The Dark Side of Bloomberg

In Defying the Odds, we discuss the 2016 campaign. The 2019 update includes a chapter on the 2018 midterms. The 2020 race, the subject of our next book, is well under  way.  

Democrats dodged a bullet with Bloomberg, who has a rather significant dark side.

Bloomberg promised that he would keep his campaign staff on payroll through November.  He broke his word, and as Juana Summers reports at NPR, former staffers are angry:

Donna Wood in Miami lost her job on a March 20 conference call.

"It was read off a script from HR, and then it was like, 'Goodbye, you can hang up now,' " she said in an interview. "It was a low blow. I felt very used and very kicked to the curb, after all that I had given to the campaign in the short time that I did work for it."

Asked how he feels now about the assurances he made as a recruiter to potential staffers, [Amol] Jethwani said, "Mike borrowed my credibility and abused it in that moment.""It was read off a script from HR, and then it was like, 'Goodbye, you can hang up now,' " she said in an interview. "It was a low blow. I felt very used and very kicked to the curb, after all that I had given to the campaign in the short time that I did work for it."

"Any time a candidate takes on staff, the staff executing that candidate's message utilize their own credibility to carry that message. That's how persuasive organizing really works," Jethwani said. "Or even, in the hiring process it's 'this candidate assured me that I have a job through November, and you have a job through November, so that's why I am assuring you that you have a job through November.'"

Former field organizers for Bloomberg's campaign have filed proposed class action lawsuits, where these complaints have been detailed in court documents. Wood filed the first breach of contract suit last month. (View a second proposed class action lawsuit against the campaign here.)

It has grown from one plaintiff to roughly 80.

 The complaint in Wood's case alleges that the Bloomberg campaign "deprived [staff] of promised income and health care benefits, leaving them and their families potentially uninsured in the face of a global pandemic."

Also at NPR, David Folkenflik:

Michael Bloomberg's short-lived presidential bid reignited a long-simmering dispute over the widespread use of nondisclosure agreements at American corporations — especially at his own.

His namesake company, Bloomberg LP, has used nondisclosure agreements broadly to conceal allegations and silence complaints from employees of sexual harassment or a hostile work environment, as published reports have documented.

The story of one Bloomberg reporter and his wife showcases the widespread use of such legal restraints at the company — and how far their reach can extend.

Six years ago, Bloomberg News killed an investigation into the wealth of Communist Party elites in China, fearful of repercussions by the Chinese government. The company successfully silenced the reporters involved. And it sought to keep the spouse of one of the reporters quiet, too.

Bloomberg: Expensive Flop, Promise-Breaker

In Defying the Odds, we discuss the 2016 campaign. The 2019 update includes a chapter on the 2018 midterms. The 2020 race, the subject of our next book, is well under  way.  

Coronavirus presents unprecedented challenges to public policy and the electoral process.

Shane Goldmacher at NYT:

It was a billion-dollar flop.

Michael R. Bloomberg spent more than $900 million on his failed bid for the White House by the end of February, a spectacular sum and the most ever for a self-funded politician in American history. But it was not enough to help the billionaire candidate win a single state before he dropped out of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary in early March.

Mr. Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York City, poured more than $500 million into television advertising and $100 million on digital ads during the course of his roughly 100-day campaign, according to a new filing made Friday with the Federal Election Commission. He spent tens of millions of dollars more on a raft of media consultants, pollsters and digital strategists, the filing showed.

Mr. Bloomberg paid more than $15 million for polling, including $11.5 million to the firm of the pollster Douglas Schoen. He spent more than $11 million on the firm created by ad-maker Bill Knapp to work on the 2020 campaign and another $4.8 million on the firm of Jimmy Siegel, another ad-maker. He directed $45 million to Hawkfish LLC, a private digital firm he owned and created before he entered the race. More than $30 million was spent on direct mail. And more than $1 million on meals for his staff that swelled to more than 2,000 in a few short months.

...
The lavish spending came to a crashing halt after Mr. Bloomberg exited the race. Mr. Bloomberg had attracted aides with outsize salaries, perks that included Manhattan apartments for some in his headquarters and the promise of a steady job — whether he won the nomination or not — trying to defeat President Trump through November.

 But plans for an independent super PAC have since been scrapped and former Bloomberg campaign officials said Friday they were transferring $18 million in leftover campaign funds to the Democratic National Committee instead. Campaign aides could reapply for jobs — at reduced salaries.

Molly Hensley-Clancy, Ruby Cramer, and  Rosie Gray at Buzzfeed:

That means many Bloomberg organizers are out of a job. Organizers in six swing states were informed this morning that they were being let go and given instructions for applying to the DNC.

“He’s chopping his employees in a pandemic,” said one staffer in Florida, who asked to remain anonymous because they had signed a nondisclosure agreement. “My life is now uprooted and I’m effectively homeless.

... 

