Mayor Mike waves goodbye…to over half a billion… (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)
The only thing more staggering than the figures are the bad decisions during his brief run.
Much to the relief of those assaulted by his digital ads (read: anyone online) Michael Bloomberg announced he was curtailing his ill-conceived campaign to run for President. In the span of almost 100 days exactly he announced his candidacy and then ducked out, after dropping a literal fortune. The end result is something that begs to be placed in the accounting ledger.
In December close to $100 million was spent by the former Mayor of New York City. January saw that figure ballooned to over $220 million. Before Super Tuesday Bloomberg had not appeared on a ballot. He essentially bought his way into the debates and it led to…next to nothing.
The end result sees Bloomberg having dropped $620 million of his own money. This means he dropped in excess of six million dollars per day, on average, but what did this ‘’investment’’ deliver for him? To date, he has received just over 420,000 votes, at a cost of around $1,500 per vote. Following his landslide win in Samoa, the other Mayor walks off with 59 delegates collected. This comes in as over $10.5 million spent per delegate.
At this rate, in order for Mike to collect the needed delegate total to secure the nomination would have led to him spending about $21 billion. Apart from Samoa, Bloomberg has never been able to get much more than 15% in any primary. This kind of result leads you to ponder how on earth he manages to amass his fortune, given these kinds of decisions?
His campaign offices have been described by the workers to resemble something less than political boiler rooms and more like the offices of start-up tech companies. Rather than operations run by volunteers with scrimped budgets the Bloomberg For President offices saw workers paid to relocate, fed 3 meals, given new equipment, and working in either corporate offices or getting rooms in fancier hotels while on the road. It has been announced that even with Bloomberg’s exit they will keep these political offices operating, segueing to become rooms working on behalf of Joe Biden.
But to consider how poorly his effort was in all of this, compare his expenses to that program forwarded by deposed candidate Andrew Yang. The idea from Yang was to essentially buy votes by pledging to pay Americans a regular stipend. Bloomberg could have done this to a VASTLY larger degree.
The Mayor could have altered the lives of countless people in deeply significant ways. Had Michael Bloomberg come forward and pledged to give every democrat and independent voter $10 cash, he would have won over enough people to become inserted into the White House. And here is the mind-blowing aspect — doing so meant HE WOULD HAVE SAVED MONEY!
Instead he flushed his dollars, and/or set them on fire by giving the cash to already flush corporations. I suppose we can be thankful he did not gain control of our national budget.
