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House Democrats Court Big Donors at Weekend Getaway

Tom Steyer / AP
March 17, 2015

Update: This post and its headline have been corrected to reflect the fact that Tom Steyer has attended the getaway in the past. It is not clear if he will be attending this year's event.

High-dollar Democratic donors will attend a New Mexico retreat this weekend that has hosted by Rep. Ben Ray Luján (D., N.M.), who chairs the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, according to a January report in Politico.

Attendees in previous years have included billionaire environmentalist Tom Steyer, who spent upwards of $70 million during the 2014 election cycle.

Luján has already made a push to raise money for the party committee early in the cycle. He has been encouraging House Democrats to pay their dues early, and the chairman has himself shelled out $150,000. […]

The weekend getaways organized by Pelosi have drawn high-profile guests in the past, including Google’s Eric Schmidt, mega-donor and environmental activist Tom Steyer and California Gov. Jerry Brown.

NextGen Climate Action, the Super PAC Steyer founded in 2013, successfully backed two Democratic candidates that year: Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe and Massachusetts Sen. Ed Markey.

Its record the following year was less impressive. NextGen backed seven candidates—four for Senate and three for governors' mansions, all of them Democrats. Only three prevailed.

Polls moved in Republicans' direction after NextGen began running ads in all but one of the 2014 contests in which it was involved.