Yeah, you’d assume Trump, but Republicans might prefer to work with Bloomberg.
But Trump’s VP would probably get the nod if it was a more typical Republican.
The soda tax of course. There is no faster or more assured means of bringing about fascist Stalinist dictatorships than taxing Big Gulps.
Actually, the limiting soda size thing was where he went too far. Taxing soda as a sin product is fine. limiting the size of products is a pretty extreme interference between the buyer and seller. If I want a damn hamburger with five patties between two donuts with a pound of cheese and a candy cane in the middle, that’s my right.
Bloomberg might like to be president, and he may think he has name recognition, but across massive stretches of the country, no one has any clue who the heck he is. There’s no way he could mount a credible campaign at this point.
Perot was unknown in early 92. He was leading in the polls in early summer of 92 before he quit the race.
Perot had not held office so he had no votes or policies that people could use against him.
Yes Perot is a good benchmark. At his peak he was a serious contender and Bloomberg is a better candidate than Perot with serious governing experience while still being a political outsider. Sanders and Trump are also weaker candidates than Clinton and HW Bush were in 92.
I’ll buy you one, I’ll have a salad. Here, I’ll say, have another! Beaming with the kindly generosity that is my nature.
So these three aging New Yorkers walk into a bar …
FWIW limits on the size of purchases of potentially harmful products has an established history. Try buying a fertilizer that contains phosphorus in significant bulk right now. Various addictive substances are limited to the amount that can be prescribed at a time. In the U.K. mandating packages of paracetamol (their name for acetaminophen) has reduced suicide rates dramatically. Many states limit how many handguns can be purchased at a time (e.g. Virginia’s one handgun a month law) to reduce gun trafficking. 190 proof grain alcohol (name brand Everclear) sale is restricted in many states too I believe. In states that have legalized cannabis the volume that can be purchased per day is usually tightly controlled. We can debate if “Big Gulps” are as harmful as to mandate such action or not, but the principle that the state has an interest in the well being of its citizens and can control the volumes of potentially harmful products sold for the public good is well established. Other than for true libertarians the line between “good idea!” and “nanny state!” is drawn mostly by how convinced one is about the nature of the harm, and much harm one feels is required before the state’s interest justifies action.
Perot makes an interesting comparison. First he was clearly positioned in the “outsider”/“unconventional”/“insurgent”/“revolutionary” populist space while if Bloomberg ran it would be because both of the party candidates were trying to occupy that “insurgent” space leaving, he’s thinking, room for someone to run as the more mainstream choice with experience as an executive in government trying to attract more run of the mill voters. Bloomberg would place himself as the perceived anti-insurgent choice.
Second, Perot lost. Twice. His time at the top of the polls flashed in the pan very quickly before he imploded with actual questioning of him.
Third, as we have discussed here before, he likely was not a major spoiler. He hurt Bush more in the early phases and drew more from Clinton when he came back, and likely also brought voters out who would have stayed home, but few believe he impacted the outcome.
Lastly, he was already hinting at it with coy denials and an active whisper campaign through much of '91. He was far from unknown in early '92.
Well Perot ended up being a nutcase so it’s not a surprise he lost. But he did manage to pull 19% in 92 which is very good for a 3rd party guy.
And Bloomberg is used to running in elections , he won 3 of them. He’s used to dealing with the press.
He’s been with the same woman since 2000 but has not married her. They live together so that won’t help him with the religious folks. But they probably are not a fan of him anyway.
Perot was a crackpot and made a fool of himself by dropping out and coming back again. Despite this he still got 19% of the vote. If he had run a serious campaign he would have surely done better.
Bloomberg is a much more credible candidate beloved of the pundit class and in our hypothetical scenario he would be running against much weaker candidates than Clinton and Bush in 92.
I think people underestimate how weak Sanders and Trump would be in a general election. Their success in attracting 30-40% of primary voters tells us very little about how they would do with much more moderate general election voters. These voters generally don’t like angry populists. They don’t like self-declared socialists like Sanders. They don’t like candidates who gratuitously insult two thirds of the population like Trump.
Bloomberg isn’t charismatic and he would have no chance against a good opponent but broadly speaking he is similar to Romney or HW Bush, a type which has won or come close to winning Presidential elections in the past. By contrast I can’t think of a successful Presidential candidate even close to Sanders or Trump.
All this is probably moot because the Sanders-Trump scenario is still unlikely particularly on the Democratic side. I can only see Sanders winning only if the e-mail issue breaks out in a big way.
Krugman notes that a Sanders/Bloomberg entry offers a path to Trump’s victory. Basically the only path. Media chin strokers would favor an allegedly bipartisan Bloomberg, which would pull in a few Democratic leaning squishes but rather fewer Republicans. Bloomberg is wonkish, which will turn off those whose political predilections are sourced from the gut. The Big Gulp soda ban (about 840 calories for a 72 ounce bucket - seriously most people defend drinking this crap?) will drive away the anti-cerebral.
Bloomberg won’t get much support from the hard white left or from minorities who care about policing. But that collective is big as coalitions go, but small electorally. Sanders could come in last.
Memo to Bloomberg:
You are a zillionaire. You want to make a difference and you want to the adulation of the cognoscenti. That’s hard. Jimmy Carter has tried to eradicate the Guinea Worm, and it’s taken 30 years so far. He might do it. But it’s a long slog and you are 73.
