Bloomberg schmoomberg
The former Republican mayor of NYC starts late and behind in the Democratic primary. Can he make up the ground?
The takeaway: Michael Bloomberg is preparing to enter the 2020 Democratic primary. This has some (most? all?) political analysts speculating about his chances to dethrone the current leaders of the field. The odds he can do so are slim.
Editor’s note:
Thanks for reading my thoughts on this subject. And thanks for subscribing! Your membership adds up and makes all this newslettering possible (reminder: I do all this work independently). Please consider sharing online or with a friend; the more readers, the merrier!
As always, send me your tips about what you’d like to read about next. Or what you don’t want to read. Or your feedback otherwise. I’m elliott@thecrosstab.com, or @gelliottmorris on Twitter.
Thanks all,
—Elliott
Reporting for The New York Times, Alex Burns reported yesterday that former Republican mayor of new York City Michael Bloomberg is preparing to file paperwork to run in the 2020 Democratic primary. It’s unclear to me whether his advisors have really thought through the move, or rather, whether they are just humoring the mayor in order to cash the massive checks Mr Bloomberg is sending their way.
We should nevertheless try to answer two obvious questions: Can Bloomberg win? How?
Let’s start with the easy part: do people even know who Bloomberg is? Lauren Wright, a politics lecturer at Princeton, shared the following chart about his name-recognition:
According to Wright, fewer than 20% of Americans know who Bloomberg is. Obviously, that will change, but it’s worth noting that the star power that gets media elites talking about him does not extend to actual voters.
Over time, perhaps Democratic voters will come to actually know about Bloomberg. So the next question we have to ask is: Who exactly would be willing to vote for him? I will answer this question in two parts. First, I talk about demand for another 2020 candidacy, then I’ll talk about whether Bloomberg fits that demand.
First, on demand, according to polling The Economist has conducted with YouGov, only a small fraction of Democrats actually want another candidate to hop in the race. I shared some of these data on Twitter yesterday:
12% of Democratic voters (a) occupy Bloomberg’s ideological space—an economically conservative, socially-progressive one—and (b) are unhappy with their current options.
How many Democrats also fit that description? Not many. Here is a graph from Lee Drutman and the Democracy Fund Voter Study Group that shows how few Americans think similarly to Bloomberg (the lower right quadrant):
A dead end?
Bloomberg will have to jump a lot of hurdles to conduct a successful campaign. Luckily, he has money to solve many of them. Staffing operations should pop up quickly in the early states. He can certainly spend his mountains of cash to plaster ads all over Iowa and New Hampshire in hopes of reaching polling cutoffs to make the debate stage. This strategy did work for Tom Steyer, after all. However, Bloomberg isn’t expected to accept campaign contributions, according to reporting from Axios, which would make qualifying for those debates impossible as the DNC requires candidates to meet both polling and donor thresholds to appear on the debate stage. I have a very strong prior assigning a low probability of victory to a candidate winning a presidential nomination in the year of our lord two thousand and twenty if they don’t appear in a televised debate.
In sum, I don’t see enough (a) demand for Michael Bloomberg’s candidacy or (b) Democrats who think similarly to him for the mayor to have even decent odds of pulling off a successful campaign. Even if he does jump in and run an earnest campaign, it’s unclear whether his strategy for taking his message to a national stage is going to attract enough attention from actual voters for him to seriously compete for the nomination.