I guess I can tell you all, I live in Detroit, MI.
Anyways, Mike Bloomberg’s ads are still running on TV here. I know he just recently dropped out of the presidential race. But I have noticed in the past, they usually are on to these things pretty quick, pulling commercials when the time has come, I mean.
My personal theory is that he just wants to tell people he is a fit candidate, and now he endorses Biden. What the heck? It’s his money, isn’t it?
Have any of you noticed a similar phenomenon where you live? And what is your explanation for it?
Oh yeah. I’m in Tucson, AZ, and the Bloomberg ads have been constant. And these are on the cable networks like USA and Comedy Central, not just on local TV.
Yeah I had to speculate on this with a friend the other day. Here in CA Tom Steyer ads were still running on TV days after he quit the race. I think the ads were bought and paid-for well in advance of Super Tuesday, and the TV station could pull them, but why work extra hard at the last minute to fill empty spots?
Of course, we, the viewing public, will never know of they were pulled and replaced, or just ran out naturally. If someone around here worked in TV advertising, they could set us straight on this one.
It’s a good one. A straight-up anti-Trump ad, no mention of Bloomberg’s name. A new simple neutral logo, m2020. One of the last frames features a #GoJoe hashtag. It seems like an interesting campaign finance workaround.
538’s Geoffrey Skelley thinks that Bloomberg’s campaign hasn’t actually ended, just changed focus to be more anti-Trump, with some ads to support Biden as well.
They’re still running in Washington State but the ads have been more anti-Trump then pro-Bloomberg; heck some don’t even seem to mention him until the end. Like, “Oh by the way I’m running for president and endorse this message.”
So him dropping out of the race barely has any effect on the utility of the ads.
ETA: Even before he dropped out the ads were like that. Some of them were more pro-Mike, like the ones talking about his biography and qualifications, but most were just anti-Trump.
I don’t know if it’s adblockers or having a Tivo or where I live (Wisconsin), but for all the jokes, memes, comments and discussion I’ve heard about overwhelming his ads are, I’ve literally never seen a single one.
If I didn’t spend time on Imgur, I wouldn’t even know people have more of an issue with his ads, or at least the amount of them, than anyone else’s.
If you want to get pedantic, usually no one’s campaign “ends” until after the election(s) in question, as merely “suspending the campaign” still allows the candidate to spend money.
Apparently someone who used to live at this address 20+ years ago is in their target audience, as am I (I guess), so I’ve been lucky enough to get SIX pieces of mail from Bloomberg!
Reminds me of the time I worked for a Department of Energy facility.
A large, old building was getting a new roof installed by a contractor. While the roof was being installed, someone in the DoE decided the building would be torn down. The DoE told the contractor to stop work on the new roof. The contractor refused because it was afraid it would not get paid for the price that was agreed upon in the contract. So the DoE had to wait for the roof to be completed and pass a full quality inspection before the building could be torn down.
Probably a mix of all of the above. Your presidential primary isn’t for another month (April 7); ours in Illinois is on March 17, and here in Chicago, Bloomberg had been carpet-bombing us with TV and radio ads for several weeks.
My guess would be that, had he done well on Tuesday, he would have ramped up the ad spending in the later primary states like Wisconsin.
Stories like this are why I don’t want the government to run anything more than absolutely necessary. I’m sure that everyone during the entire process including you, the quality inspectors and the workers thought doing that was absolutely insane, but nobody could call it off because doing so would have required more paperwork and regulation changes because such a thing was never contemplated by the myriad of rules governing these projects.
Further, there are too many hands involved. Why is the guy ordering a new roof not in consultation with the guy wanting the building torn down so it doesn’t happen in the first place? Why doesn’t the contract get turned over the lawyers and see if they were obliged to pay for a full job if they cancelled in the middle? An entity like the United States Government should be able to negotiate more favorable terms than “If you show up for one second, we pay for everything.”
And if for some reason they were, try to renegotiate or worst case just pay the contractor in full and tell him to go home. Everyone has horror stories like this about the government, but it never gets fixed.
But this doesn’t sound anything like that. It sounds like Bloomy had prepaid for the ads and decided to tweak them to help Biden.
