Steyer Campaign Press Release - Third Quarter FEC Filing Shows Tom Steyer 2020 Campaign Raised $2M

(SAN FRANCISCO, October 10, 2019) — Today, Tom Steyer's presidential campaign announced today that it has raised over $2 million since launching on July 9, 2019. The campaign will file its third quarter Federal Elections Commission (FEC) report on October 15, the first one since Steyer announced his run.

The campaign's first FEC filing will also show that the Steyer campaign has built a strong showing of grassroots support both nationally and in the early states that have quickly allowed him to qualify for both the October and November Democratic debates. The campaign's total individual contributing donors for the quarter is 166,119, for an average of a little over $12 per donation.

"The campaign's success is directly tied to Tom's experience in creating national grassroots movements," said Campaign Manager Heather Hargreaves. "Tom's late entry into the race meant that we needed to move swiftly to catch up with the other candidates who have been running since last year. We built an organization in the early states quickly and have been using a wide-array of communications platforms, and we can see definitively that Tom's message of breaking the stranglehold corporations have on our democracy is resonating with voters. That's how Tom qualified for the October and November debates in less than three months."

The Steyer campaign has not held a single fundraiser, nor has it prioritized fundraising to its email list. Tom is not taking money from corporate PACS, nor accepting contributions from the fossil fuel industry.

Campaign COO Chris Fadeff added: "Our campaign is built around Tom's principles of equity, valuing staff, and being cognizant of our footprint in the world. We put in place standards to meet these principles. We pay our staff a living wage, and want to ensure that all people can afford to work on this campaign. We accounted for the fact that the campaign is headquartered in the most expensive metropolitan area in the country and the salaries of our staff that work in San Francisco reflect that. The campaign pays 100% of benefits, offers a student loan reimbursement, and provides Sunday childcare for parents coming into the office with their children."

The workplace policies the Steyer campaign has put in place are meant to attract top talent, recruit staff to work in San Francisco, and catch up with campaigns that have already hired hundreds of staff.

The campaign notes that Steyer, all campaign staff, and the candidate's family fly commercial. In the spirit of running an emissions neutral campaign, the Steyer campaign has purchased carbon offsets for Q3 and will continue to do so through the remainder of the campaign.

Hargreaves added: "We've felt the need to align our campaign's employment practices with Tom's message of economic empowerment. We are aware of at least one labor union that has been reaching out to our staff and we intend to voluntarily recognize the first labor union that can demonstrate majority support."

Following Steyer's pragmatic philosophy on spending and the belief that presidential campaigns are a place to change conventional wisdom about spending practices, the campaign said that it's compensating its television ad makers and television ad buyers on a flat fee basis, not on a commission structure that is common in democratic politics. "No one is being compensated based on how much money the campaign spends on television," Hargreaves concluded.