks like a futile bid.
While the Associated Press has not officially called the primary contest, a week after polls closed, the vote count as of Tuesday afternoon had Steyer in third.
With 83% of the vote counted, Xavier Becerra, a Democrat, has already advanced to the general election with 27.7%. Republican Steve Hilton has 25.1%, while Steyer, a Democrat, has 22.4% (215,734 votes), placing second and third, respectively. California uses a jungle primary, meaning all candidates, regardless of party, compete in one race in June. The top two winners go on to the November runoff.
Combined with a failed bid for president in 2020, in which he received zero delegates, Steyer’s out-of-pocket expenses now total an eye-watering $557,781,638.
“I think it’s time for Tom Steyer to stop wasting his money and everyone’s time running for elected office,” Jeff Burton, a former senior National Republican Congressional Committee official and partner at Maven Advocacy, told the Washington Examiner.
Steyer’s decision to pour $213 million into his gubernatorial bid helped drive candidate self-funding in California to unprecedented levels this election cycle.
“The way Tom Steyer and Rick Jackson [a Republican running for governor in Georgia] are burning through cash, I am wondering if they are in a real-life remake of Brewster’s Millions,” David McLaughlin, a Democratic political expert, told the Washington Examiner. Brewster’s Millions is a 1985 comedy in which the main character must spend $30 million in 30 days, with nothing to show for it, to claim his full $300 million inheritance.
In California, candidates across the ballot have collectively invested roughly $250 million of their own money into their campaign coffers, according to finance records. That figure is more than eight times what candidates spent on themselves during the 2022 governor’s race and the highest amount recorded since California began maintaining digital campaign finance records in 1999.
The scale of Steyer’s investment eclipses nearly every self-funded campaign in modern state history. One of the few comparable efforts came in 2010, when Meg Whitman spent $144 million of her personal fortune in an unsuccessful bid for California governor. At the time, her self-funded spending shattered all previous records for an individual candidate in U.S. election history.
California has seen other wealthy candidates bankroll statewide campaigns over the years, though at far smaller levels. Steve Poizner contributed $14 million to his 2006 insurance commissioner campaign, Eleni Kounalakis invested more than $8 million in her 2018 lieutenant governor run, while Yvonne Yiu spent nearly $6 million during her 2022 controller campaign.
DESANTIS RIPS CALIFORNIA VOTING COUNT DELAYS: ‘IT’S PATHETIC’
In this year’s primary race to succeed Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), Democrat Saikat Chakrabarti spent nearly $9 million of his own money on his campaign, the largest self-funded congressional primary effort in California history.
Chakrabarti did not advance in the runoff.