”Bloomberg had already broken a promise of employment through November to some of the vast army of organizers he had hired throughout his three-month presidential campaign, on which he spent a record $687 million of his personal fortune. Staffers who were not in swing states were let go earlier this month.

But at the time, said the Florida staffer, they were still under the impression they would be employed by a Bloomberg campaign entity. “We got the message, ‘Hey don’t worry, you guys are fine.'”

The Bloomberg spokesperson said staffers were being encouraged to apply to work for the DNC: “The DNC Coordinated Campaign is hiring in every one of the six battleground states we identified — and more. And we will assist the DNC as much as we are able to, including by providing names of staff and working to help them onboard and grow their program as expediently as possible.”

Super Tuesday: Another Epic Journey

In Defying the Odds, we discuss the 2016 campaign. The 2019 update includes a chapter on the 2018 midterms. The 2020 race, the subject of our next book, is well under way.

One could say that Biden started off as a heavy favorite and swept Super Tuesday a year later. To quote Jim Ceaser in the the prologue to Epic Journey: ". It would be akin to summarizing Homer's Odyssey by saying that Odysseus set out after the Trojan War to return home and got there."

Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns at NYT:

The Democratic presidential race emerged from Super Tuesday with two clear front-runners as Joseph R. Biden Jr. won Texas, Virginia, North Carolina and at least six other states, largely through support from African-Americans and moderates, while Senator Bernie Sanders harnessed the backing of liberals and young voters to claim the biggest prize of the campaign, California, and several other primaries.

The returns across the country on the biggest night of voting suggested that the Democratic contest was increasingly focused on two candidates who are standard-bearers for competing wings of the party, Mr. Biden in the political center and Mr. Sanders on the left. Their two other major rivals, Senator Elizabeth Warren and Michael R. Bloomberg, were on track to finish well behind them and faced an uncertain path forward.

Debate Fallout

In Defying the Odds, we discuss the 2016 campaign. The 2019 update includes a chapter on the 2018 midterms. The 2020 race, the subject of our next book, is well under way.

Dino-Ray Ramos at Deadline:

The latest Democratic presidential debate drew a record 19.7 million viewers for NBC News and MSNBC.

The networks said that it was the most watched Democratic debate in history. It also topped the 18.1 million who watched the second night of the Democratic debate in June. That event was broadcast by NBC News, MSNBC and Telemundo.

NBC said that the debate generated 13.5 million live video streams and 22 million video views across all platforms. The network said that it translated into an average audience of 417,000 viewers.

The numbers are fast national figures from Nielsen.

 Matt Flegenheimer, Alexander Burns and Jeremy W. Peters at NYT:

Michael R. Bloomberg had put in the hours, his people said — holding mock debate sessions with top aides and meeting at length to prepare in New York and Palm Springs, Calif.

His campaign had anticipated the unsurprising questions about allegations of a hostile workplace for women at his company, stop-and-frisk policing in his city, the unseemliness of a Democratic contender who has long written checks to Republicans. And Mr. Bloomberg recognized that he would have to answer them, or at least deflect serviceably enough to survive.

But Mr. Bloomberg’s debate performance on Wednesday proved so lackluster that both supporters and rivals counted themselves taken aback, leaving his campaign more rattled than at any point since he entered the race. While Mr. Bloomberg sought to project a steely calm on Thursday during a swing through Utah, he and his team have been left to explain away a comedown that exposed some of his gravest liabilities.

Bad Debate for Bloomberg

In Defying the Odds, we discuss the 2016 campaign. The 2019 update includes a chapter on the 2018 midterms. The 2020 race, the subject of our next book, is well under way.

At the Las Vegas debate, Hallie Jackson asked Bloomberg about sexual harassment suits that ended in nondisclosure agreements.  Like Trump, he answered by talking about all the opportunities that he had provided for women.  Jackson then turned to Warren, who had been critical of Bloomberg on this point.

WARREN: Yes, I have. And I hope you heard what his defense was. "I've been nice to some women." That just doesn't cut it. The mayor has to stand on his record. And what we need to know is exactly what's lurking out there. He has gotten some number of women, dozens, who knows, to sign nondisclosure agreements both for sexual harassment and for gender discrimination in the workplace. So, Mr. Mayor, are you willing to release all of those women from those nondisclosure agreements, so we can hear their side of the story? (APPLAUSE)

BLOOMBERG: We have a very few nondisclosure agreements.

WARREN: How many is that?

BLOOMBERG: Let me finish.

WARREN: How many is that?

BLOOMBERG: None of them accuse me of doing anything, other than maybe they didn't like a joke I told. And let me just -- and let me -- there's agreements between two parties that wanted to keep it quiet and that's up to them. They signed those agreements, and we'll live with it.

BIDEN: Come on.

WARREN: So, wait, when you say it is up to -- I just want to be clear. Some is how many? And -- and when you -- and when you say they signed them and they wanted them, if they wish now to speak out and tell their side of the story about what it is they allege, that's now OK with you? You're releasing them on television tonight? Is that right? (APPLAUSE)

BLOOMBERG: Senator...

