I’d like to think that former New York mayor and multi-gazillionaire Michael Bloomberg has a snowball’s chance in H-E-double toothpicks of surviving first contact with the Democratic presidential primary, but this may be a case of my revulsion getting the better of me. After all, a man who has made clear his plan is to buy his way to the nomination may indeed have the firepower to alter the dynamics of the race, though whether in his favor remains to be seen. As the The New York Times reported:
Advisers said he intended to stake his candidacy on big, delegate-rich primary states like California and Texas, where Mr. Bloomberg’s immense personal fortune could be put to extensive use.
Should Mr. Bloomberg proceed with such a campaign, he would be attempting to take a high-risk route to the Democratic nomination that has never succeeded in modern politics — one that shuns the town hall meetings and door-to-door campaigning that characterize states like Iowa and New Hampshire, and relies instead on a sustained and costly campaign of paid advertising and canvassing on a grand scale.
It seems as likely that his plan will backfire spectacularly, given the presence and momentum in the race of the two major populist candidates, Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. Many have already commented on how his presence is a gift to those two, who will be able to literally point to his presence on stage as the living embodiment of the outsized power of billionaires in our political (and economic) system. Indeed, the non-negligible possibility that he might actually succeed in using his billions to win the Democratic nomination should be a moment of reckoning for all party members, including moderates who might not have placed income and wealth inequality at the top of their priority lists. I’d like to think that Bloomberg will supercharge the Warren and Sanders campaigns at the expense of more centrist candidates like former Vice President Joe Biden and Senator Amy Klobuchar; not only does Bloomberg serve as living proof of the two populists’ indictments of the corruption of wealth, but he also presents an existential danger to their very candidacies and the progressive movements they both lead and are carried by.
It’s notable that Bloomberg’s plan — mass advertising rather than actual contact with voters — would potentially build his candidacy without cultivating the grassroots networks that would benefit the Democrats beyond just himself. It would be a shallow movement dedicated to a single candidate, rather than the mass democratizing surge currently underway and desperately needed by this country. By relying on a financial shock and awe approach, Bloomberg’s strategy threatens to dominate whatever substantive message of liberal social policies and conservative economics he’s hoping to sell us: the campaign medium would (accurately) become the message.