Va. megadonor Michael Bills funds Democrats. But hes no party insider.
ALBEMARLE COUNTY, Va. — The man spending more money than anyone else to elect Democrats in Virginia this year has never met most of the candidates he’s funding and has little relationship with the party establishment.
Charlottesville investor Michael D. Bills, 65, founded the nonprofit Clean Virginia in 2018 to push for renewable energy, campaign finance reform and — most of all — tighter regulation of the state’s biggest public utility, Dominion Energy. His crusade against senior lawmakers of both major parties for being cozy with Dominion has made him something of an outcast even as his river of cash becomes impossible to ignore.
This year, with all 140 seats in the General Assembly up for election on a freshly redistricted map, Bills is doubling down on the prospect of a massive change in leadership. Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) might get all the attention for having a personal fortune and using his national profile to raise record contributions from billionaire conservatives around the country, but Bills has single-handedly kept pace with Youngkin and outdone every individual donor by far.
Bills has donated a total of $12.5 million over the 2022-2023 campaign cycle — about the same as Youngkin’s Spirit of Virginia PAC and significantly more than the Republican State Leadership Committee and the House Democratic Caucus, according to incomplete numbers compiled by the nonpartisan Virginia Public Access Project and the State Board of Elections. Most of Bills’s donations are to Clean Virginia, which then donates to candidates.
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If you add in his wife, Sonjia Smith, who contributes independently, the Bills-Smith family has donated a whopping $16.44 million — beyond what even Spirit of Virginia has given so far and likely putting them atop all donors, according to the VPAP numbers.
Almost all of the Bills-Smith cash has gone to Democrats, including in most of the tightest suburban races where control of the General Assembly could be decided. At a time when the party lacks an incumbent governor to rally around for fundraising, you might expect Bills or Smith to function as kingmakers.
But Smith is deeply private, and Bills professes no relationship with the party or its leadership, and no collaboration. “No, no and no,” he said in an interview. “And you can question, like, why, or whose fault or whose opportunity is missed there, or whatever.” He spread out his hands and shrugged.
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Several top Democrats declined to comment or did not respond to requests for comment for this article.
But if Democrats hold their majority in the Senate in the Nov. 7 elections, or if they flip the House of Delegates blue, that success will owe significant credit to Bills’s money. He and Smith will have helped steer a new generation of Democrats into power and thwarted Youngkin’s effort to enact a conservative agenda such as permanent tax cuts, looser environmental regulations and a 15-week ban on abortions, with exceptions. A blue wave in Virginia would also undercut any hope Youngkin has of making a last-minute presidential bid.
So what would Bills want for all that?
That’s the big question. Bills insists he’s just out to help elect good candidates. And, along the way, a more tangible goal: to take Dominion Energy down a political peg or two. Dominion happens to be running neck-and-neck with Bills and Spirit of Virginia in current campaign donations, according to VPAP — though the company gives evenly to Democrats and Republicans.
A challenge to Dominion
It’s tempting to look at Bills as the parallel-universe anti-Youngkin. Like the governor, he’s tall and slim, has four (grown) children, and has amassed a huge fortune in the world of finance and investing.
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Bills, 65, lives on a 140-acre estate outside Charlottesville. While Youngkin climbed the ladder to become co-CEO of the Carlyle Group private equity firm before stepping down to run for office, Bills made his fortune at Goldman Sachs in New York and with Tiger Management before starting his own asset management firm.
Bills and Smith began dating at Hampton High School in Hampton, Va., and both were from career Air Force families that had traveled a lot. They wanted to put down roots and wound up, 25 years ago, in an old house in the rolling hills outside Charlottesville. Both Bills and Smith had attended the University of Virginia, and his parents had settled nearby in Lynchburg.
The woods and meadows surrounding their home gave Bills a chance to do something with his burgeoning interest in the environment. Over time, he covered much of the property with native plants. Fencing keeps out deer, and Bills has invited teams of scientists to study its wildlife. His investing firm is called Bluestem after the hardy grass that grows there — it can be cut, subjected to drought or even burned and always grows back, he said, symbolizing “persistence.”
