HOUSTON ― Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren and former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg are political rivals of the first order. The progressive senator who seeks to limit the influence of the wealthy on policymaking and the multibillionaire media mogul who is determined to use his fortune to advance centrist policies have exchanged fiery and exasperated barbs at the last two Democratic presidential debates, and Warren has aired hundreds of thousands of dollars in attack ads against him.
But the pair find themselves in shockingly similar political positions heading into the single most important day on the Democratic presidential primary calendar, a date both campaigns have long pointed to as the real start to a long march to the Democratic National Convention in Milwaukee this summer. Strong performances from a triumphant Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and a resurgent former Vice President Joe Biden in early states have significantly weakened their political hands and left them with dreams of a contested convention as their most likely paths to the nomination. Both campaigns may find it difficult to justify their continued existence to allies without surprisingly robust performances on Tuesday night, when roughly one-third of the delegates to the convention will be handed out.
And Warren’s and Bloomberg’s campaigns are even using eerily parallel messaging to show why they would be better presidents than their ideological rivals, pointing to a potential coronavirus pandemic as the type of crisis they could better handle than Sanders or Biden. Both are also counting on a surge of television and digital advertising to keep their vote counts high in crucial states like Texas and California that will award huge numbers of delegates.
The pressure is likely greater on Bloomberg, who has fewer long-standing ties to the Democratic Party, and based his very entrance into the race on the idea that Biden would limp into Super Tuesday ― a possibility the former vice president’s nearly 30-point win in South Carolina erased. Two of the most senior strategists in the Democratic Party suggested on Saturday night that Bloomberg should exit the race.
“The reality is Bloomberg needed Biden to lose South Carolina to have any chance,” David Plouffe, who managed former President Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign, said on MSNBC. A few channels over on CNN, top Obama strategist David Axelrod had similar musings: “As long as Biden is competitive in this race, where’s the path for Bloomberg?”
Warren has faced less explicit pressure, but polling indicates she could win at most just one of the first 18 states to vote ― her home state of Massachusetts. Some progressives are growing increasingly antsy about her presence in the race and fear she could limit Sanders’ delegate advantage. One previously neutral left-leaning group, Democracy For America, endorsed Sanders on Monday. And other groups could seek to push Warren out of the race after Tuesday.
“If you get to a point where the difference between Biden and Bernie is down to five points, and Warren is that five points, there’s going to be a lot of pressure on her to drop out,” a Democratic strategist said, requesting anonymity to avoid alienating Warren and her campaign.
Both Warren and Bloomberg received a boost on Sunday night, when former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg dropped out of the contest, potentially making it easier for them to hit the 15% viability threshold necessary to receive delegates in states and districts across the Super Tuesday map.
“If you haven’t heard it, then we spent a lot of money for nothing.”
At a Bloomberg event in Houston on Thursday morning, an older-leaning but diverse crowd munched on a plentiful spread of breakfast tacos and picked up free T-shirts from the campaign, listening to Bloomberg deliver an brief stump speech and take no questions before jetting off to a campaign stop in Oklahoma, another Super Tuesday state.
“You’ve all heard our slogan, ‘Mike will get it done,’” Bloomberg said, in the midst of a speech that portrayed him as uniquely positioned to use his combination of money and management experience to pass gun control and climate change legislation. “If you haven’t heard it, then we spent a lot of money for nothing.”
Bloomberg is, if nothing else, right about how much money he’s spent. His campaign has spent more than $64 million on television ads in Texas alone. By comparison, Biden has spent just over $217,000; Warren and a super PAC backing her have spent just under $950,000; and Sanders has spent $4.5 million, according to a Democrat tracking ad buys in the state. Bloomberg has a whopping 19 field offices in the state, and has visited six times. The campaign claims to have the only presence in the heavily Latino areas along the U.S.-Mexico border, and is hosting more than 30 events a week.
He’s repeated this type of heavy investment across the Super Tuesday map, hiring more staffers, spending more on ads and opening more offices in any other candidates. But at least in the largest states ― Texas and California ― his investments place him in third and fourth place, according to polling averages.
Bloomberg’s relatively low rate of return has Biden allies in a tizzy, arguing the billionaire is effectively boosting Sanders by stealing ideological moderates and Black voters from the former vice president. On Sunday, a super PAC supporting Biden, Unite The Country, suggested Bloomberg should drop out of the contest.
“Bloomberg’s $500 million in advertising is basically serving as the Bernie Sanders super PAC, dividing the large share of Democratic voters who do not identify in the super-liberal lane of the party,” the group’s leaders wrote. “Mayor Bloomberg should decide soon if he wants to be the reason why Bernie Sanders is the nominee of the party.”
The Bloomberg campaign has rejected that argument, arguing the first four states are electorally insignificant. “Mike Bloomberg has not been on the ballot yet,” Bloomberg campaign manager Kevin Sheeky said not long after the South Carolina results rolled in. (The campaign has a point: Ten times as many delegates will be awarded on Tuesday as in the first four states combined.)
The Biden campaign, full of energy after South Carolina, has been eagerly suggesting voters could switch en masse from Bloomberg to the former vice president. “I know y’all dated, flirted, dabbled with Mike Bloomberg a little bit,” said Richmond Mayor Levar Stoney, a Biden endorser, at a rally in Virginia on Sunday. “All is forgiven, it’s time to come home.”
