FRESNO, Calif. _ Despite having arrived later than most to the 2020 presidential race, billionaire Tom Steyer on Monday said he's gaining ground, as he opened a new office in Fresno.
The 62-year-old candidate _ one of 15 candidates seeking the Democratic nomination _ planned a kickoff gathering at his Bullard Avenue office after touring a local pipefitters training facility.
Steyer is an outspoken opponent of President Donald Trump, having started the Need to Impeach campaign in October 2017. The petition has gathered more than 8 million signatures, which Steyer called "a huge reason" why Congress carried out the impeachment.
"He is the most corrupt president in American history. My goal in this always is to get American people to have their voices heard," Steyer said in an interview with The Fresno Bee. "I felt all along that the only thing that was going to make Washington do the right thing was if the American people raised our voice."
After making more than $1 billion as the founder of Farallon Capital, Steyer left the investment firm in 2012.
Steyer says he's been involved in grassroots efforts related to school lunches and providing access to banking in underprivileged areas like Fresno.
His political action committee Nextgen America contributed $230 million to Democrats in the 2014, 2016 and 2018 campaign cycles. He announced his run for office in July, pledging to spend $100 million of his own money on the campaign.
Steyer qualified for the Democratic debate earlier this month, though he's polling in the single digits. He was polling this month nationally at 2 percent, according to Morning Consult, and 9% in the early primary states of Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada.
"I'm late to this game and I've gone up every week. And I've gone up since then, so we'll see," he said. "I look at this and I think it's a wide-open race. Probably two-thirds of primary voters haven't made up their mind."
Steyer says he knows the San Joaquin Valley.
A native of New York, Steyer is now based in San Francisco. A bank and nonprofit called Beneficial State Bank that he started with his wife, Kat Taylor, in Oakland has since established locations in Fresno, Visalia and Porterville.
He also held a roundtable conversation in Fresno with other leaders, like civil rights activist Dolores Huerta, in December 2018 to talk about the Valley's notoriously poor air and water quality.
Those Valley communities, and many others, are home to a large swath of low-income families. Many are working class people of color, plus a high percentage of Latino voters call the Valley home.
Fresno has drawn other candidate visits. Three Democratic presidential candidates have visited Fresno, so far � Julian Castro, Pete Buttigieg and Bernie Sanders.
Sanders opened a campaign office in Fresno in November. Civil rights activist Shaun King will be there at next week's Art Hop stumping for Sanders.
Steyer says his appeal to Latino voters is evident not only by his work in the Valley, but his contributions to undocumented immigrants fighting to stay in the country. Steyer says he's given about $3 million in the past two years to undocumented immigrants battling deportation.
Steyer said he and his wife have worked with immigrant communities going back to at least 1994's state Prop 187, a Gov. Pete Wilson-led effort to prohibit undocumented immigrants from receiving health care, public education and other services.
"We could see there was a racist reaction then in California, exemplified by people like Pete Wilson and the Republican Party that was trying to react against immigration _ especially against Latino immigration," he said. "We thought that was wrong."
"Mr. Trump is a much more virulent racist Pete Wilson, vilifying and treating Latinos specifically terribly," he continued. "I see that as a continuation of the exact same thing."
Climate change has continually ranked at the top of Steyer's stated priorities though he has been shadowed by his time with Farallon Capital, a group that invested hundreds of millions of dollars into coal mining and coal-fired plants in Asia. Though he has divested from the industry, some of those plants are expected to operate into 2030.
"Really, I see this as I'm in exactly the same position as every other American, which is we all grew up in a fossil fuel world," he said. "I'm sure (many people) got on a bus that had an internal combustion engine. You weren't doing something intentionally bad. You were just living in the world. Now we all have to make the same change."
Steyer noted he's since taken the Giving Pledge _ which means he promised to give away the bulk of his wealth in his lifetime to philanthropic or charitable causes _ and has worked for more than 12 years on climate change solutions.
Among his other top priorities, he's also proposed adding term limits to the Senate, expanding the number of justices on the Supreme Court and breaking corporate influence on the government. He said on Monday he supports California High-Speed Rail, which he said would be even more valuable when it can reach the Silicon Valley.
Steyer calls himself a Washington outsider who can challenge Trump and corporate greed by using his own business acumen.
"My basic thesis is that the federal government is broken," he said. "That it's been purchased by corporations, and until we take back the government, we're not getting any of the progressive things American citizens want in terms of health care and education and living wage and clean air and clean water."