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Worried about human-caused climate change, Bills set out on a long-term project to offset all the carbon he has put into the atmosphere over a lifetime of travel. His house and outbuildings all use geothermal heat. The family’s cars are all electric. He has reached a goal of producing more energy than he consumes, thanks to solar panels that cover the roof of a barn and part of an adjacent field.
It was while installing the first of the solar panels years ago that Bills says he first ran up against Dominion Energy. The regulations and costs of setting up his own power station, he said, were needlessly onerous.
Asked about those complaints, a spokesman for Dominion wrote in a statement that “we not only make solar easy we are one of the leaders of solar development in the nation.”
In the early 2000s, Bills served as chief investment officer for U-Va.’s endowment. One of his board members was Thomas F. Farrell II, a longtime senior executive at Dominion who later became the utility’s CEO and chairman before dying of cancer in 2021. Bills said the two had a “positive relationship” and didn’t discuss his mounting concerns about Dominion.
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The giant utility, which is a state-regulated monopoly, has long been characterized as the fourth branch of Virginia government because of its outsize influence in Richmond. Though considered well-run — its stock a staple for longtime Virginia residents and retirees — Dominion wields extraordinary power to help write complex regulatory laws at the General Assembly. Its influence arguably peaked in 2015 with the passage of a law that protected Dominion from the State Corporation Commission’s ability to review rates and order refunds to customers.
Bills said he grew increasingly frustrated with what he saw as Dominion’s ability to stifle efforts to spread affordable renewable energy, so he took a look at Dominion’s political giving — which under the state’s lax campaign finance laws is virtually unrestricted. “I thought, gee, they’re a big company … they must be flooding the legislature with money,” Bills said.
Instead, he found Dominion’s contributions added up to something like $12 million over a decade, which seemed like a bargain compared with its state-regulated profits of many times that amount over the same period, he said. “It was legal — corrupt, morally wrong, repugnant, but legal,” Bills said. “You kind of realize that’s not the system that we should have.”
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Dominion, not surprisingly, rejects Bills’s characterization.
“Our mission and our contributions are transparent. We are proud of our record of providing reliable, affordable and increasingly clean energy to our customers,” Dominion spokesman Jason Williams said in a statement. “Some operate in secret both in their contributions and their agenda. To the extent billionaire Mr. Bills is pursuing a deregulated model, such as the one that failed the citizens of Texas while lining the pockets of others, we believe our approach is better.”
A ‘strained’ relationship
Bills, for the record, is not a billionaire — he said his net worth is less than Youngkin’s, which is estimated at more than $400 million. But he does have a fortune big enough that when he saw Dominion’s level of giving, he thought: “I could offset that money.”
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In 2017, Bills pledged support to then-Lt. Gov. Ralph Northam for the Democratic nomination for governor. But Smith supported an old family friend instead — former Democratic congressman Tom Perriello. Though Northam won the nomination and the governorship, Perriello’s candidacy headlined a new wave of liberal Democrats in Virginia in reaction to the presidency of Donald Trump, who was unpopular in the state.
The party made unexpected gains in the House of Delegates that year. Sensing change, Bills huddled with Perriello, who introduced him to his former chief of staff, Brennan Gilmore, a native of Lexington, Va., who had served in the State Department and worked with Perriello during the Obama administration.
The three hatched the idea for Clean Virginia, a nonprofit that Bills would fund and Gilmore would run. Its key tactic: If a candidate would pledge not to take money from Dominion or own stock in the company, Clean Virginia would donate instead.
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The group’s first big election cycle was 2019, the year Democrats won unexpected majorities in both the House and Senate with a new and diverse generation of candidates. Many of them had taken the Clean Virginia pledge, but many establishment Democrats had been chastised by the Bills group for taking Dominion money — including two of the most powerful Democrats: Sen. Richard L. Saslaw (Fairfax), who became Senate majority leader, and Del. Eileen Filler-Corn (Fairfax), who became the first woman to serve as House speaker.
Filler-Corn did not respond to a request for comment for this article, and Saslaw responded by sending an email linking to an article defending Dominion as having low consumer electricity rates. In a move that irritated even new-guard Democrats, Clean Virginia also donated to a couple of extremely right-wing, pro-Trump Republicans — Sen. Amanda F. Chase (Chesterfield) and Del. David A. LaRock — because they renounced Dominion donations.
