The tiny hamlet of Dixville Notch, located in the northernmost New Hampshire, hewed to tradition at midnight today, casting the very first votes in the Democratic presidential primary. Bernie Sanders, whose name was on the ballot, got one vote. Pete Buttigieg, whose name was on the ballot, got one vote.
Mike Bloomberg, whose name was not on the ballot, won Dixville Notch. He got three votes. All write-ins.
Might that be a harbinger of things to come, a Bloomberg boomlet in the fluid Democratic race? Surely it’s too soon to say. But it does suggest that the self-monetized mogul – who’s currently spending $600 million on TV and digital advertising (a mere 1/100th of his $60-billion net worth) – seems increasingly well positioned to scramble the race in ways not seen since another upstart New Yorker upended the Republican party four years ago.
Perhaps the New Hampshire primary results, due tonight, will clarify the Democratic chaos, but don’t bet on it. Bernie Sanders will win his democratic socialist niche, fueling the justifiable fear that he’d be stomped by Trump if he were the nominee. Pete Buttigieg (too inexperienced?), Joe Biden (too depleted?), and Amy Klobuchar (too uncharismatic?) will likely divide the anyone-but-Bernie vote. Elizabeth Warren (too programmatic?) will likely get Bernie’s progressive leftovers. Then it’s on to Nevada and South Carolina – with Bloomberg planning an ambush on March 3, Super Tuesday, when he’s on the ballot for the first time, when one-third of all delegates will be in play.
Money doesn’t guarantee success in politics – history is riddled with the failed bids of self-funded candidates – but Bloomberg’s timing appears to be impeccable. The reason he has swiftly soared to third place in a new national poll (drawing 15 percent of likely primary voters), and is now viewed as the third most electable Democrat (17 percent of likely primary voters) is not merely because the current field is widely perceived as underwhelming. It’s also because, among many Democrats desperate to beat Trump, there’s a growing belief that despite their instinctive aversion to billionaires, they might just need a billionaire to neutralize Trump’s well-monetized lies.
Especially a billionaire who, in that same poll, currently beats Trump among all voters by nine percentage points – the widest spread of any Democratic candidate. Which is ironic, since Bloomberg is a late-blooming Democrat who, as recently as 2004, touted George W. Bush from the podium at the Republican National Convention. Or perhaps it means that voters are intrigued by someone with an independent brand. Or perhaps it simply means that, in case of emergency, you break the glass.
Yeah, yeah, I know, Bloomberg is less than perfect, he’s done things that are racist and misogynistic, and progressives are already and oh so predictably ignoring his great stuff (climate change, gun violence, savaging Trump) in order to flunk him on the purity test. But if he turns out to be the best way to end our slide to autocracy, the Democratic left will need to get over itself.
Frankly, I didn’t foresee a Bloomberg bid. When he was flirting with an entry last autumn – just as he’d flirted with bids in 2008, 2012, and 2016 – I thought he’d take another bye, because, as I wrote, “there’s no market for a billionaire white guy” in the Democratic race. But Bloomberg bet correctly that Biden would appear too wobbly for the long haul, that resultant infighting among the moderate candidates would play to Bloomberg’s unique strengths – namely, money and organization.
He’s already running the equivalent of a general election campaign, having hired a number of voter-targeting experts from the Obama team, and having hired more than 2000 staffers nationwide – with special emphasis on swing states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Florida, and North Carolina. He already has a Spanish-language operation in Arizona, a state that has been slowly trending blue and could be highly competitive in November. All told, he’s putting his money on the line at a time when the Democratic National Committee, helmed by the inept Tom Perez, isn’t raising squat. The aforementioned $600 million that Bloomberg is spending on ads is reportedly nine times more money that the DNC raised in all of 2019.
But it’s the ad content that matters most. Bloomberg is already road-testing general election messages – eviscerating Trump’s detestable character in a memorable ad, attacking Trump’s ongoing efforts to sabotage Obamacare (a winning issue for Democrats in the ’18 midterm elections), and pitching his own proposal to expand the health reform law. Indeed, one of his recent health care ads prompted Trump to tweet in anger, thus confirming the widely held belief (which I share) that Bloomberg gets under Trump’s skin.
It’s easy to see why: Bloomberg has a lot more money than Trump, and if there’s one thing Trump understands, it’s money – starting with the fact that Bloomberg, over the past month, has reportedly spent more money than Trump on Facebook ads.
To paraphrase Bob Dylan, something is happening here but we don’t know what it is. If we’ve learned anything from 2016, it should be clear by now that the old rules of party engagement are gone. Post-New Hampshire and post-Super Tuesday, if the Democratic race ultimately pits Bernie against Bloomberg – neither of whom is really a Democrat – we should not be shocked in the least.