Mike Bloomberg looks to Florida to keep hopes alive after Super Tuesday struggles
Three months deep into a $500 million campaign and under pressure to withdraw, billionaire Mike Bloomberg watched from South Florida Tuesday night as his hopes to become the 46th president of the United States seemed to fade as soon as they had begun.
The former New York mayor, on the ballot for the first time in the Democratic primary on Super Tuesday, the biggest single day on the primary calendar, did his best to be optimistic as voters in 14 states cast ballots mostly for people not named Bloomberg — damaging his strategy to emerge from a contested convention with the Democratic nomination.
“As results come in, here’s what is clear: No matter how many delegates we win tonight, we’ve done something no one else thought was possible,” Bloomberg said from a stage in the Palm Beach County Convention Center. “In just three months, we’ve gone from 1% in the polls to being a contender for the Democratic nomination for president.”
But early results suggested otherwise.
Within minutes of polls closing on the East Coast, early results showed former Vice President Joe Biden romping in Virginia, a state with 99 delegates, and taking North Carolina, with 110 delegates. Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders quickly won his home state. As the night wore on, the two candidates competed for first and second place across states reporting results, with California and Utah reporting late.
Bloomberg’s battle was largely just to get over the 15% popular vote threshold — the tipping point at which candidates become eligible to receive a proportional share of a state’s delegates. He was in second in Colorado, but in some states he appeared likely to come in fourth, behind Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren.
His performance Tuesday — which won’t be fully measured until California methodically plods through its primary results — was crucial: Nearly a third of all the delegates to be awarded during the primary process were up for grabs.
Sanders entered the evening with 60 delegates, Biden with 54, and Warren with 8. Bloomberg, who entered the race too late to make the ballot in the first four voting states, began the night with none.
Bloomberg supporters who made up the largely white, older crowd waited anxiously in a second-floor convention center ballroom filled with piped-in fog while listening to pop, noshing on short rib sliders and sipping wine.
At 7:43 p.m., the crowd had something to cheer about: the territory of American Samoa and its six delegates were called by CNN for Bloomberg.
Aaron Clar, a 42-year-old New York transplant who said he once worked for Bloomberg, offered that he’s “petrified” of the prospects of a Biden or Sanders nomination.
“I just hope he stays in this. I hope he’s not out of it. You hear people say ‘He’s in. He’s out.’ Biden’s surging,” said Clar, of West Palm Beach. “I just think a lot of people don’t know about him.”
Bloomberg, a billionaire entirely funding his own campaign, has done his best to become a household name. Since jumping in the race in November, he has spent $539 million on TV, radio and online ads, according to Advertising Analytics — nearly doubling the spending of the field.
But Bloomberg’s campaign, built on the idea that he is the best candidate to beat President Donald Trump, was also built on expectations that Biden would collapse. And after the former vice president’s impressive showing Saturday in South Carolina, pressure built, instead, for Bloomberg to withdraw.
Reports popped up Tuesday of depressed expectations, and the campaign rushed to deny a report by Vanity Fair that Bloomberg’s own advisers were urging him to pull out.
“It’s very entertaining watching someone take $500 million, pour gasoline on it, and light it up on national TV,” Dario Moreno, a Miami-based pollster, said late last week during a Florida International University panel. “His performance has been underwhelming.”
Ahead of Tuesday, Bloomberg’s campaign had declined to talk about their expectations for how many delegates he would win. But they spoke optimistically about his chances. Jim Anderson, a senior adviser to Bloomberg, predicted in an interview Monday that “we’re going to surprise people.”
“We’re in it for the long haul,” he said. “We’ve organized beyond Super Tuesday.”
As the night wore on, Bloomberg had yet to compete to win a single state. But tallies showed him above 15% in Alabama, North Carolina, Maine, Oklahoma, Tennessee and Texas.
Elaine Kamarck, a Brookings Institute senior fellow and member of the Democratic National Committee’s rules committee, said in an interview that California would serve as the biggest indicator of Bloomberg’s chances going forward. But the West Coast state, which has millions of voters and a notoriously slow process for counting votes, likely won’t produce complete results breaking down the share of its 415 delegates until Wednesday afternoon at the earliest.
“We’ve got to see California come in before we really know what this looks like,” she said. “For a contested convention to be a realistic probability, tomorrow we’ll have to have three or four candidates with substantial amounts of delegates. And then they’ll have to keep winning throughout the rest of the season.”
As results came in, Bloomberg looked to Florida, a crucial general election swing state viewed as a must-win for Trump. The state’s primary is set for March 17. More than 300,000 voters have already cast ballots by mail or at early voting centers.
“I came here because winning in November starts with Florida. And if I’m the nominee, let me make you this promise: We will beat Donald Trump in Florida and swing states around the country,” said Bloomberg, who was introduced by Judy Sheindlin, better known as her Judge Judy daytime TV character.
Bloomberg had spent the entire day focused on Florida, a massive prize with 219 pledged delegates.
He’d started his morning with an order of Cuban coffee — “Sin azucar,” or without sugar — at El Pub in Little Havana, and ended the day before a roaring crowd at the convention center in West Palm Beach.
Earlier in Miami, Bloomberg had acknowledged that his campaign strategy had changed from trying to win the delegates necessary to secure the nomination on a first ballot. Instead, he said he was pinning his hopes for victory on a brokered convention, in which pledged delegates are no longer tethered to the results of their state’s primary contest and floating super delegates are unleashed to vote for candidates of their choice.
“You don’t have to win states. You have to win delegates. I think what happens here is nobody wins a majority, somebody will have a plurality, then you go to the convention,” Bloomberg told reporters at his Little Havana office, shortly after ordering a cafe con leche-flavored ice cream cone at Azucar. “I don’t think I can win any other way.”
The last brokered convention was in 1968.
Bloomberg’s campaign has spent weeks pressuring Biden surrogates to flip their support to him and urging the former vice president to drop out, and he became prickly when pressed about whether he would withdraw from the race after Biden’s strong South Carolina showing over the weekend pushed out three other candidates, two of whom endorsed him.
“Have you asked Joe whether he’s going to drop out?” he bristled, saying that, if anything, Biden was siphoning delegates away from him. “When you ask him that, you can call me.”
Told of Bloomberg’s remarks in Miami by a New York Times reporter, Biden, in Oakland Tuesday, responded: “Michael, have a good day.”
After Miami, Bloomberg stopped in Orlando, where Mayor Buddy Dyer endorsed him at his field office, and then at a memorial for the 2016 shooting at Pulse nightclub with the parents of Jerry Arthur Wright, one of 49 people killed.
As Bloomberg campaigned, President Donald Trump was taking shots at “Mini Mike Bloomberg” on Twitter, saying the former New York mayor “can never recover from his incompetent debate performances.” And outside Bloomberg’s campaign rally Tuesday night, Republicans gathered waving Trump flags to remind Bloomberg that he was in the president’s home town.
Bloomberg mentioned Trump’s tweets Tuesday night in his speech. He said the president is afraid to face him in Florida in November. And then he asked Floridians for their help on March 17 — a contest in which he’ll need to do well to have any shot at being on the ballot in the fall.
“I need your help,” he told the audience. “And I need your vote.”
Miami Herald reporter Bianca Padró Ocasio and McClatchy DC reporter Alex Daugherty contributed to this report.
This story was originally published March 3, 2020 at 9:45 PM.