WARREN: Is that right, tonight?

BLOOMBERG: Senator, the company and somebody else, in this case -- a man or a woman or it could be more than that, they decided when they made an agreement they wanted to keep it quiet for everybody's interests.

BIDEN: Come on.

BLOOMBERG: They signed the agreements and that's what we're going to live with.
(CROSSTALK)

BUTTIGIEG: You could release them now.

WARREN: I'm sorry. No, the question is...

BLOOMBERG: I heard your question.

WARREN: ... are the women bound by being muzzled by you and you could release them from that immediately? Because, understand, this is not just a question of the mayor's character. This is also a question about electability. We are not going to beat Donald Trump with a man who has who knows how many nondisclosure agreements and the drip, drip, drip of stories of women saying they have been harassed and discriminated against. (APPLAUSE) That's not what we do as Democrats.

JACKSON: Mr. Vice President?

BIDEN: Look, let's get something straight here. It's easy. All the mayor has to do is say, "You are released from the nondisclosure agreement," period.(APPLAUSE)

...
BLOOMBERG: I've said we're not going to get -- to end these agreements because they were made consensually and they have every right to expect that they will stay private.
(AUDIENCE BOOS)

But how many people were watching?  And will they remember? Also note:

Situations from NH debate & NV debate could not be more different. In NH- an unprecedented 45% of voters said they might change their minds the weekend of the primary but here in NV, 3/4s of all ballots were cast before last night's debate. Little room for debate effects.

— Rachel "The Doc" Bitecofer 📈🔭🍌 (@RachelBitecofer) February 20, 2020

Bloomberg Baggage

In Defying the Odds, we discuss the 2016 campaign. The 2019 update includes a chapter on the 2018 midterms. The 2020 race, the subject of our next book, has begun.

At Axios, Mike Allen sums up some of Bloomberg's vulnerabilities:

• He bought power and silence: He hid behind $400 million in ads to buy his way to second place — after spending billions of dollars to ingratiate himself with would-be critics.
• He was crude and sexist: The N.Y. Times and WashPost unloaded detailed investigations of sexist language and behavior. The WashPost reported a lawsuit by a former Bloomberg LP saleswoman: "She alleged Bloomberg told her to 'kill it' when he learned she was pregnant," which she interpreted as "have an abortion to keep her job." Bloomberg denied that under oath and reached a confidential settlement, per the Post. The campaign said: "Mike simply does not tolerate any kind of discrimination or harassment."
• When he was New York mayor, the city's stop-and-frisk policy targeted black and Latino people. Bloomberg told a black church in Brooklyn in November: "I want you to know that I realize back then I was wrong."
• He has Cheney-like authoritarian instincts: He called the NYPD the "seventh largest army in the world," and joined George W. Bush in Muslim-targeting crackdowns in the years after 9/11. "I think people, the voters, want low crime," Bloomberg told the N.Y. Times in an interview in 2018. "They don’t want kids to kill each other."
• He censors and silences media. He owns one of the largest media companies in the world, with his journalists under orders not to cover his "wealth or personal life." After he announced, Bloomberg News journalists were told in an internal memo: "We will continue our tradition of not investigating Mike (and his family and foundation) and we will extend the same policy to his rivals in the Democratic primaries."
• He coddled China for business reasons. Bloomberg told PBS' "Firing Line" in September, during a discussion of climate, that Xi Jinping "is not a dictator — he has to satisfy his constituents or he's not gonna survive." Michael Forsythe, one of the top journalistic diggers in Hong Kong, left Bloomberg News in 2013 and later joined the N.Y. Times, where he's now an investigative reporter, after Bloomberg News sat on an exposé about financial shenanigans by the regime, because of fears that Bloomberg would be expelled from China. Bloomberg editors said the article wasn't ready.

Bloomberg Bucks

In Defying the Odds, we discuss the 2016 campaign. The 2019 update includes a chapter on the 2018 midterms. The 2020 race, the subject of our next book, has begun.

 Alexander Burns and Nicholas Kulish at NYT:

Since leaving City Hall at the end of 2013, Mr. Bloomberg has become the single most important political donor to the Democratic Party and its causes. His personal fortune, built on a financial information and news company, is estimated at over $60 billion. It fuels an advocacy network that has directed policy in dozens of states and cities; mobilized movements to take on gun violence and climate change; rewritten election laws and health regulations; and elected scores of politicians to offices as modest as the school board and as lofty as the Senate.

He has spent billions on philanthropy:

But The Times’s examination — based on a review of years of campaign and nonprofit tax filings, as well as interviews with more than 50 people who have benefited from his support — illustrates how deeply that philanthropy is entwined with Mr. Bloomberg’s political preoccupations. In fact, in 2019, the year he declared his presidential candidacy, Mr. Bloomberg’s charitable giving soared to $3.3 billion — more than in the previous five years combined. His campaign disclosed that total in response to inquiries by The Times, but the donations were not itemized and most of it does not fall under public disclosure requirements.

