Mike Bloomberg shouldn’t be the nominee – but he’s exposed the roadmap for taking Donald Trump down
Give me Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren, Amy Klobuchar, or Pete Buttigieg – in any order – as the 2020 Democratic nominee for president, and I’ll be plenty happy. They’re varying degrees of liberal, but they’re all smart, noble, and politically competent, meaning they’d each be able to move the nation forward and to the left. Mike Bloomberg is liberal on issues like gun control, but he’s not a liberal overall – and there are things about his personal and professional past that are red flags. So Bloomberg is, at best, my fifth choice.
I spell all of this out so it’s clear that I’m not endorsing Mike Bloomberg on any level when I speak positively of how he’s running his campaign. But we really need to be paying attention to his approach against Donald Trump, because it’s really resonating with voters. Bloomberg has the unfair advantage of being able to run an essentially limitless number of TV ads, because he has limitless money in his bank account. But all those ads wouldn’t be helping him any, if they were the wrong kinds of ads.
The other Democratic candidates are largely focusing on important political and social issues, and I applaud them for their willingness to do this. But because they each have their own variation of how best to move things forward on matters like health care and the economy, what the average nonpartisan voter takes away from it all is that the Democrats are endlessly arguing with each other over policy. Our whole country is on fire thanks to Donald Trump, who is still running around with a blowtorch and setting more things on fire, and the firefighters are busy arguing with each other about which kind of equipment to use.
That’s not what’s really going on, of course. None of the Democrats running for president can do anything to stop Trump’s arson today, because none of them can get into power any sooner than January. So they’re all talking about their plans for how to fix things once Trump is gone. But Mike Bloomberg is doing something very different. He’s using his TV ads to take a blowtorch directly to Donald Trump.
Can Bloomberg’s ads do anything to stop Trump’s arson before January? No, not really. But it signals to the public that he understands that Trump is the 2020 issue. Hillary Clinton spelled out in 2016 why Trump would be a disaster, and not enough people believed her at the time, but now many of them can see it for themselves. The media rarely covered Hillary when she was talking about the issues. Instead, they only covered her when she was talking about Trump, and then they bashed her for not talking about the issues. Spoiler alert: whoever the 2020 Democratic nominee is, they’ll get that same unfair treatment from the media no matter what they talk about, so they might as well just go right at Trump.
This is not to say that the Democratic candidates should abandon the issues. Not at all. You have to show people that you’re not Trump. Talking about the issues is what won the Democrats the House majority in 2018. But the midterms are different. You had to find a way to motivate people to show up and vote in an off-year when the president isn’t even on the ballot, so you had to promote each Democratic House candidate as being someone worthy of making the effort to show up and vote for.
Millions of Americans see the 2020 election as an opportunity to put an end to this Donald Trump disaster once and for all. They’re not necessarily looking for ideology, plans, or virtue. They’re just looking for someone who understands that, for all of America’s problems, Trump is the most immediate problem. They’re looking for someone who is punching Trump in the mouth. Mike Bloomberg is largely ignoring the rest of the Democratic field, in favor of punching Trump every chance he gets.
The other Democratic candidates should take note. Yes, they’re (unfairly) working with smaller TV ad budgets. But Bloomberg is showing us that punching Donald Trump in the mouth – even at this very early stage of the primary race – may be the singularly most effective way to fire up voters in favor of that candidate. If Liz, Joe, Pete or Amy wants to fend off Bloomberg’s surge, they should consider focusing more on Trump, and at least a bit less on the incremental disagreements they have with each other on policy.
