Michael Bloomberg drops out of 2020 race, endorses Biden

Michael Bloomberg is dropping out of the 2020 presidential race and endorsing Joe Biden after a lackluster Super Tuesday showing, his campaign announced Wednesday.

Bloomberg won’t have the chance to see how his strategy of spending millions on TV ads and appearing at more campaign events in Florida than any other candidate would stack up against Biden and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, the two leading candidates left in the race.

“Three months ago, I entered the race for president to defeat Donald Trump,” Bloomberg said in a statement. “Today, I am leaving the race for the same reason: to defeat Donald Trump — because it is clear to me that staying in would make achieving that goal more difficult. I’m a believer in using data to inform decisions. After yesterday’s results, the delegate math has become virtually impossible — and a viable path to the nomination no longer exists. But I remain clear-eyed about my overriding objective: victory in November. Not for me, but for our country.”

Bloomberg’s statement comes a day after he campaigned throughout Florida and said he had no plans to drop out. But he only won one Super Tuesday contest, the caucus in tiny American Samoa, and didn’t reach the 15% threshold to receive delegates in a number of states, including Texas and California.

Florida was the centerpiece of Bloomberg’s campaign. He spent Tuesday in Miami’s Little Havana, fielding questions from reporters, and then traveled to Orlando to speak with gun violence survivors before heading to West Palm Beach to watch Super Tuesday results with supporters there. On Wednesday morning, he had been scheduled to meet with members of the Venezuelan community in Doral, the U.S. city with the highest percentage of Venezuelans. But there was no sign of Bloomberg’s campaign Wednesday morning at El Arepazo, the Venezuelan restaurant in Doral holding the event.

The gathering with former Miami Mayor Manny Diaz was canceled shortly before it was set to start, but about five people still showed up.

“The losses are visible. We don’t have to explain them,” said Venezuelan Abel Ibarra, who was one of the organizers of the event. “We thought Mike Bloomberg’s participation was really important in this race. We were able to explain to people that the Democratic Party is not socialist.”

Ibarra added that he would be supporting Biden, and encouraged all Venezuelans to follow suit. He also said Sanders was not a Democrat and had been “abusive” of the term Democratic socialism, which he said turns off a lot of Latin Americans in South Florida.

Bloomberg’s supporters were prepared for the news after his underwhelming performance Tuesday. Less than an hour before the campaign announced the candidate’s withdrawal, Bloomberg’s campaign manager, Kevin Sheekey, sent a reflective campaign email to supporters thanking them “for getting us this far.”

“I think he’s realistic,” Evan Ross, a Miami political consultant and Bloomberg supporter, said in an interview about a half hour before Bloomberg announced his decision to drop out. “The only thing he can accomplish by staying in the race is making it harder for Joe Biden to win the delegates he needs to win the nomination.”

Ross predicted that Biden will now win the Florida primary by at least 30 percentage points. Hillary Clinton beat Sanders by 31 percentage points in Florida’s 2016 Democratic primary.

With Bloomberg out of the race, the outlook in Florida — a state in which the former candidate had established more than a dozen field offices and more than 100 staffers — became clearer.

”Florida is Biden country,” said Eric Johnson, an adviser to former President Barack Obama’s 2008 Florida campaign and political strategist for Nikki Fried, Florida’s agriculture commissioner, who is the only statewide elected Democrat in Florida.

Biden held consistent double-digit leads in Florida polls throughout 2019 before Bloomberg entered the race — and before Sanders irked South Florida Democrats with recent comments praising Fidel Castro’s literacy programs in Cuba.

More than 300,000 Democrats voted in Florida before Tuesday night’s results began to flood in for Biden, but Johnson said it’s unlikely that early votes will skew the results in a state where Biden has led in almost every poll.

“This is the one state where Biden was probably OK in the early voting,” he said.

Bloomberg has said his army of staffers will continue to support the Democratic nominee until the general election in November, a potential boon in expensive swing states like Florida. Florida’s primary is March 17.

The former New York mayor and billionaire businessman also praised Biden’s positions on gun safety, healthcare and climate change in his announcement.

“’I’ve known Joe for a very long time. I know his decency, his honesty, and his commitment to the issues that are so important to our country — including gun safety, healthcare, climate change, and good jobs,” Bloomberg said.

This story was originally published March 4, 2020 at 10:37 AM.