Mr. Bloomberg has probably spent more from his personal fortune on his presidential campaign than any politician in American history. And while there have been political megadonors like the casino tycoon Sheldon Adelson, philanthropic giants like Bill Gates and self-funded candidates like Ross Perot, never before has one presidential hopeful combined the influence and reach of all three.

With a chilling effect:

“They aren’t going to criticize him in his 2020 run because they don’t want to jeopardize receiving financial support from him in the future,” said Paul S. Ryan, vice president of policy and litigation at the good-government group Common Cause.

That chilling effect was apparent in 2015 to researchers at the Center for American Progress, a liberal policy group, when they turned in a report on anti-Muslim bias in the United States. Their draft included a chapter of more than 4,000 words about New York City police surveillance of Muslim communities; Mr. Bloomberg was mentioned by name eight times in the chapter, which was reviewed by The Times.

 When the report was published a few weeks later, the chapter was gone. So was any mention of Mr. Bloomberg’s name.

 Rebecca R. Ruiz at NYT:

Mr. Bloomberg, the multibillionaire behind Bloomberg L.P., has poured hundreds of millions of dollars into the race, paying to make his voice omnipresent on television and radio. He has deployed his corporation in service of his campaign, reassigning employees from the various arms of his empire and recruiting new ones with powerful financial incentives, including full benefits and salaries well above national campaign norms.

Entry-level field organizing work for Mr. Bloomberg, for example, pays $72,000 annually — nearly twice what other campaigns have offered. In under 12 weeks, Mr. Bloomberg’s operation has grown to a staff of thousands, with more than 125 offices around the country and a roster of slick events featuring swag, drinks and canapés.

...
Day-to-day, some Bloomberg campaign workers with prior political experience, who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak about their work for Mr. Bloomberg, described what they saw as an unfathomable luxury: the ability to brainstorm and act on their ideas without concern for costs. The campaign has, for instance, hired 70 staff members in Florida and opened field offices in Puerto Rico and the United States Virgin Islands.

Howard Dean strategist Joe Trippi says that penury can spark creativity, but...

 Nonetheless, he added, laughing: “Picking between the advantage of being a little bit more creative with your money, versus having the money to do whatever you want to do — most campaigns would pick having more money.” 

Scott Lewis and Andrew Keatts at Voice of San Diego:

Former New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg’s presidential campaign has built a significant footprint in San Diego County, and it’s squeezing local campaigns.

Leading up to 2020, local campaigns were concerned presidential campaigns would buy up TV time in the run-up to the March election — making it harder and more expensive for them to buy their ads to reach a mass audience.

Now, there’s a bigger concern they didn’t see coming.

Multiple local campaign professionals have told us Bloomberg’s campaign is hiring staffers, paying them more than local campaigns could come close to matching and promising to keep many of them on through November.

It’s created a labor squeeze for campaign workers and paid canvassers, just as candidates are starting the process of turning out voters.

Stuart Stevens sarcastically replies to Bloomberg critics:

No, I’d rather have four more years of Stephen Miller and Serb Gorka rather than vote for a guy who, like JFK vs Humphrey, won the nomination using private wealth. (And Bloomberg actually made his, not inherited.) I mean, really? https://t.co/91Iu7CAolb

— stuart stevens (@stuartpstevens) February 16, 2020

Plan B

In Defying the Odds, we discuss the 2016 campaign. The 2019 update includes a chapter on the 2018 midterms. The 2020 race, the subject of our next book, is well under way.

A January Gallup poll asked respondents if they would be willing to cast a presidential vote for members of various groups.  Only one group got opposition from a majority.  In the survey, 53 percent said that they would not vote for a socialist.

 Alexander Burns and Jonathan Martin at NYT:

The Democratic presidential primary is entering an intensely tumultuous phase, after two early contests that have left former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. reeling and elevated Senator Bernie Sanders but failed to make any candidate a dominant force in the battle for the party’s nomination.

Within the Democratic establishment, the results have deepened a mood of anxiety and frustration: The collapse of Mr. Biden’s support in the first two states, and the fragmentation of moderate voters among several other candidates, allowed Mr. Sanders, a Vermont progressive, to claim a victory in New Hampshire and a split decision in Iowa with former Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Ind.

In both states, a majority of voters supported candidates closer to the political center and named defeating President Trump as their top priority, but there was no overwhelming favorite among those voters as to which moderate was the best alternative to Mr. Sanders. Unless such a favorite soon emerges, party leaders may increasingly look to Michael R. Bloomberg as a potential savior.

In an unmistakable sign of Mr. Bloomberg’s growing strength and Mr. Biden’s decline, three black members of Congress endorsed the former mayor of New York City on Wednesday, including Representative Lucy McBath of Georgia, a high-profile lawmaker and gun-control champion in her first term — and a senior adviser to Mr. Bloomberg told campaign staff that internal polling showed the former mayor now tied with Mr. Biden among African-Americans in March primary states.

