Soros signed on as an early backer of Obama during the 2008 campaign, but spent only about $5 million on political causes that cycle, according to a tally by Bloomberg that doesn't include undisclosed donations to political nonprofits. He spent even less in 2012, even though the Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling prompted a flood of new seven-figure contributions that year.
At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland that January, he remarked to Reuters that some hard-right candidates would provide a big contrast with Obama but "there isn't all that much difference" between the president and Mitt Romney, the eventual Republican nominee. He also remarked that "a lot of the talent has left" Obama's administration.
A few months later, Soros told a Clinton confidant that he wished he hadn't backed Obama in the primary four years earlier.
"He said he's been impressed that he can always call/meet with you on an issue of policy and he hasn't met with the president ever," Neera Tanden said in a 2012 e-mail to Clinton, who was then serving as Obama's Secretary of State. "He regretted his decision in the primary -- he likes to admit mistakes when he makes them and that was one of them."
The e-mail was one of thousands of Clinton's messages that the State Department later made public, several of which show what a warm reception Soros got from her office. They show him planning a meeting with Clinton to request funding for a university he supports; recommending a few names of potential mediators for a crisis in Albania; and having a long talk with one of her aides about the situation in Burma. Over the past few years, Soros' charities have given between $1.5 million and $6 million to the Clinton Foundation.
Soros's biggest contribution this year is a total of $7 million to Priorities USA, the main super-PAC supporting Clinton. Another $1 million went to American Bridge, an opposition-research group. And last week, he announced he was putting $5 million into a new super-PAC known as Immigrant Voters Win. The group is part of a coordinated $15 million voter-turnout effort, first reported in the New York Times, that is targeting Latinos and immigrants in Colorado, Nevada and Florida.
The $13 million total puts Soros near the top of the list of this election cycle's biggest donors, and it doesn't include the $5 million he's pledged to another effort, led by Democratic lawyer Marc Elias, to challenge new voter-identification laws and other restrictions at the state level.
In an era of super-PACs, Soros's giving doesn't stand out like it used to. Thomas Steyer, the former San Francisco hedge-fund manager, spent more than $70 million in 2014, and the casino mogul Sheldon Adelson gave more than $90 million in 2012.
At Davos in January, Soros remarked that Trump and Cruz are engaging in "fear mongering." But he predicted that neither of them would prevail in the November election. "Here I have to confess to a little bit of bias, so take that into account," he told Bloomberg Television. "I think it's going to lead to a landslide for Hillary Clinton."