Did Bay Area billionaire Tom Steyer’s $65M gamble to make climate change an election issue pay off?

Bay Area billionaire Tom Steyer poured more than $65 million into the midterm elections in an attempt to make climate change a top tier issue for voters — and lay the groundwork for an expanded effort in 2016.

But with Republicans trouncing Democrats in races across the nation and gaining control of the Senate, the environment appears to have lost big, and some political experts say Steyer just wasted a fabulous amount of his personal fortune.

Steyer and his NextGen Climate Action superPAC focused on seven key races and backed the Democrat in each race; the candidate he backed won in three. The biggest victory came in New Hampshire, where Democrat Jeanne Shaheen narrowly defeated Republican Scott Brown.

“We are very happy about New Hampshire. Michigan was also a really great result,” Steyer said in an interview Wednesday. “I feel as if we did better than we expected, and we are in this for the long run. I feel energized. I am not feeling down one iota.”

Steyer focused on four Senate races in Colorado, Iowa, New Hampshire and Michigan. Republicans won in Coloroda and Iowa, while Democrats won in Michigan and New Hampshire, two pivotal states that managed to beat back the red tide. Steyer also focused on gubernatorial races in Florida, Pennsylvania and Maine. Republican Govs. Rick Scott in Florida and Paul LePage in Maine were re-elected; Democrat Tom Wolfe won in Pennsylvania.

“It was a waste of money,” said Andy Smith, director of the UNH Survey Center. “Climate issues weren’t a major issue in the campaign. Shaheen focused on the fact that Brown isn’t from New Hampshire, and Brown linked Shaheen to President Obama. If Steyer and NextGen had an impact, it was largely on the margins.”

Steyer and his camp stress that they have created an infrastructure — which includes identifying 250.000 “climate voters” — for the long haul. And while Democrats were playing defense across the country, Steyer used climate change as a way to draw sharp distinctions between candidates in tight races.

“This is a multi-cycle fight that we have to win,” Steyer strategist Chris Lehane said in a text message late Tuesday. “While this was a challenging cycle for Democrats all over the country, this was a cycle where climate was used offensively.”

Political observers note that Steyer’s influence — and that of other wealthy individuals who increasingly act as kingmakers in elections — must be measured in several ways.

“Tom Steyer may not have put climate on the agenda in voters’ minds, but he certainly put it on the agenda for politicians and candidates,” said Daniel Newman of Maplight.org, a Berkeley nonprofit that tracks money’s influence on politics. “Politicians need a lot of money to run for office, and they are competing for donor dollars, not just votes. So one person has the ability to play a huge role in not just who can run for office but what is being discussed.”

According to the Center for Responsive Politics, Steyer was by far the largest known single donor in the 2014 elections. But several fundraising organizations, including 501(c)4 groups, are not required to disclose their donors — making it possible that other wealthy individuals, such as industrialists Charles and David Koch, who support conservative candidates, spent far more.

“There’s no doubt we are the David to their Goliath,” Steyer said. “This is why we did what we did. I am highly confident that in all of the states, we were outspent by a lot.”

Corey Cook, a professor of politics at the University of San Francisco and director of the Center for Public Service and the Common Good, said Steyer has been transparent about his effort to try to level the playing field, or make it a fairer fight.

“There’s clearly a lot of money on the other side from the coal and oil industry,” Cook said. “Steyer has positioned himself as the countervailing force. He stands apart in terms of his national focus, the amount of money he’s spent and the way he tried to influence elections in several states.”

In Michigan, Steyer and NextGen backed Democrat Gary Peters in his the Senate race against Republican Terri Lynn Land. Steyer visited southwest Detroit and residents of the 48127 ZIP code, which NextGen called the dirtiest ZIP code in the country. Peters, as well as Shaheen, mentioned clean energy in their victory speeches.

A New Yorker who earned his MBA from Stanford’s Graduate School of Business in 1983, Steyer fell in love with California and never went back east. He founded the hedge fund Farallon Capital Management in 1986 but stepped down in 2012 to focus on philanthropy and politics.

Steyer’s first foray into California politics was in 2010, when he co-chaired and gave $5 million to the successful campaign against Proposition 23, a measure to suspend California’s landmark global warming bill. Next, he chaired and bankrolled Proposition 39, forcing out-of-state businesses to calculate tax liability based on the percentage of their sales in California; it will bring the state roughly $1 billion a year, to be spent on energy efficiency and clean-energy projects at public buildings and schools.

Some have suggested that Steyer may run for public office one day, but that seems unlikely.

“This is a fight that has to be fought, and we know this is a long road,” Steyer said about the urgency of climate change and the politics around it. “I have no plans right now” to run for office.

Contact Dana Hull at 408-920-2706. Follow her at Twitter.com/danahull.