...
In early January, Representative Gregory Meeks of New York offered an off-the-cuff assessment of the Democratic race: Should Mr. Biden wheeze in the early states, many in the party would turn to Mr. Bloomberg as a Plan B.

“If Mr. Biden can’t get out of New Hampshire and Iowa, then Bloomberg has Super Tuesday,” Mr. Meeks said at the time.

On Wednesday, he was one of the three black lawmakers who endorsed Mr. Bloomberg.

Bloomberg's Parallel Universe of Money

In Defying the Odds, we discuss the 2016 campaign. The 2019 update includes a chapter on the 2018 midterms. The 2020 race, the subject of our next book, has begun.

Kathleen Ronayne and Andrew DeMillo at AP:

Bloomberg is running, but he’s on his own track, essentially creating a parallel race to the nomination with no precedent. While his competitors are hunkered down in the four states with the earliest primaries, Bloomberg is almost everywhere else — a Minnesota farm, a Utah co-working space, an office opening in Maine. He’s staked his hopes on states like Texas, California and Arkansas that vote on March 3, aiming to disrupt the Democratic primary right around the time it’s typically settling on a front-runner. Or, should Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, a self-described democratic socialist, be that front-runner, Bloomberg could be a backstop to Democrats still looking for a moderate choice.
Skipping the early voting states and banking on success in later delegate-rich contests has never been done successfully. But no candidate has ever brought the financial firepower that Bloomberg can — he is worth an estimated $60 billion and has already spent more than $200 million building a campaign in more than two dozen states, taking him well past Super Tuesday.

 Alexi McCammond, and Stef W. Kight at Axios:

• He’s blowing through cash to create a parallel (or bigger) unofficial, uncoordinated party infrastructure in case the DNC can’t help the eventual Democratic nominee enough in states that should be competitive with Trump.
• With 2,100 paid staff, Bloomberg has three times as many as Trump, five times as many as Joe Biden and more than twice as many as Elizabeth Warren, according to data the campaigns provided to Axios.
• He pays his staff more than any other 2020 Democrat's campaign and offers housing if they have to move to New York City, according to a campaign official.
• What they're saying: "He’s building his own infrastructure, he has been able to invest in the tech and data to really build his own operation," said a Bloomberg campaign aide. "If you look at what happened in Iowa, it’s a good problem for us to have that we are self-reliant."
• By the numbers: In just over a month, Bloomberg spent more than the top 2020 contenders spent for the whole final quarter of 2019 combined, according to Federal Election Commission data. He also outspent the entire RNC and DNC.
• He's locked down big names in Democratic politics, many of whom were crucial in Barack Obama's election.
• Since January, Bloomberg has spent more on Facebook ads than Biden, Bernie Sanders, Pete Buttigieg and Warren combined.
• Trump is the king of Facebook ads, but Bloomberg has spent $5.7 million more than the president's campaign in the past month.
• Stories about Bloomberg have remained in the top 5 for social media interactions for the past few weeks, according to the Axios-Newswhip 2020 Attention Tracker.
• But he doesn't get nearly the online attention that Biden, Sanders and Warren have long enjoyed — a metric that is often correlated to enthusiasm for a candidate.

 Alexander Burns and Nick Corasaniti at NYT:

Resembling fund-raisers in every aspect but one, Mr. Bloomberg’s events are organized under the auspices of a division of the campaign known as the Committee for Mike, a unit that closely resembles the structure of a traditional fund-raising operation — except that it does not actually solicit donations.

Unveiled last month, the Committee for Mike was described by the campaign as a network of influencers committed to Mr. Bloomberg’s candidacy. Its staff members have asked supporters to speak up for Mr. Bloomberg on social media and in personal conversations with their friends and colleagues, especially those who may reside in key primary states and general-election battlegrounds. Among the people managing the operation are former top fund-raisers for Senators Kamala Harris of California and Cory Booker of New Jersey.
...
To supporters of other campaigns, this branch of the Bloomberg operation appears to have another effect. By pursuing contributors and asking them to get involved in his candidacy — without actually donating money to him — Mr. Bloomberg could have the effect of dampening fund-raising for opponents who cannot underwrite their campaigns with personal wealth.
...
The approach comes straight out of Mr. Bloomberg’s re-election playbook of 2005, when his team locked down the biggest Democratic donors in New York City by bringing them onto his mayoral campaign as blue-chip endorsers. As he is doing now, he was financing his own campaign. But their support helped wipe some of the most important Democratic financiers from the contributors’ list of his donations-dependent Democratic challenger, Fernando Ferrer.

Bloomberg and Trump

In Defying the Odds, we discuss campaign strategy and 0rganization.   The 2019 update includes a chapter on the 2018 midterms.  

