Why Bloomberg Can't Beat Trump [View all]

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Why Bloomberg Can’t Beat Trump
It’s hard to imagine a Democrat less able to win working class votes.
by Harold Meyerson
February 19, 2020


This should be a happy time for former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Right now, his ads are drowning the airwaves in the 14 states that will vote on Super Tuesday, March 3, while in most of those states, the campaigns of his non-billionaire opponents for the Democrats’ presidential nod have barely begun.

As the campaign rolls on, however, Democratic voters will learn more about Bloomberg’s actual record. The mass incarceration in black and brown communities that resulted from police practices he put in place as mayor; the pre-emptive arrests he authorized of people who sought to protest the 2004 Republican convention in New York (for which the city had to pay hefty fines for false arrests); his defense of Wall Street bankers in the wake of the 2008 financial panic (he termed the fines levied against banks for misconduct “outrageous”)—these are just some of the many Bloomberg policies and positions that should give Democrats pause.

Even so, some Democrats may be willing to overlook that Bloomberg governed and in many ways still thinks like a Republican because they believe he has the best chance to unseat President Donald Trump next November.

But he doesn’t. Indeed, he can’t.

It’s hard to imagine a Democrat less able to win working class votes—those of young black and Latino workers, and those of the white workers who swung the 2016 election to Trump. Minority voters are unlikely to look kindly on his mayoral record: intensifying stop-and-frisk, vetoing legislation that banned predatory lenders from doing business with the city, and opposing city legislation to raise the living wage. Now that he’s running for president he says he backs a minimum wage hike, but in 2014, he told Fox News, “I’ve always thought that this impetus to raise the minimum wage is one of the most misguided things we can do.”

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https://prospect.org/politics/why-bloomberg-cannot-beat-trump/