Bloomberg drops out, backs Biden in Democratic presidential race

Thursday, 5 March 2020 01:26 - - {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}

Reuters: Billionaire former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg ended his presidential campaign on Wednesday and said he was backing Joe Biden for the Democratic Party’s nomination to challenge President Donald Trump in the November election.

“A viable path to the nomination no longer exists,” Bloomberg said in a statement, having failed to deliver convincing wins in his electoral debut on Super Tuesday despite lavish spending on campaign ads across the United States.

Endorsing Biden, Bloomberg said: “I will work to make him the next president of the United States.”

His exit ended a novel electoral strategy, a vast experiment in political advertising, as Bloomberg, 78, skipped the four early-voting states and instead focused on the 14-state Super Tuesday contest.

His only victory on Tuesday came in the US territory of American Samoa. Biden, 77, the former vice president, accomplished his Super Tuesday goal of muscling Bloomberg aside and consolidating support of moderates to turn the race into a one-on-one contest against the democratic socialist, US Senator Bernie Sanders.

Bloomberg was winning more than 15% of the vote, enough to pick up some delegates, in Tennessee, Texas, Colorado, Utah, California and Arkansas. Since entering the race on 24 November 2019, Bloomberg spent more than $500 million of the fortune he built on his eponymous media company on an ad campaign that vaulted him into the top tier of the Democratic field.

After blanketing the airwaves with promises that he could defeat the Republican Trump in the 3 November election, his support among Democrats and independents in public opinion polls rose to around 15% from about 5% when he entered. He hired thousands of staff and mounted a vigorous national tour focused on the 14 states that voted on 3 March. But Bloomberg was dogged along the way by criticism over his past support of policies seen as racially discriminatory, including stop-and-frisk policing, which ensnared a disproportionate number of African-Americans and Latinos, as well as past sexist remarks.