The League of Conservation Voters is something of an artifact of an earlier era. It was founded in 1969, long before the words “climate change” were on every environmentalist’s lips, and it doesn’t get the media attention that newer organizations like the Sunrise Movement that foreground young people have attracted. But the LCV’s influence can’t be overstated. It scores every federal legislator’s environment record, and the resulting grades are one of the simplest ways to judge lawmakers. (Democrats have very good LCV scores, Republicans have very bad ones.) Its “Dirty Dozen” list of politicians the LCV is working to defeat (almost always Republicans) is a handy guide to high-leverage races each cycle. Its advocacy has been full-throated, sometimes exceeding the bounds of the law (it got a $180,000 FEC fine after its 527 campaigned for John Kerry during the 2004 election).
And in comparison to other environmental groups, it puts a lot of money where its mouth is, having made $10 million worth of contributions during the 2020 election cycle while chipping in over $40 million in outside spending.
The PAC that serves as a vehicle for most of the group's political spending is called the LCV Victory Fund. Since spending around $10 million in the 2014 cycle in federal elections, it has steadily increased its footprint to $20 million in 2016 and $29 million in 2018. While the LCV raises money from members of all income levels, the Victory Fund gets a substantial portion of its funding from wealthy donors, including the British investment manager Jeremy Grantham (who has given the PAC more than $2 million each cycle from 2016-2020) and Michael Bloomberg (who contributed $5 million in 2018).
The LCV Victory Fund is part of an ecosystem of PACs that move money around in a sometimes bewildering series of transactions. In 2018, it contributed $11 million to other PACs, while $16 million went to the LCV’s own large-scale ad-buying operation. When it comes to those ads, the LCV seems to have become a big believer in negativity—the vast majority of its spending in 2018 was anti-GOP as opposed to being pro-Democrat. This approach seems to have been largely successful, with 11 of LCV’s Dirty Dozen House targets going down in defeat, along with a majority of its Dirty Dozen Senate targets. (Notably, most of the Senate candidates the LCV opposed were challengers, while its House targets were all incumbents; the LCV’s worst defeat of the cycle was also in the Senate, where Florida’s Rick Scott unseated incumbent Bill Nelson despite the Victory Fund spending $2.3 million to oppose him.)
The LCV Victory Fund doubled down in 2020, launching what the organization called “our most ambitious campaign in history.” In this cycle, they targeted 1.5 million voters in Arizona, Florida, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin—all key swing states. Boosted by $6.75 million from Democratic dark-money operation the 1630 Fund and $15.5 million from the LCV’s own coffers, the Victory Fund distributed some $41 million in total.
Once again, the Victory Fund went heavily negative. It spent over $9.8 million in attack ads on Donald Trump alone—named the “dirtiest of all time” by the LCV. When combined with the $7 million it spent in support of Biden, it was by far the most it has thrown at a presidential race. (It spent $2 million to oppose Trump in 2016.) The PAC’s other primary targets in negative spending were Senate races—$4.2 million against Steve Daines in Montana, $3.7 million against Joni Ernst in Iowa, and $1.5 apiece against South Carolina's Lindsey Graham and Arizona's Martha McSally. (The PAC also sent a few million to support Democratic candidates.) The results weren't great, because it turned out to be a lousy cycle for Senate Democrats; McSally was the only targeted incumbent who was unseated.
The LCV isn’t doing anything that other, newer green organizations don’t do. The conclusion among environmentalists is that electoral victories are necessary to combat climate change. Smaller groups, however, don’t have the dollars needed to influence Senate contests, though that chamber is where climate legislation has traditionally been killed. That partly explains the focus of the Sunrise Movement and others on primary races where they work to remove Democrats they judge insufficiently supportive of the Green New Deal.
The LCV is in a league (pun intended) above Sunrise and its ilk by virtue of its size, stature and the deep pockets of some of its donors (Mike Bloomberg gave the Victory Fund $5 million in 2018 and another $2.5 million in 2020). That means it can train its sights on bigger prey, including presidential and Senate races. The problem was that in 2020, it came up largely empty, except for the defeat of Trump.
