Michael Bloomberg drops out of the race after a disastrous Super Tuesday.

Michael Bloomberg.

Former New York Mayor and billionaire Michael Bloomberg has dropped out of the 2020 race after a disastrous performance on Super Tuesday. The Hill. Bloomberg endorsed Joe Biden on the way out saying Biden had the best chance to beat Donald Trump. Bloomberg had only captured 44 delegates and one a single race, American Samoa, during this election cycle. Bloomberg had ignored the first four contests and bet everything on Super Tuesday spending hundreds of millions of his own wealth but was beaten badly by Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders. Bloomberg was also hurt with other candidates dropping out of the race, with the anti-Bernie Sanders vote coalescing around Joe Biden, greatly reducing the chances of a contested convention. 

My Comment:

I'm extremely happy about this. As a gun owner Michael Bloomberg was an existential threat and if he had been elected before his term was out I would likely be in prison, dead, on the run, or part of the forces fighting him in the 2nd American Civil War. Bloomberg IS the modern gun control movement and without his billions of dollars it would have died a long time ago. He's an evil man and I am glad that he failed so spectacularly. 

And fail he did. I think the people that say that money is everything in politics were proven very wrong. Bloomberg spent at least half a billion dollars on his campaign and he had very little to show for it. He didn't win a single state and his delegate count was extremely limited. He only won in American Samoa which is almost completely irrelevant in the presidential race. He, along with Tom Steyer, shows that money can't buy an election. 

I think it's clear that his strategy failed as well. Joining the race late was a big mistake as it allowed other candidates to gain momentum. By the time he was actually on a ballot, Sanders had won three states more or less and Biden had regained momentum by winning in South Carolina. Bloomberg would have had to have won big on Tuesday to have any chance at all, but it didn't work out that way. If he had been on the ballot on those states he might have knocked Biden out of the race if it was he that won Iowa, New Hampshire and/or Nevada, but instead Biden took control of the "moderates" in South Carolina. 

Bloomberg was also deeply hurt by the timing of the dropouts. If Steyer, Klobuchar and Buttigieg had stayed in it would have split the Joe Biden vote pretty severely. Sanders would have been hurt as well, but it would have allowed Bloomberg to stay in the race and he may have even won a state or two. Though the dropouts still look like they were designed to destroy Sanders, it may have had the fringe benefit of doing the same to Bloomberg. 

Of course what really killed Michael Bloomberg was his awful debate performances. He was utterly destroyed by Elizabeth Warren in the first debate as he had no answers for her, and the other candidates, attacks on his record with women and other various scandals. He only did a little bit better during the second debate. Money can't buy someone a personality or debate skills and it was pretty obvious that Bloomberg didn't have any. He looked totally prepared and completely flubbed the response to the attacks against him. 

I also don't know who Bloomberg was supposed to appeal to. As a former Republican, there were a lot of Democrats who wouldn't vote for him on principle. And many more liberal Democrats resented the fact that he was a billionaire, and everyone was fairly disgusted in the way he was throwing his money around in what looked like an attempt to buy the election. He was also fairly conservative (by Democrat standards), old, white and Jewish, all things hated by the left. 

Bloomberg also tried to appeal to centrists and disgruntled Republicans but his pitch fell flat. The gun issue alone was enough to disgust the vast majority of Republicans, even those that dislike President Trump and independents were turned off by his various scandals and terrible debate performance. The only people that seemed to like him were radical centrists and the almost extinct "never Trump" movement. These people are essentially politically irrelevant and it showed during the election.

I also think the billions of dollars that Bloomberg spent ended up turning people off. The advertising was intrusive to the point of being annoying and it got to the point where you didn't want to turn on your TV because there'd be so many Bloomberg ads. Bloomberg's astroturf campaign to buyout various social media stars backfired as well as people balked at the lack of authenticity of the promotions. Even if people weren't already disgusted with how Bloomberg was using his money, the results of the campaign ended up making people angry. 

I do think that it was funny that Michael Bloomberg joined the race primarily to stop Bernie Sanders after Joe Biden faltered, but in the end it was Biden that ended up being the best chance to defeat him with Bloomberg's attempt being essentially pointless. Had he kept out of the race Biden would have won regardless so Bloomberg truly did waste all of his money for basically no reason. 

As far as the race for the 2020 candidate goes I think it's probably Joe Biden's to lose now. It seems very clear that black people don't want to vote for Bernie Sanders and it's very possible that he loses all the southern states. Sanders will probably do well on the coasts though, and the Midwest is up for grabs. It may depend on what Elizabeth Warren does as if she stays in for the long hall, she could split the progressive vote with Sanders and cost him even more states. But I get the feeling I will be writing up another post about her dropping out of the race very soon.