Every four years, we get a faux Michael Bloomberg boomlet. It’s a tiresome tradition, and it never lasts very long. His aides leak word that he’s toying with a presidential bid, pundits flood the zone with speculation, but at the end of the day, having crunched the data, he concludes that there’s no market for a billionaire white guy.
Pre-2008, pre-2012, and pre-2016, he pre-pondered an independent run. But this time he’s supposedly eying the Democratic race, filing some preliminary paperwork just to dip his toe into the water. Or to float a trial balloon. Or whatever it is he thinks he’s doing.
Perhaps he has proprietary polling stats that put him in play. Perhaps there’s truly a grassroots Democratic demand for a Republican-turned-independent rich guy to ride to the party’s rescue. But I’ll go with the latest national poll, which says that only four percent of Democratic primary voters yearn for Bloomberg – which put him way back in the pack with Andrew Yang. The poll also says that 25 percent of likely Democratic primary voters view Bloomberg unfavorably – “higher than any of the 15 candidates currently in the race.”
And if he assumes that Democrats are broadly disenchanted with the current field, that’s wrong as well. According to another national poll, conducted earlier this month, 78 percent of likely Democratic primary voters said they’re satisfied with the current choices; only 22 percent said otherwise. Those stats are far more bullish than their counterparts in 2015, when the top Democratic choices, in advance of the primaries, were Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders.
Hopefully, this will be my first and last look at Bloomberg. A boy can dream. It’s not just because New York mayors have a terrible track record in presidential politics (Rudy Giuliani in 2008, John Lindsey in 1972). And it’s not just because it’s tin-eared to believe that populist Democrats, incensed about income inequality, would magically reward a guy who sweeps into the race with a billion of his own fortune. And it’s not just because female Democrats in the #MeToo era wouldn’t support a well-documented misogynist, and it’s not just because African-American Democrats wouldn’t look kindly on an ex-mayor whose stop-and-frisk policy disproportionately targeted people of color – and didn’t reduce the crime rate.
It’s also because Bloomberg’s calendar strategy (if he follows through with it) is patently nuts.
He’d skip the first four primary contests (Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, South Carolina) out of necessity, because he doesn’t have the ground game to play retail politics. Instead, he’d show up late, for “Super Tuesday” in March, when 15 states hold primaries, when he can presumably rise like a comet on a titanic wave of TV and online ads, financed from his pocket, in delegate-rich states like California.
Why is this nuts? Because it’s highly likely that someone from the current top tier (Joe Biden or Elizabeth Warren or both) will have notched victories in those early states and gained momentum for Super Tuesday. Bloomberg is calculating that Biden will fail in those early states, thus opening a “moderate” slot for him, but right now there’s no evidence that Bloomberg’s higher profile is weakening support for Biden; the aforementioned national poll shows Biden still solidly on top, with 31 percent of likely primary voters. And Bloomberg’s calendar strategy assumes that Biden’s moderate rivals, most notably Pete Buttegieg and Amy Klobuchar, will fail to catch fire in those early states.
Basically, Bloomberg is banking on the Rudy Giuliani strategy. Back in 2008, Rudy ceded all the early states and pitched his tent in delegate-rich Florida. He was decimated. In his national campaign, he wound up spending $60 million and notching one delegate. Bloomberg is certainly free to dip into his personal til and spend as much as he wants (he spent $77 million of his own money to win his second mayoral term, and spent $90 million to win his third term, with only 50.6 percent of the vote), but if I were advising him, I’d respectfully steer him away from a fool’s errand and suggest that he invest more wisely. Perhaps by backing a preferred current candidate. Or by tripling down on his financial support for gun safety and climate change. Or perhaps he should try to buy Fox News.
It was no surprise, this past weekend, to read that “sources close to Mike Bloomberg” are viewing his latest candidacy flirtation as “partly a trial balloon to gauge interest and preserve the former mayor’s options.” Right on schedule. I’m betting that the balloon has already burst, and that now we can return to our regularly scheduled program.