At Axios, Mike Allen and Margaret Talev report that Bloomberg is emulating Trump's campaign methods:

• Social creature: Trump's re-election campaign has deployed Facebook in a bigger way than any campaign in history, outspending all the Democrats combined. Bloomberg's team openly admires the digital prowess of Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale and has built a "content factory" of constantly updating and iterating videos and messages that are narrowly targeted at — and constantly fed to — promising prospects.
• Ubiquity: Trump forced himself into our lives with Twitter taunts and endless TV appearances. Bloomberg is buying his way into the minute-by-minute of our lives with TV ads. Bloomberg's team believes one of the key lessons of Trump campaign is that if voters see you on TV all the time, they'll take you seriously. At Bloomberg HQ, his TV ads play on a constant loop. It takes a while to realize it's not cable news, where his ads seem nearly as persistent.
• Success sells: Like Trump, Bloomberg promises ad nauseam to replicate his professional success in governance. Many of Bloomberg's ads follow the rough arc of: 1) Hit Trump ... 2) Why the problem matters ... 3) What Mike did as New York mayor ... 4) What Mike would do as president. It's a key part of Bloomberg's effort to signal, both overtly and subliminally, that he's running against Trump — not the other Dems.
• Slogan power: Bloomberg's massive data operation found that Bloomberg's record as mayor was one of his big selling points. And Bloomberg's inner circle thought "Make America Great Again" was an effective slogan. Voilà, the Bloomberg slogan: "Mike Will Get It Done." The twist: "It" can mean beating Trump, enacting gun control as president, or whatever the voter imagines.
• It's all about brand, baby: Bloomberg, like Trump, has set up his campaign so his personal brand shines, win or lose. The former mayor is making plain he will spend up to $2 billion to win himself — or, if he loses, allocate some of that to the Democratic nominee and Bloomberg's pet causes. As a down payment, he's showering money on state and local parties to help them, up and down their tickets, regardless of who wins the primary.

Julia Marsh at NY Post:

Billionaire presidential long shot Michael Bloomberg is trying to poach staff from other campaigns with outsized salaries and fancy perks like three catered meals a day, an iPhone 11 and a MacBook Pro, according to sources.

Bloomberg is paying state press secretaries $10,000 a month, compared to the average going rate of $4,500 for other candidates and state political directors are making $12,000 a month, more than some senior campaign advisers earn, sources said.

National political director Carlos Sanchez pulls in $360,000 a year. Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s political director, made $240,000 in 2016.

Every Bloomberg staffer gets a MacBook Pro and an iPhone 11 on day one. They also enjoy three catered meals daily.

Bloomberg's Massive, Well-Paid Staff

In Defying the Odds, we discuss campaign 0rganization.   The 2019 update-includes a chapter on the 2018 midterms.  

Christopher Cadelago and Goldenberg at Politico:

Mike Bloomberg’s presidential campaign has brought on more than 700 staffers spread out across 33 states, with a growing number of organizers joining his ranks in states that vote on Super Tuesday, aides told POLITICO.

All told, the former New York mayor's operation totals more than 1,000 people, a figure that includes hundreds of staffers who work out of his Manhattan headquarters.

...
 To lure staffers, Bloomberg’s campaign is offering salaries that in some cases far exceed typical wages paid by his opponents. The campaign has also agreed to pay them well into the summer or through the November election, regardless of whether he's the nominee. Advisers said the move is designed to ensure new hires, like Bloomberg himself, are committed to eliminating Trump.

The California Primary

In Defying the Odds, we discuss California's place on the electoral landscape. The update looks at political and demographic trends through the 2018 midterm.

In the March 3 California presidential primary, no-party-preference voters (i.e., independents) may vote in the Democratic race but not the GOP side.  But the catch is that they must request a Democratic ballot. To vote in the Democratic primary by mail, they would have had to file the request in December.  But they can still make the request at any early voting station or a primary-day ballot station.  And they still have more than a month to change their registration to Democratic.

Kathleen Ronayne at AP:

So far, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and billionaire Michael Bloomberg have been most aggressive in pursuing independents. Sanders, the independent senator who has thrived on anti-establishment enthusiasm, is urging his California supporters to become Democrats, despite the fact that they can vote for him as independents. At a December rally, he walked the audience through changing their voter affiliation, telling them to use the secretary of state’s website.

His campaign argues that this approach ensures voters get the ballots they need, rather than having to take additional steps, as independents must. Californians can change their party registration until Feb. 18. The campaign is also adding a feature on its mobile app that will let supporters look up the party registrations of friends and family, so that they can send them instructions on how to vote for Sanders.

...
As of last week, just 8% of independents who vote by mail had asked for a ballot in the presidential primary, according to data collection by Paul Mitchell, who runs the nonpartisan Political Data Inc., which collects and sells voter data to campaigns. Not all counties had reported data.

Complicating matters is the fact that for most elections, Californians are accustomed to open primaries in which all the candidates appear on the same ballot, regardless of party. Many may not know that the presidential race runs differently. The state also moved up its primary from June to March, and the earlier voting could catch some people by surprise

...

