Over the weekend, news came out from various anonymous sources that Michael Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York City, is preparing a run for the presidency. This news doesn’t mean the bid is certain; the media was equally sure that Vice President Joe Biden would enter the fray last year. But it does mean that there are now two New York City billionaires threatening to run third party if the primaries don’t go the way they would like.
Even then, Bloomberg has allegedly said he would only enter if Senator Bernie Sanders performed very well in the early Democratic primaries and the Republicans were on the path to nominating Donald Trump or Senator Ted Cruz.
The implication is that Bloomberg would position himself as a reasonable centrist in a political world gone crazy. The Democrats nominate a socialist. The Republicans nominate a scorched-earth conservative who promises to take us back to the wondrous 1890s when our troops stopped the unions, birth control was illegal and all of the immigrants were white. Into this mix of caricatures, a reasonable moderate steps in to bring sanity back to American politics. The moderate majority rejects the extremes and falls in lockstep behind a technocratic crusader for sanity.
This strategy rests upon three core assumptions: Bloomberg is a moderate, the parties nominate extreme candidates and a majority of Americans would prefer a moderate to an extreme partisan. I doubt all three.
But before we get into all of that, I should touch upon the man at the center of the issue. Bloomberg was born to a working-class Jewish family 73 years ago. From there he worked his way up through Ivy League business schools and Wall Street to found his own company and end up with a net worth of over $36 billion. This makes him both more successful and more self-made than Donald Trump, which could diminish The Donald's appeal should he get the nomination and run against Bloomberg.
From there he went on to get elected mayor of New York twice as a Republican and once as an Independent. He dreamed of a city of steel, silicon and gold. The buildings were to be more impressive and spread out in an ever-expanding commercial and business district. Policies were to be based upon data and theory more than ideology, leading to more balanced budgets as well as layoffs and human costs. The Bloomberg administration was also very good for the city’s elite.
He was popular enough to get re-elected twice in a decidedly liberal city. But his tenure was not without controversy. He ignited conservative fury through an attempt to regulate the maximize size of soft drinks. Some liberals hated him due to a perception that he was too friendly to the ultra-rich. Stop-and-frisk policies and broken windows policing continued a tradition of “law and order” that conservatives credit with cleaning up the city and liberals contend further marginalized and oppressed communities of color.
After leaving office, Bloomberg became a full-time philanthropist for a time before returning to his company. He endorsed President Obama in the 2012 election due to Mitt Romney’s denial of anthropogenic climate change. In recent years, he has bankrolled an organization designed to match the National Rifle Association’s spending in congressional elections in order to reduce the power of the gun lobby.
Bloomberg doesn’t cleanly fit any political orthodoxy. He champions liberal causes like climate change and gun control. But he’s rather conservative in his approach to business and policing. His stances can repel the activists of both parties, but he’s also not a good example of a centrist. Take the soda debacle: it’s hard to find any liberal outside of New York City willing to propose anything similar, putting him to the left of the Democrats. He rivals Hillary Clinton in his scorn towards the gun lobby.
But in a country that increasingly views the financial industry with disdain, his support of and personal ties to Wall Street place him on the economic right. His support of stop-and-frisk policies, which gave police the power to intercept and search people (usually people of color), also place him distinctly right of center.
It is also less than certain that both parties will nominate someone on the fringes. While Clinton is losing ground to Sanders in Iowa and New Hampshire, she still dominates national polling and could kill his momentum in more moderate states. The Republican elites could potentially salvage a comeback with a win or second place finish by John Kasich in New Hampshire followed by a change in delegate or convention rules and an influx of money.
I’m also just not sure he could assemble a coalition of moderates. The combined national primary polling of Kasich, Jeb Bush, Carly Fiorina, Rand Paul and Chris Christie is about 16 percent. While surprisingly few Democrats view themselves as liberals, Bloomberg might not be able to exploit the large swath of moderate Democrats due to the shadow of Ralph Nader.
In 2000, Al Gore won the popular vote and came within an inch of winning the election. He would’ve gotten away with it, too, if it weren’t for a meddling candidate. Ralph Nader earned less than 3 percent of the popular vote, but the vote in Florida was close enough that the few votes he pulled away, combined with a governor who had a definite conflict of interest and five Republican-appointed Supreme Court justices, handed the election to George W. Bush. The event might still have enough weight in the Democratic psyche to make a vote for Bloomberg look an awful lot like a vote for Cruz.
Between those two, he probably couldn’t pull away enough votes to make an impact. The fear of third parties handing the election to the other side in a winner-take-all system already dissuades voters from supporting them. Because of that fear, the polarization of the electorate and a set of radical candidates could do more to harm Bloomberg’s path to the presidency than help him. path to the presidency than help him. Research has suggested that fear of the enemy is stronger than love of your party's candidate in American elections. That, above all, could be Bloomberg’s downfall.