I wrote my first “Bloomberg for President?” article in 2007. Bloomberg thought about it when he won his second term in 2005 as mayor. And then he left the Republican Party in 2007 and registered as an independent. That was part of a plan to run in 2008. He had staff that started to go around the country and explore ballot access questions and put together the pieces of what would have been a run then. Obviously it never happened, but it got reasonably far down the line. There was some talk about running maybe in 2012, but nothing more than a couple of conversations. [...]
The strategy now in 2020 is to skip the early states, which have traditionally been the places you go to sort of win over the field and burnish your reputation. Bloomberg really wants to make a big splash on Super Tuesday, and then it sounds like he wants to kind of go in and work all the advantages to get all the delegates he needs. It doesn’t sound particularly democratic. [...]
Bloomberg often gets a lot of attention for how much money he spent on campaigns. He spent more than that when he was mayor, between the races: funding, writing checks, inviting people to come play golf and stay at his home in Bermuda, flying on his private plane, advertising campaigns, the smoking ban, some of the education changes that he got. He was using the money as a way of bulldozing the opposition, of giving a support structure that people needed and wanted to be there in order to get what he wanted through, and make it so that he had an agenda that was able to progress. He also used it to drown out the opposition. That is something that’s very, very special for a mayor to be able to pull off, and only he has been able to do that. Imagine that you can pay for your opposition to just be quiet. Then suddenly you don’t seem like you’re unpopular, even in places where you might be. [...]
Bloomberg is about the money here. There’s no question about it. The money is an enormous part of that. And it’s a really odd fit for the Democratic Party at this point. I think his campaign would not even be within the realm of possibility if there weren’t such a level of anxiety among Democrats about beating Trump. It keeps coming back to the money for a lot of people, and that makes many other Democrats very uncomfortable. I was at an event in Iowa City a couple of days before the caucuses with Elizabeth Warren, and she called Bloomberg a danger to our democracy with the way that he is running the campaign, spending this much and skipping the early states. Not him, but the campaign was a danger to our democracy. That’s the way she said it.
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