I may be late to the discussion but I couldn’t figure out what Bloombergs plan was until I heard this theory.
There are 3979 delegates in the democratic primary. A candidate needs 1990 to win the primary. Failure for any candidate to win 1990 delegates will result in a contested convention.
In the contested convention, super delegates can vote. And I believe other delegates can change their vote.
Bloombergs plan is to win enough votes on super Tuesday and in large states so that no candidate can hit 1990 delegates. Mainly his goal is to stop sanders from hitting 1990.
Then at the contested convention he offers a wide range of financial incentives for delegates to pick him or pick a more moderate candidate (like Biden or buttigieg) who will not pass a wealth tax. Bloomberg will pay several billions a year in a wealth tax.
Incentives could be things like offering hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars in financial aid to democratic races at all levels. Maybe say ‘of you pick Biden I will donate a billion dollars to house and senate races, and another half a billion to state and local races’. He can use his financial leverage to get delegates to pick him or pick a more moderate democratic candidate who won’t push for a wealth tax.
Bloombergs main goal is shutting down a wealth tax and blocking progressive taxes as part of the democratic platform. And this is his method of doing it. The democratic party endorses this plan and that’s why they changed the rules so Bloomberg can be in the debates.
To me, this theory makes a lot of sense as to why and how he is running. Is this theory well known at this point?
I’m fine with Bloomberg donating to leftist causes, but this will create a huge fight within the democrats if he succeeds.
But that’s the point. If Bloomberg can siphon enough votes so sanders can’t get 1990 delegates, then there is a brokered convention. Then Bloomberg can help pick a more moderate nominee.
This is the time of year when “contested convention” always comes up, and as always it’s extremely unlikely to happen (probably less likely this election than most). After the first 2 primaries, the entrenched voting factions coalesce around whichever of their candidates got traction, and this time around there is really the mainstream wing and the progressive wing and that’s about it. Whether Bloomberg likes it or not, if he gets crushed by Biden in the early primaries, the vast majority of his voters will flock to Biden. His only route to staying in the election is to at least come close to Biden in Iowa, gain ground or outright come ahead in New Hampshire, and then keep gaining ground and win multiple states on Super Tuesday.
I can’t imagine Bloomberg is so stupid & paranoid that he thinks a wealth tax has any chance of ever getting passed. President Sanders or Warren can’t just suddenly declare that a wealth tax exists. Mitch McConnell would never even allow a vote on it, and if by some miracle Schumer became majority leader instead, that Wall Street pet wouldn’t allow it either. It’s not happening.
Otherwise, I agree with the rest. Bloomberg wants to split the delagates and be a kingmaker. This is more to serve his own ego than an attempt to protect his pocketbook. The entire GOP and most Democrats are alread busy protecting Bloomberg’s pocketbook 24/7, so he has no need to worry.
There’s no “if” about it. Bloomberg *will *get crushed in the first four primaries. He will not come close to Biden in Iowa, he will not come close in NH. He doesn’t care. He’s not competing there. He’s going for Super Tuesday and beyond. He’s banking on Biden underperforming, and Sanders doing well. If the left does well in the first four (Sanders), Biden is vulnerable. This is where Bloomberg’s banking on picking up the moderate baton.
If you look at any past primary at least since the TV era, each early primary gets a ton of attention, and the media simply reports who the top performers were, and voters follow suit and run away from the others.
I think it is shaping up to be a two-horse race between Biden and Sanders. If the early primaries show Sanders winning almost every one, people are either just going to vote for the frontrunner, or if there is enough of a backlash against Bernie’s success , they’ll go for the perceived number 2.
Nobody in that era has had Bloomberg’s unholy amount of cash and willingness to spend it either. Plus the dude’s playing moneyball with it. That’s completely unprecedented, but not necessarily a bad idea. Time will tell, but don’t underestimate Bloomberg just because he’s not doing things like you’re used to seeing
For Bloomberg’s candidacy to have any chance, he needs Biden to under-perform. Right now, despite all of the angst over Biden’s apparent fragility, when you look at the poll numbers, he still is looking fairly safe to finish in the top two in all of the February primaries, and that’s probably all Biden needs going into Super Tuesday. All of that is to say that Bloomberg a long shot right now.
