January 11, 2020

Bloomberg Is Saying All the Right Things About Party Unity—For Now

Check back in July.

Bloomberg

Bastiaan Slabbers/NurPhoto/ZUMA

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Michael Bloomberg hasn’t been a Democrat for long. The billionaire White House hopeful began his adult life in the party of FDR, but he switched to the GOP when he ran for mayor of New York City in 2001, winning the endorsement of Rudy Giuliani. Bloomberg later became an independent and then changed his registration to back Democratic in 2018, after endorsing Barack Obama in 2012 and Hillary Clinton in 2016.

Now, as he seeks the Democratic presidential nomination in a historically unorthodox and mind-mindbogglingly expensive campaign, Bloomberg is trying to demonstrate his commitment to his once-and-current party with a promise to fund 500 staffers and a $15 million voter turnout operation to support the eventual nominee. That news, first reported by NBC, came with a lingering question: Would he commit those kinds of resources to electing the Democratic nominee, no matter who it is? What if it’s Democratic-Socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont (currently leading in Iowa), or Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren—both of whom have pilloried the influence of the uber-rich and have accused the Bloomberg of trying to buy the nomination.

Now Politico‘s Holly Otterbein adds some clarity: Yes, Bloomberg says he plans to spend big, even if that means spending big on behalf of Sanders and Warren.

That comes on the same day the Daily Beast reports that Bloomberg—after spending $200 million on his candidacy—is currently on pace to pick up zero delegates.

That’s potentially a very big deal. Bloomberg has faced criticism from some Democrats for his support of Republicans in the recent past. (In 2018, he raised money for New York Republican Reps. Peter King and Dan Donovan.) What’s more, the news comes amid a months-long drumbeat of other Democratic donors on Wall Street threatening to pull their money from the party if someone like Warren is the nominee.

But of course, this all comes with a giant caveat. The whole point of advertising in advance how magnanimous you’ll be to the eventual nominee is to convince people of your loyalty so they’ll make you the nominee instead. It’s one thing to say this in January; it’s another to follow through with it in July.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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