But interviews with Bloomberg voters in Houston indicated there may be more resistance to Biden than otherwise thought. Many of them viewed Sanders as an equally existential threat as Trump, and were deeply disappointed in the rest of the Democratic field.
“This election is huge. American Democracy is under threat from the left and the right,” said David Hoyer, a physician who said Bloomberg would “end the lying, the nonsense and the craziness.”
He quickly ticked through the flaws of the rest of the field: “Sanders is gonna lose, Warren is a nutcase. The Republicans will roll over Buttigieg. Biden is too old.”
Getting Bloomberg out of the race may prove to be easier said than done. While he has no television ad time reserved after Tuesday, a multibillionaire can snap his fingers and restart the ad blitz. Asked on CBS’s “60 Minutes” on Sunday night if he would stop running if he wasn’t in the top three after Super Tuesday, Bloomberg responded quickly: “No, of course not.”
‘Milwaukee is the final play.’
Warren’s first words after arriving onstage at her rally in front of 2,000 people in Houston on Saturday night were blunt: “I want to be the first to say the outcome of the first four contests haven’t gone exactly as I hoped.”
Earlier in the day, Warren had finished fifth in the South Carolina primary, following up back-to-back fourth-place finishes in New Hampshire and Nevada and a third-place finish in Iowa. But Warren, more than any other non-billionaire candidate in the race, invested early and often in the Super Tuesday states. Her campaign has 60 organizers on the ground in Texas, and started knocking doors and calling voters back in August.
On the day of the New Hampshire primary, halfway through a rough run in the early states, Warren’s campaign pointed to Super Tuesday as the day everything would get better. “Warren is poised to finish in the top two in over half of Super Tuesday states (eight of 14), in the top three in all of them, and is on pace to pick up at-large statewide delegates in all but one,” campaign manager Roger Lau wrote at the time.
In a memo released Sunday morning, Lau sounded a bit like a door-to-door salesman whose next big payday was always right around the corner. His optimism about Super Tuesday was turned down, though he still insisted Warren would earn delegates “in nearly every state in play on Super Tuesday.”
Instead, Lau said, the campaign ― reinforced by a $29 million fundraising haul in February powered by her filleting of Bloomberg at a debate in Las Vegas, and a pop-up super PAC that has spent more than $12 million supporting her ― was looking to a contested convention as a route to victory.
“In the road to the nomination, the Wisconsin primary is halftime, and the convention in Milwaukee is the final play,” Lau wrote, noting the campaign has already put $4.1 milllion into paid media into states that vote later in March, and up to the Wisconsin primary on April 7. “Our grassroots campaign is built to compete in every state and territory and ultimately prevail at the national convention in Milwaukee.”
Not mentioned in the memo: the threat to Warren in her home state of Massachusetts, where Sanders campaigned on Friday and Saturday. Polls indicate Sanders has a slight edge in a tight race there, which could lead to an embarrassing loss. Some Warren allies questioned Sanders’ tactics, noting he could likely net more delegates by keeping her under the 15% viability threshold in Texas and California instead of by squeaking out a narrow win in the Bay State.
In her speech in Houston, Warren ― who long refused to air virtually any criticism of her opponents ― laid into her rivals for the nomination, including Sanders. She said his “30-year track record shows he consistently calls for things he fails to get done.” Biden was “so eager to cut deals with Mitch McConnell and the Republicans that he’ll trade good ideas for bad ones.” Bloomberg was nothing more than a billionaire play-acting “whose track record as mayor shows he’ll govern to protect himself and his rich friends over everyone else.”
But even more of her speech was dedicated to how she would respond to the spread of coronavirus in the United States, laying out a plan on how she would combat the virus’s spread and its economic impacts: Testing and a theoretical vaccine should be free to all, she said, and the government should ready a fiscal stimulus to help businesses hurt by supply chain disruptions.
“This crisis is a reminder that this primary isn’t a game. We are picking a president ― and we need someone whose core values can be trusted, who has a plan for how to govern, and who can actually get it done,” she said. (Bloomberg, who placed a national three-minute network television ad buy on Sunday to lay out his plan to respond to the crisis, is making a similar argument.)
In recent days, the Warren campaign has tried to turn back the clock by releasing more of her detailed policy plans, a throwback to when her ideas dominated the primary conversation and earned her significant amounts of media attention. She released a marijuana legalization plan before a town hall in Denver, a plan for border communities before one in San Antonio and a plan for farmworkers before an event on Monday night in Los Angeles. But it seems unlikely another white paper will lead to a delegate boost.
Randi Weingarten, the American Federation of Teachers president who endorsed Warren in her personal capacity on Saturday night, remained optimistic ― perhaps stubbornly so.
“People would have said the same thing about Joe Biden before tonight,” she said when asked if there was still time for Warren to reemerge as a top-tier candidate. “And there was a decisive victory that Joe Biden had tonight and it changed the dynamics of the race.”
The change in dynamics needs to come soon. Shortly before Warren walked onstage on Saturday night, a small group of supporters started a “here to stay” chant, echoing the candidates’ words at a rally last weekend in Seattle.
The chant died out in less than a minute.