But surprises can and do happen, and a poor Iowa finish would be bad news for Biden. I wouldn’t be surprised to see Biden come in at 2nd place behind Bernie in IA, but if he finishes behind Buttigieg and/or Warren, then that’s a problem that will follow him wherever he goes.
I think we’ll know a lot more about Biden’s - and Bloomberg’s - chances after Monday night.
Bloomberg is almost certainly not running to block a wealth tax, and likely has virtually no fear of such a tax. I think Bloomberg is a genuine centrist. Like most leftists, you naturally assume all centrists are closet monsters or far right conservatives. It’s one of the most destructive thought patterns the Democrats deal with on a regular basis–believing only far leftist political views are genuine, and all others are just craven.
A brokered convention doesn’t necessarily have two rounds of voting. When a candidate gets pledged delegates, (assuming the candidate has managed the process correctly–Trump for example didn’t in 2016, but it wasn’t a big enough issue to affect his nomination), those pledged delegates are typically extremely loyal to that specific candidate. If we finish the last primary and no one has hit the majority number (which sounds like is 1990), the candidates can actually broker deals on their own. For example let’s say Bernie is 500 delegates short and Liz Warren has 600 delegates. Warren can agree to release her delegates and she’ll also advocate they vote for Bernie. That sort of thing has actually happened before, and generally these delegates follow their marching orders. So this would happen before the convention even started, and once Bernie and Warren’s deal was firmly in place, it would be announced very publicly to shift the perception away from the convention being “contested”, it’d become widely understood Sanders is the nominee.
I just used Sanders/Warren as an example, any collection of candidates who can merge delegates to get to a majority could theoretically enter into an agreement to release their delegates and instruct them to vote for another candidate on the first ballot.
If this happens superdelegates never get to vote.
If it does get to a second vote, the superdelegates are going to be lobbied hard, and we’ll have a true contested convention. That being said the people who are superdelegates actually really want to beat Trump, and they are probably going to want to “preserve” as much democratic influence on the process as possible. This is why I wager that the superdelegates likely would coalesce around candidates who have at least one of these three attributes:
-Received the most total votes (by voters) in the primaries
-Received the most pledged delegates from the primaries/caucuses
-Won the most States
That could in theory be three separate people but most likely it would be 1 or 2 different candidates (in 2008 Hillary actually for example won the “popular vote” over Obama, but Obama won more delegates and more states.)
Most likely given the nature of our political system and what is seen as more important, the candidate with a plurality of the pledged delegates will be very likely the person the supers coalesce around. The only chance I would see for them to go in a different direction would be if the person who won a plurality of pledged delegates won that plurality by a very small margin (say less than 150), and that same candidate say, lost the total popular vote. In that case the results might seem muddied enough the supers would potentially go against the plurality winner.
Most likely the individual candidates will still also be able to lean on their former pledged delegates into the second round. But the pledged delegates are usually local, smaller time activists. It’s entirely possible they actually behave unpredictably in the second round, and may be motivated to change votes based on direct appeals from the candidates and etc. The superdelegates aren’t even the real scary thing for Democrats with a contested convention that has two rounds of voting–it’s the pledged delegates. Mainly because it’s really far more unpredictable what they would do in round two than a superdelegate.
I know everyone screamed like a stuck pig about the new debate requirements but I like it since it’ll force Bloomberg on the debate stage or make him chicken out.
I still think most of Bloomberg and Steyer support is coming from those who have been bombarded by ads. That is unprecedented. And those ads are everywhere. I know the cool kids under 30 never watch TV but there’s still a ton of older people who both watch it and vote. I know the Buttigieg campaign is all about Iowa and NH, so there’s almost no resources anywhere else in the country. I assume it’s pretty much the same for Warren.
So, the question for Bloomberg is does he stay strong once the campaign finally moves out of IA and NH and people in other states start paying attention? I’ve used the Super Bowl analogy before. People that go out to a bar and typically don’t drink will often order a Bud or Bud Light because they’ve seen endless ads for it. Are the people being polled in national polls just saying Bloomberg because they’ve seen the commercials and maybe they know they don’t like Bernie?
