Michael Bloomberg Is Not Electable. Period.
It’s time for a wake up call for certain Democratic primary voters. These voters despise Donald Trump and want more than anything to see him defeated in 2020. However, they survey the current field of contenders for the 2020 Democratic nomination, and find it wanting. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are too out-there, too vulnerable (supposedly) to cries of “socialism” that will conjure images of empty Venezuelan store shelves in their minds. Joe Biden might be more their speed, but concerns about his age and fundraising ability raise red flags. Kamala Harris’ campaign has finally succumbed to its many issues, and Pete Buttigieg they find appealing, but too young and inexperienced.
Enter the one man who many of them have begun to look to as a potential savior. Three-term New York City mayor, billionaire whose net worth eclipses Trump’s dozens of times over, and, in their minds, a reasonable moderate who will not turn off a general election audience. Yes, Michael Bloomberg is the man who fulfills all of their hopes and dreams for bringing about a new “return to normalcy” that they desire from the 2020 election. The problem with this narrative is that everything about it is profoundly mistaken. In fact, Michael Bloomberg is a terminally unelectable candidate on multiple levels, and nominating him could very well hand Donald Trump his second term on a silver platter.
This narrative that Bloomberg is the “responsible, electable” candidate with appeal to independents is one that I have heard repeated to me personally by several people, some of whom (without naming names of course) are not without influence in Democratic politics. While Bloomberg could appeal to a certain type of independent or Republican voter, voters of this profile do not reside in swing states, but rather are upper-income voters that live in the cities of deep blue states. Those voters are the last vestiges of the liberal, Rockefeller Republican types that once made those states competitive in national elections.
The Bloomberg-supporting type of Democratic voter believes these Republicans and independents are prolific for two reasons; first, since these Bloomberg supporters tend to be upper income themselves and run in the same social circles as independents and Never Trumpers, they project the attitudes of the people they encounter in their own lives onto swing voters in the rest of the country. Second, Never Trump Republicans are disproportionately represented in the editorial pages of the newspapers that Bloomberg Democrats read on a daily basis- the New York Times alone has three- David Brooks, Ross Douthat and Bret Stephens. Again, this ubiquity in Bloomberg Democrats’ lives is projected onto the rest of the country without a basis in fact.
In fact, we already saw this narrative be shown to be false in the 2016 election. Pundits looked at the number of traditionally conservative newspapers from major metro areas that endorsed Hillary Clinton, the former Reagan and Bush administration officials who backed her, and wrongly assumed that would have an effect on not only the Republican base, but independents as well. The result was that on Election Day Hillary carried wealthy, traditionally Republican-leaning areas of Democratic states such as Manhattan’s Upper East Side and California’s Orange County, but lost the historically Democratic Rust Belt, and with it the election.
For all of the talk about white working class voters driving Trump’s victory, equally important but often overlooked was the fact that black turnout dropped off sharply in 2016 from 2012. Some of that can be attributed to voter suppression or the lack of Barack Obama on the ballot, but much of that was due to Hillary Clinton’s record on mass incarceration, summed up in one video clip from 1996 where she described young black gang members as “super predators” that became infamous during the 2016 cycle.
As Mayor of New York City, Bloomberg aggressively defended the city’s “stop and frisk” policy, and also called the NYPD “my own army” in a 2011 speech. While they may have no love for Trump, the black voters in Milwaukee, Detroit and Philadelphia will have little cause to be enthusiastic about a President Bloomberg either. For their part, working class whites who voted Democratic in the past and are disappointed by Trump’s failure to deliver his promised return of industrial jobs to the Rust Belt would be less likely to return to the Democratic fold with Bloomberg than perhaps any other candidate, thanks to Bloomberg’s unique closeness with Wall Street and championing of policies like his soda ban, which was unpopular even in New York, let alone middle America.
As polling begins to include Bloomberg as a contender in earnest, the truth of his unpopularity will become more and more apparent for anyone paying attention to see. A poll released this week by Monmouth University showed Bloomberg with only a 26 percent favorable rating among registered voters, compared to 54 percent unfavorable. Those numbers are worse than the President on both counts. These numbers cannot be attributed to low familiarity with Bloomberg either; the poll found that only 6 percent of voters surveyed had not heard of Bloomberg, a significantly higher figure than those who had not heard of Pete Buttigieg (16 percent) and just slightly below Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, who come in at 1 percent, 1 percent and 4 percent respectively. If these numbers are borne out by other surveys, what this means is that Bloomberg has very little chance to improve on his dismal numbers.
Establishment Democrats believing that Michael Bloomberg is a compelling or electable candidate for the Presidency is exactly the same mentality that led to the ultimately disastrous coronation of Hillary Clinton as the nominee in 2016. That was a political blunder of epic proportions, but a Bloomberg nomination could put even that to shame. Fortunately, his nomination appears to be unlikely (his favorability numbers are far behind most of his Democratic competitors according to Monmouth). They may not see it now, but if his campaign goes nowhere as it should, hopefully his would-be boosters in the Democratic Party will one day find the perspective to realize that it was ultimately for the best.
