For Dems, Tom Steyer
San Francisco activist Tom Steyer’s NextGen Climate Super PAC said Monday that the billionaire Democrat will wage a campaign to put Republicans on the “hot seat” about climate change and spend “what it takes” for an aggressive new high-tech war room to track — and attack — GOP candidates in 2016.
For GOP, Charles Munger Jr.
A month after Charles Munger Jr. wrote his first $100,000 check to a political campaign, he got a taste of the chronic rejection familiar to California’s big Republican donors: The 2005 ballot measure he backed lost by a landslide.
Yet Munger, the son of a billionaire, went on to spend almost $78 million on scores of other campaigns.
The spending by the Palo Alto physicist has thrust him into an unlikely role for a man whose occupation is to research the fine points of protons and electrons: He is a central force in the Republican Party’s attempted comeback from its two-decade slide in California.
“If it weren’t for Charles Munger, the California Republican Party would have been driven into the sea at this point,” said Kevin Spillane, a GOP strategist.
A courtly academic who fancies bow ties and suspenders, Munger, 58, spent more than $11 million last year to help put Republicans in Congress and the Legislature, making him by far the state party’s biggest benefactor. His funding of Latino, female and moderate candidates has been crucial to the party’s effort to shed its image as a league of conservative white men.
Much of Munger’s money went to losers. But his funding of a few winners — such as Assembly members Catharine Baker in the Bay Area and David Hadley in the South Bay — was critical in denying Democrats a legislative supermajority.
With the $1.9 million he put behind moderates in Republican primaries last year, Munger also alarmed party operatives who prefer conservatives. Republican blogger Jon Fleischman said Munger’s spending was deterring some conservatives from running.
A campaign is less appealing, he said, when “you’re one heartbeat away from Charles Munger dropping $1 million on your head.”
http://www.latimes.com/local/politics/la-me-adv-munger-20150304-story.html#page=2