I don’t think Bloomberg or Steyer’s plans will win. This is not the right political climate for billionaires, even good billionaires, in the Democratic Party.
Progressives should take a long hard look at the wealth tax and first figure out how they’d get it passed even with a Democratic majority in the Senate. Even if they get it passed after spending a ton of political capital, what’s the chance of it surviving the current SCOTUS? Roberts kept the ACA alive I think more for his own legacy. Roberts is a very conservative judge, but he does care about how he will be written about in the history books and doesn’t want to go down as a right wing rubber stamp like Rehnquist.
Something else to keep in mind about Bloomberg is he entered the race when Biden was at a really low point. Mike isn’t actually an idiot or an evil guy, he looked at Biden’s struggling poll numbers, and the fact of the matter is anyone who has seen previous Biden runs for the Presidency knows Biden is a lackluster campaigner. Not just at the glad handing and speechifying, but at building a campaign organization. At fundraising. He’s never been great at this stuff, Biden’s political career has mostly been about leveraging power in the U.S. Senate and then being a party elder perfectly positioned to make a pretty good “Elder Statesman” Vice President for Obama.
Mike had a genuine fear that given Biden’s weak campaign chops, poor fundraising, that he could be near a collapse. Bloomberg does genuinely want Sanders to not win (I’m on the same boat, not only will Sanders be a terrible general election candidate, he would be a terrible President–no Americans should want him to win); and I think Bloomberg mostly stepped in so he could be like “here’s Mike” after Biden collapsed.
But Biden recovered from his lowest point and has held steady with around 25-30% of national polling. His fundraising is still lackluster, but it’s enough to be viable. So now Bloomberg is in the weird position that his campaign may actually siphon enough votes away from Biden that it cripples his chances to win the primary when Bloomberg gets delegates of his own on Super Tuesday.
There have been some lightly leaked rumors that Bloomberg may be interested in ending his campaign and building for himself a sort of “Financier-in-Chief” role for the Democrats instead of continuing as a candidate himself. But we’re at a weird inflection point where I don’t think it’s clear to Bloomberg himself yet if Biden is really going to hang in there, so he doesn’t want to withdraw too soon only to see Biden collapse after say, a narrow win of South Carolina (my prognostication is if Bernie wins IA/NH and gets within 10% of Biden in South Carolina Biden’s campaign falls apart pretty bad.)
I’d love to see where you got those lightly leaked rumors from. I have no problem believing he wants to be a financier-in-chief (either for himself, another moderate nominee, or perhaps Senate/House candidates if Sanders somehow wins the nom), but I don’t believe for a minute he actually *wants *to end his campaign. If he did, he would’ve bought an $11 million dollar Super Bowl ad to attack Trump rather than build himself up. He’s done a shit-ton of anti-Trump ads, if he didn’t want to continue in this race, why not just run another one of those for $11 million?
Like Bloomberg has given a total of $3bn to Johns Hopkins (his alma mater), has put $8bn into fighting for gun control and climate change policies. His actual spending on this Presidential campaign is still pretty small for Bloomberg.
Since Bloomberg LP is a privately held company and we’ve not seen Mike’s tax returns yet it’s a little hard to quantify–but I’d guess Mike receives anywhere from $1-3bn a year in profit from his ownership of Bloomberg LP. He makes more than that from positive capital gains (mostly unrealized) on a typical year as well. Back in 2016 Mike was worth $36bn and is worth $60bn estimated today, a large portion of that wealth is tied up in his 85% ownership stake in Bloomberg LP, but he has tens of billions in other assets.
Bloomberg could spend $5bn on this campaign and it wouldn’t materially affect him in any way.
And I understand it means nothing to him. But if he were actually interested in dropping out and just wounding Trump for the eventual nominee, why wouldn’t he run an ad directly attacking Trump, instead of building himself up? That doesn’t strike me as someone who “may be interested in ending his campaign,” as you claim.
No, you’re the one who claimed there were rumors he is interested in ending his campaign. It’s on you to back that one up, not me. Otherwise you could just start posting made up crap with the hope of not getting called on it. That’s not how it works here, and you know that.