Clean Virginia has since renounced LaRock and Chase and said it revised its giving standards to emphasize, in part, respecting the “integrity of the democratic process.” This year it has given a total of $175,000 to four Republican candidates. It also has backtracked on the idea of a “pledge,” which had drawn criticism as being a quid pro quo.
Former delegate David Toscano, a Charlottesville Democrat who served as House minority leader until 2018 and was something of a mentor to Filler-Corn, said Bills is a conundrum for the Democratic establishment.
“It’s fair to say the party’s relationship with him is complex and strained,” Toscano said. “On the one hand, his money is really important to [candidates being able to] tell their story. On the other hand, he has occasionally targeted Democratic incumbents for no reasons other than they had taken some money from Dominion. … I recognize his progressive bona fides but I’m a little worried about his ability to disrupt incumbents.”
That disruption is part of what appeals to Del. Sally L. Hudson (D-Charlottesville), who won Toscano’s seat in the House when he did not seek reelection during the blue wave of 2019.
“How you work within a broken system to build a better one is a tough challenge,” she said.
Hudson ran unsuccessfully this year for the Democratic nomination for state Senate in the Charlottesville area, and her campaign was another example of how Bills and Smith are sometimes at odds: Smith supported Hudson, but Bills made modest donations to both Hudson and her opponent, Sen. R. Creigh Deeds, who won the nomination.
Smith is a more overtly Democratic donor, and while she declined to be interviewed for this article, she emailed a lengthy statement outlining her political outlook. Protecting access to abortion has long been her top issue, along with improving public schools (which all four of her children attended) and fostering diverse candidates.
Democratic Party of Virginia Chairwoman Susan Swecker declined to comment for this article, as did House Minority Leader Don L. Scott Jr. (D-Portsmouth). Scott has taken money from Dominion, as has his GOP counterpart, House Speaker Todd Gilbert (Shenandoah).
But a Youngkin political adviser was eager to take up the subject of Bills and his millions.
“It’s a lot of money. … It’s really stunning,” said Zack Roday, a spokesman for Spirit of Virginia. Bills is pushing Democrats to the left, he said, promoting an unrealistic renewable energy policy that will raise prices and harm Virginia consumers.
“It’s the epitome of the special interest at work,” Roday said.
Yet early this year, Youngkin and Bills were on the same side as the General Assembly passed a major utility regulation bill that restores the State Corporation Commission’s power to oversee Dominion and issue rebates to consumers. Clean Virginia was among several environmental groups that worked on the legislation, and they credit its passage to a change in attitude among lawmakers — especially the crop of Democrats that have been elected with Clean Virginia money.
Several big companies had also pushed for the bill. And Youngkin was a major factor in swaying Republicans in the name of consumer protection. Many observers also pointed out that Dominion didn’t help its relationship with Youngkin when it was outed as contributing to a group that ran ads opposing him during the 2021 governor’s race.
After that legislative win, Bills and Gilmore briefly considered whether Clean Virginia had served its purpose and could be disbanded. But they decided otherwise. And for this year’s elections, with control of the General Assembly at stake and Youngkin setting fundraising records to pursue his conservative agenda, they wound up giving more than ever.
“Michael has kind of defaulted into saving the day on that,” said Perriello, who views Bills and Clean Virginia as helping to usher in “generational change” in the Democratic Party.
Bills said that he isn’t consciously trying to counter Youngkin or his money but that he sees several clear goals, including pushing for environmental protections and close oversight of utilities.
“We’re not trying to put Dominion out of business. We want a properly regulated utility,” he said.
That includes pushing for campaign finance reform to limit the ability of big corporations to massively underwrite political campaigns, Bills said. Until then, Bills, Gilmore and Smith all see their mission as supporting candidates who otherwise wouldn’t be able to compete against well-funded opponents.
Campaign finance reforms, of course, would take away their own ability to make unlimited donations. And that’s fine with Bills.
“I don’t think anybody should have to do this,” he said, “or should be able to do what I’ve done.”
correction
A previous version of this article incorrectly reported that Michael Bills gave a donation to R. Creigh Deeds but not to his opponent, Del. Sally L. Hudson (D-Charlottesville), in a state Senate Democratic primary. He gave to both candidates. The article has been corrected.
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