Candidates must earn support from 15% of voters in a congressional district to gain the delegates that will determine who wins the nomination. And since California has more congressional districts than any other state, independents could make the difference between clinching much-needed delegates or leaving the state empty-handed.

“If they’re targeting certain congressional districts, they’re not having to beat their opponent by 100,000 votes,” Mitchell said. “Delegates are going to be won on the margins up and down the state.”

A larger-than-usual number of downballot races in the top-two primary could end up as Democratic-on-Democrat.  Joel Fox tells why:

Traditionally, Republican voters turn out in higher percentages relative to their registration numbers compared to Democrats in primary elections. That may not hold true when California voters go to the polls on March 3. 

With all the attention on the Democratic presidential nomination race in California and Republican voters prohibited from asking for a Democratic ballot, one wonders the effect on down ticket races if many Republicans choose to stay home.

Because of California’s unique election system, all candidates for an office other than president are listed on the same ballot and a voter can vote for any of the candidates regardless of party. Yet, party preferences of candidates are identified on the ballots. An occasional Democratic voter who is driven to vote this time because of the close presidential contest on the Democratic side will probably be looking for Democrats to vote for in other races.

Meanwhile, Republicans who see no major presidential challenger to President Trump just may sit this election out. That is the fear of state Republican officials.

Bloomberg and the Delegate Count

In Defying the Odds, we discuss campaign finance and campaign technology. The 2019 update includes a chapter on the 2018 midterms. 

As we have explained in our books -- especially Epic Journey -- winning a nomination is about arithmetic, not psychology.

Alexi McCammond at Axios:

Mike Bloomberg’s 2020 campaign will open a field office in the U.S. Virgin Islands in the next few weeks, his campaign tells Axios.

Why it matters: It’s rare for a presidential campaign t0 open shop in an American territory, and the Virgin Islands aren't scheduled to hold their caucuses until June 6.


The big picture: The Virgin Islands have 11 delegates up for grabs in 2020.  

• This is further evidence of Bloomberg’s non-traditional campaign, focusing on delegate count rather than Iowa and other early states.
• "Mike believes Americans in the territories are often overlooked and have an important voice and role to play in this election," said Dan Kanninen, Bloomberg's states director.
• Bloomberg traveled to the Virgin Islands in 2017 as part of a major push to help hurricane recovery.

Billionaire Bucks

In Defying the Odds, we discuss campaign finance and campaign technology.   The 2019 update-includes a chapter on the 2018 midterms.  

Maya King at Politico:

Together, Tom Steyer and Mike Bloomberg have poured nearly $200 million into television and digital advertising alone, with the former New York mayor spending an unprecedented $120 million in the roughly three weeks since he joined the presidential race. That’s more than double the combined ad spending of every single nonbillionaire in the Democratic field this year.

“We’ve never seen spending like this in a presidential race,” said Jim McLaughlin, a Republican political strategist who worked as a consultant for Bloomberg’s mayoral bids in New York. “He has a limitless budget.”

The question isn’t whether anyone else will come close to matching Bloomberg's or Steyer’s ad spending. Rather, it’s whether all that spending is making any difference.

At present, the two remain mired in single digits in the polls. Steyer isn’t spending at the same stratospheric levels as Bloomberg, yet with $83 million in ad buys so far, he’s still far outpacing everyone other than his fellow billionaire. The next highest spender on ads is Pete Buttigieg at $19 million.

Carl Campanile at NY Post:

Former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg is spending so much money on television spots across the country that it’s causing ad rates to soar, a new analysis shows.

“The typical [TV] market increased their rates by 22 percent as the political spending poured in,” an Advertising Analytics analysis found.

“Houston was among the markets that responded most actively to the new advertiser,” it added. “This is partially attributable to Bloomberg’s $1 [million] buy increasing the political spending in the market tenfold. This shock spending increase was matched by a 45% increase in rates, which is among the highest of any market.”

That means the massive spending is driving up advertising costs for Bloomberg’s competitors and other advertisers, an Advertising Analytics’ analysis of the billionaire’s first week of ad spending found.

Asma Khalid at NPR:

Bloomberg's strategy is unique — and especially notable in a Democratic primary in which big money and billionaires have often been vilified.

As a late entrant in the race, Bloomberg is bypassing campaigning in the first four primary states and is instead focused on marshaling his money into advertising. In recent weeks he's been blanketing the airwaves, introducing himself to voters in essentially every TV market in the country.

...
Bloomberg's money strategy is not just about advertising; it's also about hiring, especially in the states that will vote right after the first four (Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina).

"The recent announcement that he's added 200 staffers on the ground in a number of the March [3] Super Tuesday states, it changes the calculation a little bit for the candidates who are currently in," [D strategist Karen] Finney says.

Bloomberg's strategy is based on the assumption that Democratic voters are anxious about their options. His campaign thinks he has a path if no candidate emerges as the clear favorite after the first few states vote.

"You don't need to have early primary states," says Steve Williams, mayor of Huntington, W.Va. "He's got a network all across the country. What he has done, nobody, nobody has been able to match."

