Dominion Energy isn’t the only lightly regulated monopoly throwing money at Virginia politicians.
There’s multimillionaire Michael Bills, who together with wife Sonjia Smith and his political action committee, Clean Virginia, are spending on state campaigns more than four times as much as Dominion, the electricity giant Bills vows to bring to heel.
Their generosity — it’s largely directed at left-leaning Democrats — is eye-popping, even in Virginia, one of 11 states with no limits on contributions in state elections. The only rule for political money here: It must be disclosed.
These days, the Charlottesville couple and Clean Virginia — combined they have committed about $6.7 million so far this cycle — have a monopoly on big-dollar donations to select candidates. They offer a quid pro quo: cash to candidates who refuse Dominion donations.
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Smith and the PAC gave $750,000 of the $1.8 million reported in the just-concluded fundraising period by their choice for the gubernatorial nomination, former Del. Jennifer Carroll Foy of Prince William. About 42% of Carroll Foy’s harvest came from Smith and Clean Virginia, to which Bills recently steered an additional $3 million from his hedge-fund fortune.
But include contributions from last year and total giving to Carroll Foy from Smith and the PAC swells to $1.1 million. And from these two cash spigots gushed a third of the candidate’s total fundraising.
Outsized contributions by individuals are not new in Virginia.
Many of the people who wrote the fattest checks — few were household names, though some became such because of their largess — have been largely forgotten, died or have been overshadowed by succeeding waves of mega-donors: R.G. Moore, a Hampton Roads home builder; John Kluge, a broadcasting magnate from Charlottesville; retailing pioneer Sydney Lewis of Richmond; Bahman Batmanghelidj, a Northern Virginia developer, and Patricia Cornwell, the crime author who lived in Richmond.
In 1972, J.D. Stetson Coleman, an oil executive from horse country and a national Republican benefactor, gave $200,000 for TV commercials that would lift Bill Scott to an improbable victory for U.S. Senate over the incumbent Democrat, Bill Spong, who was seeking a second term.
Of all people, Scott was shocked by Coleman’s munificence. Scott feared it would be seen by the public as a plutocrat purchasing a politician.
Carroll Foy — along with three others badly trailing for the nomination Terry McAuliffe, a master fundraiser who took $10,000 from Smith in his first win for governor in 2013 — hasn’t such concerns.
Rather, Carroll Foy welcomes giant checks from Smith and Clean Virginia as ammunition in the fight to make them illegal, replacing Virginia’s sky’s-the-limit system with caps on contributions, banning donations by utility monopolies such as Dominion and Appalachian Power, and prohibiting politicians from using campaign dollars for personal purposes.
In other words, Carroll Foy and her bankrollers refuse to unilaterally disarm. They see nothing contradictory in operating by rules that, they say, have corrupted politics but somehow can uncorrupt it. Their logic: Our big money is good because it protects people. The utilities’ big money is bad because it protects profits.
Brennan Gilmore, who runs Clean Virginia, says Bills and the PAC are using their cash as a counterweight to that of Dominion: “It is an equal and appropriate reaction to our system of government.”
The Oracle of Charlottesville, Larry Sabato, isn’t buying any of it.
“I resent when people present themselves as saints and others as sinners,” said the University of Virginia politics analyst, adding that voters should be suspicious of economic power because sooner or later it is leveraged for favors only elective officials can deliver.
Magnifying wariness over the Bills-Smith-Clean Virginia money machine is the source of its lucre, the Bills-led hedge fund, Bluestem Asset Management. Hedge funds are complex schemes that, while regulated by the federal government, can be opaque, providing little information to the public on their investments.
By industry standards, Bluestem is small, managing for about 130 individuals and institutions $2.8 billion — up from $1.8 billion a year ago, according to its filings. Paydays are big, with fees based on up to 2% of an investor’s grubstake and 20% of what a fund generates for its customers.
We’re talking many millions of dollars.
From that spins off six-figure contributions that, for Bills-Smith-Clean Virginia, haven’t produced a lot of winners, but get a lot of attention.
Even that of a prospective House speaker.
Ahead of the 2019 election in which Democrats took back the legislature, Smith gave $100,000 to Sally Hudson, an economist readying to challenge for renomination then-House Minority Leader David Toscano of Charlottesville. Toscano had plenty of money and said he was confident he would win.
But the Smith donation was a signal Hudson would be well-financed. And that had Toscano — a Dominion skeptic who had refused to take the anti-Dominion pledge — thinking a quiet retirement was better than a bruising campaign.
As Toscano, now writing a book on Virginia’s changing politics, put it, “It had the impact of accelerating things.”
Contact Jeff E. Schapiro at (804) 649-6814 or jschapiro@timesdispatch.com. Follow him on Facebook and on Twitter, @RTDSchapiro.