28 new york | march 2–15, 2020
can’t actually lead. He should run Indiana, because we could use
that.” And when Shama talks about raising three Muslim boys in the
Trump era, her eyes become misty—crying from what seems less like
sadness than righteous anger. “I know what a Bloomberg adminis-
tration did in my city and for people—the very people I have worked
with my entire life,” she says. “Senator Sanders hasn’t achieved that,
and I don’t believe he can for our country. So unless you can prove
to me that someone on day one knows how to walk in and knows
how to define the challenges in our society that need addressing—for
real, not for fake, not for talk, not for like, ‘We’re going to drain gov-
ernment of money.’ ” She trails off. “Mike has done that.”
LIKE THE PARTY AS A WHOLE, Bloomberg is now trying to
move himself to the left, even if at his core, he doesn’t really seem to
believe in helping people who aren’t helping themselves. I once
heard him say to a voter asking about Social Security and Medicare,
“In this country, we can’t have somebody dying in the streets without
being able to see a doctor. On the other hand, the taxpayer says,
‘Look, there’s a limited amount of money that I have.’ It’s balancing
that ...” The voter interrupted, “It’s called civilization, though,” to
which he shot back, “You’ve got that one right.”
And even though he’d said he wouldn’t go after other candidates,
when Sanders attacked him, he started to, calling Sanders a “com-
munist” and putting out press releases about some people, possibly
Sanders supporters, though who knew, defacing Bloomberg-
campaign windows around the country with phrases like corpo-
rate pig and eat the rich. When I talked to Sheekey, in mid-
February, he said, “The contest really has turned because we have
this existential threat. We have Bernie Sanders, who’s now with-
out question the Democratic front-runner, and that’s true as you
think forward, looking at the delegate count, or politically it’s true
in any poll you would take nationally. But who ultimately would
probably lose in the general election with Donald Trump.”
On February 20, the campaign got more aggressive about the
field, with Sheekey publicly calling on Klobuchar, Buttigieg, and
Biden to all vamoose out of the race. “That’s the most galling,
hubristic bullshit I’ve ever seen,” says a Democratic strategist. “So
you’re saying candidates who have spent a year earning support and
votes and delegates should get out? Here’s another way of looking
at it: If you weren’t diverting hours and hours of cable-TV coverage
and print coverage, everyone in the middle might coalesce around
Pete. You don’t have one pledged delegate yet, and we should all get
out because you have money? That’s oligarchy. That’s madness.”
Plus at the end of February, Biden began climbing in the South
Carolina polls. “One of the things even money can’t address is the
unexpected consequences that happen in a multicandidate field—
the physics of it,” says strategist Joe Trippi. “If Biden has a big win
in South Carolina, it’ll be the Comeback Kid thing, and he’ll get
three days of good TV coverage before Super Tuesday. That lifts him
three or four points in some states.” Sanders might steamroll the
field on Tuesday, or he might have to fight to the convention. At
Bloomberg’s first debate, only the senator from Vermont said the
party should accept the candidate with a plurality as its leader no
matter what. If Sanders comes into the convention with 38 percent,
Biden with 35, and Bloomberg is still hanging around with some-
thing decent, Bloomberg could throw the election to either of these
guys. And we know it wouldn’t be Sanders.
If he’s not the nominee, Bloomberg has promised to keep field
operations up in six battleground states, keep his digital operation
up and running, and fund paid media with a focus on anti-Trump
ads. But those promises might mean spending millions of dollars to
elect a socialist whose campaign, when asked about the possibility
of Bloomberg support last week, answered, “Hard no.” This makes
Sanders seem a bit rigid—but Sanders’s supporters think Bloom-
berg himself is an ideologue motivated by his disdain of progres-
sives. “He’s on a mission to stop Bernie or Warren,” says Waleed
Shahid of Justice Democrats. “I would hope he would keep using
his wealth to support democratic causes,” but “I’m a little concerned
that he and Tom Steyer may have hurt feelings.”
Trippi feels confident Bloomberg will deliver. “I take his cam-
paign at their word that they’re going to keep all these headquarters
open and keep fighting,” he says. That did seem to be the conven-
tional wisdom, both inside Bloomberg HQ and out; Bloomberg is
not known to be petty, but someone who closely guards his legacy.
But on February 27, in Houston, he said he’d shutter operations if
the nominee rejected his support, as Sanders already had. “What do
you mean, I’m going to send a check to somebody and they’re not
going to cash the check?” said Bloomberg. “I think I wouldn’t bother
to send the check.”
To those close to the campaign, this looked like a temporary
squabble of the kind that comes up regularly in primary seasons only
to disappear by the fall—not a real obstacle to Bloomberg spending
Trump out of office, and maybe just a show for the cameras. But any
purse-tightening would represent a colossal walk-back from Bloom-
berg, given how regularly and steadily he’d been proclaiming he was
in this to beat Trump and would do anything it took no matter the
nominee—promises that had earned him additional goodwill
among the Establishment of the party he’d been funding so lavishly
and would now be, hypothetically, disavowing. The campaign says
nothing like that is likely to happen: “Mike has said he will happily
support another Democrat if he’s not the nominee. It’s up to them
whether they want the support or not.” If the candidate refuses, they
say, Bloomberg would just spend the money on an anti-Trump
super-pac, as was always the plan (he would never have been able
legally to donate more than $2,800 to the campaign itself ). But even
if the dustup settles quickly, it’s likely the psychodrama between
these two egos will be playing out all summer and fall.AS THE COUNTDOWN CLOCK READ FIVE DAYS and 13
hours and three seconds before Super Tuesday, plus 250 days until
the general election, Bloomberg came into the office to meet a
smattering of mayors. The event was a curious one but in line with
his desire to shake up campaigns: His team had put up a billboard
in Times Square and asked people to call in with questions for
Mike, then flown in these mayors to take the calls. They huddled
with Bloomberg and their cell phones at several white desks
(whether those on other line were so random as to be coaxed to call
Bloomberg via a billboard I would not venture a guess). The first,
Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, formerly of Baltimore, had phone
issues, but Bloomberg stood by patiently. “You should go to Silicon
Valley. There’s no cell service,” he said. “Wait until they have a heart
attack and nobody can call a doctor. There’s actually a couple golf
clubs who are changing their rules for just that reason.”
When the phone bank is over, a half-dozen top staffers gather
near the front door, some off with him to Massachusetts, Tennes-
see, Alabama, Texas, and elsewhere before Super Tuesday. The
group rides an elevator down, but moments later Bloomberg
appears with his security guard, who is urgently talking into an
earpiece, trying to locate the inner circle that has just disappeared.
Bloomberg’s sure the crew has gone downstairs and is probably
already in a car waiting for him, but the security guard wants him
to stay put. Now young staffers notice him and, surprised to find
him unsurrounded, stop to shake his hand or ask how long he’ll be
gone. “I didn’t know how much to pack, because I’m leaving for
four days,” he says—he wasn’t sure about how many shirts, how
much underwear. The tall mayor of Paterson, New Jersey, from the
earlier phone bank, comes by, then asks me to take a picture of
them together. Bloomberg’s security guy finally waves at him to get
in the elevator as the mayor holds up his phone to show me the
picture. It’s not a good shot. “My head’s cut off,” he says. ■