That network Williams is referring to, it's mayors — mayors who trust Bloomberg and feel indebted to him because they've received millions of dollars in grants to build art centers or fight climate change. After Bloomberg left office, he leveraged his personal fortune into helping other cities.

Earlier this month, Williams endorsed Bloomberg, whose foundation gave the city of Huntington assistance related to the opioid epidemic.

"Somebody helps you, you help them," Williams says, "and it's amazing how our city has benefited from Mayor Bloomberg's support."

Iowa Democrats Are Not Crazy about Clinton or Bloomberg for 2020

In Defying the Odds, we discuss the early stages of the 2016 campaign, when many candidates were unknowns.  We are now in the early stages of the 2020 race.

Preferences and positives mean little in early polls.  Negatives are another matter. At Politico, Steven Shapard writes of the first DMR Iowa caucus poll of the 2020 cycle:

The potential candidate with the highest negatives: Bloomberg, who was elected in New York as a Republican. Forty percent of Democrats view him favorably, while 31 percent have an unfavorable opinion.

One longtime Democratic figure isn’t welcome in the race, however: A large majority of caucusgoers, 72 percent, say 2016 nominee Hillary Clinton would “detract” from the race for president, while only 25 percent say she would add to the race. And roughly as many Democratic voters have an unfavorable opinion of Clinton (49 percent) as view her favorably (47 percent).

Clinton, who narrowly defeated Sanders in the 2016 caucuses, says she won’t run for president again.

The poll was conducted December 10-13 by West Des Moines-based Selzer & Company. Out of 1,838 registered voters contacted, 455 said they would definitely or probably attend a Democratic caucus in early 2020, for a margin of error of plus or minus 4.6 percentage points.

Bloomberg Money in 2018

In Defying the Odds, we discuss congressional elections as well as the presidential race.  Campaign finance is a big part of the story.

Stephanie Saul and Rachel Shorey at NYT:

Records filed so far show that organizations controlled and funded by Mr. Bloomberg spent more than $41 million on 24 House races, much of it on eye-catching ads rolled out on social media and broadcast on television in the crucial final days of the campaign.

And while it’s impossible to conclude that any one factor tipped the balance in a race, Mr. Bloomberg appears to have reaped the benefits of his millions in giving. Democrats won 21 of the 24 races he sought to influence. Of those, 12 had been considered either tossups or in Republican districts.

Since the money came directly out of Bloomberg's pocket, Bloomberg PACs did not have to spend time on fundraising.  All the attention went to the spending.

“I had a budget,’’ Mr. [Howard] Wolfson said. “It was a big budget. I didn’t have to raise it. I knew it was coming and that gave us real advantages in terms of spending late in these expensive markets. We were able to really come in and overwhelm at the last minute in some of these places.”

The group identified target districts based on a theory that highly educated voters were more likely to vote Democratic, even if they had previously voted Republican. Mr. Bloomberg’s operation hired two companies that analyzed educational achievement in Republican congressional districts, Mr. Wolfson said.

They identified districts previously ignored by national Democrats where there were opportunities to stretch the Democratic map.

One of those was Oklahoma’s 5th Congressional District, where an increasingly young and well-educated electorate had been lured by jobs and the urban conveniences of Oklahoma City, and where Ms. [Kendra] Horn was running.

Democratic Money Advantage

In Defying the Odds, we discuss state and congressional elections as well as the presidential race. 

Alex Isenstadt at Politico:

Since the end of July, Republican candidates in the 70 most contested races have reserved $60 million in TV ads, compared to $109 million for Democratic hopefuls, according to figures compiled by media trackers and reviewed by POLITICO. The disparity is almost certain to grow, as former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg makes good on plans to spend nearly $80 million to help Democrats flip the House.

“From Democrat candidates to outside groups, we’ve never seen anything like this before,” said Brian Walsh, president of the pro-Trump America First Action super PAC. “They are dumping in cash by the truckload.”

...
 “We’re raising more money than we usually do on our side, and they’re raising more than they ever do and it’s because of Trump," [Charlie] Black said. "He’s the great motivator.”
...
Meanwhile, a blame game is underway. Many Republican lawmakers and strategists are frustrated with the NRCC over its failure to raise more money, they said in interviews. The committee has reserved $46 million on the TV airwaves, compared to $64 million by their Democratic counterpart. A committee spokesman said the NRCC has eclipsed its fundraising record by $20 million this election cycle.

Critics also contend that the House GOP campaign arm has miscalculated by continuing to spend on behalf of Rep. Barbara Comstock, a Northern Virginia Republican who faces an uphill path to reelection. The committee has reserved nearly $5 million in the pricey Washington, D.C. media market — resources, some argue, that could be used to buttress other lawmakers with more realistic odds of winning.
...
Other senior party officials, however, say fault lies with Congressional Leadership Fund. They argue that the group erred by spending millions of dollars on TV ads well before the fall campaign season kicked into gear, when voters weren't as tuned in.