Howsaboot getting together with your billionaire friends at Davos and set up a chin-stroking panel that would vet our Presidential candidates? Push statesmen rather than celebrities like Palin, Trump and (in your view) Sanders. Back it up with ad-bombs. Admittedly it might be hard to rope in some of Koch’s allies, which would be essential. Ever since Bill Buckley backed the lightweight Goldwater rather than a real statesman and told his minions to back the most conservative Republican who was still electable, we’ve had governance problems. Then again, Carter wasn’t very qualified either.
I trust any objective panel would pass Hillary with flying colors. There are few Presidents who have been workhorse Senators from big complicated states and run the country’s foreign policy for a term. Experience isn’t everything, but Hillary Clinton has it in spades. There’s another Republican candidate who is also highly qualified, but he polls at less than 5% nationally.
Yeah, Perot may have gotten 19%, but how many electoral votes did he get? Zip. He knew how to run a major campaign like Bloomberg does. He may siphon off votes from one candidate or another in the general, but he has absolutely no chance of winning.
Why wouldn’t people like angry populists? Most successful Presidential candidates have been the ones who played the populist card the best (FDR, Truman, Nixon, Carter, Reagan, Clinton, Bush II). Certain populistic stances of those two candidates (nativism for TRUMP especially) might turn off segements of the electorate but that doesn’t mean they’d like Bloomberg. The effeminate, gutless form of “centrism” that Bloomberg is the perfect embodiment has no intellectual vigour or consistency and certainly no mass popular support-it’s little more then the application of the Golden Mean fallacy to politics with a bias towards the interests of the American overclass. It certainly has no appeal to a voter who is say a “moderate” who is a labour union member and supports government-provided social insurance but also is sceptical of gun control.
Where is this opening for a third party of the center? What niche will it occupy? What positions will it take that aren’t already taken by one party or the other - and overwhelmingly the Democrats?
Bloomberg’s not going to get more than a trivial amount of actual voter support. At the national level, the main constituency for candidates like Bloomberg is the pundit class. And I bet even they are tired of the idea.
(Pst: Qin. Your rhetoric is veering off into unhinged territory. Just saying.)
On the substance I mostly agree, except for the part in bold. There is such a thing as gutless centrism, but banning Big Gulp isn’t an example of that - such a policy is unpopular across the ideological spectrum. That said, gutless centrist editorialists will be attracted to Bloomberg, because it reinforces their narrative of false equivalence. I daresay that this constituency, while modest, is probably more electorally significant than fans of nudge theory like Thaler and Sunstein.
Bloomberg’s path to victory would involve hiring consultants, stressing that Big Gulp was a local initiative, relying on the Republican overclass to get scared of Bernie Sanders and therefore ad-bomb him (easy) and ad-bomb Trump. The problem is that this is big league stuff, and Bloomberg doesn’t have time for inevitable mis-steps.
I apologize if I’m starting to sound that way.
I wasn’t specifically referring to the Big Gulp ban when I said I consider Bloomberg’s ideology to be gutless. That said, I think it can be argued even something like that is indeed “gutless” in the sense that it’s the sort of “Dutch courage” move that’ll have the pundits applauding while excusing one from undertaking the more systematic reforms in inequality and so forth that cause obesity.
If this election cycle is proving anything, it’s that simply bombarding the airwaves with ads doesn’t work as a strategy in an age when everyone and their grandmother has access to the Internet. Consider how many tens of millions of dollars Jeb! wasted for his TV spots with single digits in the polls to show for it while TRUMP soared to the top of the polls with his Twitter comments. Once TRUMP starts mocking the soda tax ban, Bloomberg is pretty much toast among rank and file conservatives and libertarians while Sanders can do the same with Bloomberg’s blatant Wall Street ties.
Trying to play with the 538 “what would it take to flip” app to inform speclations.
Assuming in that 3-way scenario the Donald drives up non-college educated turn out and share, and that Black vote is slightly off from last time as Bernie does not excite them, and even ticks up to 13% GOP … what states are most competitive and would be most impacted by some share going elsewhere?
OH, VA, FL, PA, MI, IA, NH, MI, WI, NV, CO, and even MN, are all competitive within a couple of points in a two-way but without unrealistic non-college educated numbers Sanders prevails, but what happens in those states in a three-way. Rangel D of PA is already speculating that in that case he’d support Bloomberg. That could pull enough D off to deliver the state to Trump. But Sanders being to play as the common man against two billionaires might play well with parts of the working class …
The big question would be if Bloomberg draws more of the college educated Whites who would have otherwise voted for Trump or more of them who would have voted for Sanders?
Speaking just to this. ^^
Clearly social media can vastly amplify, or corrupt, or even drown out, a traditional paid mass-media message. Which was all but impossible 20 years ago.
The winning combination is to use a combo of placed social media spews (anybody got a better term?) in addition to conventional mass-media buys in a coordinated effort to steer and amplify the social media conversation.
Buying conventional ad space the conventional way and hoping it goes viral is planning to fail. As Jeb! has, and will continue to, demonstrate.
The most powerful force of all is to get the news media with their 24 hours per channel to fill to decide that talking about you is the best way to boost their own rankings and ratings. That’s like adding news speedballs to the social cocaine on top of the paid media uppers. So far Trump is offering a masterclass in this.