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Bloomberg Heads to Arkansas to File for 2020 Presidential Primary Why Bloomberg and Deval Patrick Changed Their Minds About 2020
(about 7 hours later)
Michael R. Bloomberg flew to Arkansas on Tuesday morning to personally file paperwork to become a presidential candidate in the state’s Democratic primary, sending a highly public signal about his strong interest in entering the 2020 race. It was late summer and the Democratic presidential primary was in flux. Joseph R. Biden Jr. was sinking in national polls and Senator Elizabeth Warren was on the rise. And two men, Michael R. Bloomberg and Deval Patrick, were again thinking quietly about running for president.
Mr. Bloomberg arrived in Little Rock, Ark., with a few aides, according to two people familiar with his activities. Arkansas is the second state in which he will be on the Democratic primary ballot, after qualifying to put his name on the ballot in Alabama last Friday. The two southern states both have early filing deadlines, even though they are not among the first primaries on the calendar. They had both ruled out entering the race over the winter. Mr. Bloomberg, the former New York City mayor, had conducted polling and focus groups and concluded it was not worth challenging a rival as strong as Mr. Biden. Mr. Patrick, the former governor of Massachusetts, had confronted a family illness — his wife was diagnosed with cancer — and new scrutiny of his business record. He, too, opted out of the race.
“Mike wanted to go and do the filing himself,” said Jason Schechter, a spokesman for Mr. Bloomberg. “If he runs, he’s going to go to states that Democrats never go to in the primary campaign. We’re starting that today in Arkansas.” But over time, they both developed second thoughts. Critical of Mr. Biden’s campaign, Mr. Bloomberg asked his aides to bring updated polling information gauging his prospects. Mr. Patrick began expressing unease to friends about whether the existing crop of candidates could unite the Democratic Party after the primary, or heal a divided country after the general election.
Mr. Bloomberg planned to have lunch at Sims BBQ with the mayor of Little Rock, Frank Scott Jr., during a brief visit to the city. And both men still harbored an undimmed ambition to be president.
Mr. Bloomberg is considering a trip to North Carolina as soon as this week, two people briefed on his plans said. The state’s filing deadline is not imminent, but similar to Arkansas it is among the Super Tuesday contests in early March that Mr. Bloomberg would aim to contest aggressively as a candidate. Now, Mr. Bloomberg and Mr. Patrick are at the precipice of joining the tumultuous 2020 race, encouraged by a combination of anecdotal angst among voters and party officials, and in Mr. Bloomberg’s case by a trove of public-opinion research.
Michael John Gray, chairman of the Arkansas Democratic Party, said he had spoken briefly with Mr. Bloomberg in Little Rock on Tuesday morning. He said Mr. Bloomberg had recalled visiting the city during his time as mayor, for the opening of Bill Clinton’s presidential library. Mr. Gray said there was “a lot of buzz” in the state capital about Mr. Bloomberg’s visit, since Arkansas has only attracted visits from a few candidates so far in this campaign. Both men have concluded in recent weeks that Mr. Biden, the former vice president, is not the imposing adversary they had expected him to be, interviews with aides and allies show. Both also believe there is room in the race for a more dynamic candidate who is closer to the political middle than Mr. Biden’s two most prominent challengers, Ms. Warren and Senator Bernie Sanders.
“I thanked him for being there in Arkansas,” Mr. Gray said, suggesting Mr. Bloomberg could generate interest among voters beyond the traditional early-state circuit. “You do that by showing up in places where people don’t show up.” Should Mr. Bloomberg and Mr. Patrick enter the race, they would test that proposition in different ways: Mr. Bloomberg with a powerfully funded campaign that would take on President Trump directly and contest the biggest states on the primary map from the start; Mr. Patrick with an insurgent candidacy that would begin in next-door New Hampshire and run through South Carolina, where black voters are likely to decide the primary.
On Tuesday afternoon, in his first Twitter post related to a potential candidacy, Mr. Bloomberg trumpeted his trip to Arkansas. Advisers to Mr. Bloomberg conducted extensive polling at the national level and in the Super Tuesday states, including in the weeks leading up to his filing paperwork in Alabama last Friday. That data showed a number of shifts in the Democratic electorate since Mr. Bloomberg’s decision to forgo a run in March, people familiar with the polling said: It found Mr. Biden less formidable, and voters even more intently focused on questions of electability. A series of tests, gauging the impact of Mr. Bloomberg’s positive message and potential messages attacking him, yielded encouraging results.
In a further sign that Mr. Bloomberg is likely to run, one of his longtime lieutenants informed the Pete Buttigieg campaign that he could no longer back the South Bend, Ind., mayor in a primary that included Mr. Bloomberg. Gary Hart, the former Colorado senator who made a last-minute bid for the Democratic nomination in 1988 after dropping out of the race, said the burden on both Mr. Bloomberg and Mr. Patrick would be to articulate a clear rationale for entering a race already overflowing with options.
Bradley Tusk, Mr. Bloomberg’s former campaign manager in New York, hosted a fund-raiser for Mr. Buttigieg last month. But on Tuesday, Mr. Tusk said that while he still saw Mr. Buttigieg as an impressive candidate, circumstances had changed and he would be supporting Mr. Bloomberg in the presidential race. “They ought to be out in public stating that rationale, and it has to be new and different,” Mr. Hart said. “It can’t be Beto O’Rourke warmed over, it can’t be Cory Booker. I mean, so many different approaches have been tried and haven’t quite gelled.”
Mr. Bloomberg, the former New York City mayor and billionaire media executive, is expected to make a final decision within days on whether to proceed with a presidential campaign. People close to him believe his mind is all but made up and his advisers have been recruiting potential campaign staff at a furious pace since the end of last week. While neither man has made a final decision, Mr. Bloomberg has already formally designated himself a candidate in two states with early filing deadlines. Mr. Patrick is expected to announce his intentions this week, and canceled a planned appearance Wednesday at a Colorado conference of socially conscious investors.
But Mr. Bloomberg has not yet made any formal announcement and there is at least a chance he could back away from the campaign. Both men conveyed their intentions to Mr. Biden last week, Mr. Patrick in a phone call to the former vice president, and Mr. Bloomberg through an emissary, his longtime aide Kevin Sheekey.
Mr. Bloomberg is one of several prominent Democrats weighing a late entry into the 2020 campaign. Most serious besides Mr. Bloomberg is former Gov. Deval Patrick of Massachusetts, who could jump into the race as soon as this week. If there is room for someone to break through late, Mr. Hart predicted it would be by coming across to Democratic voters as the candidate uniquely capable of winning the general election.
Mr. Patrick and his allies have been reaching out to Democrats in the early primary and caucus states, and Mr. Patrick spoke last week with former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. to tell him he was considering the race. “The overwhelming fact of this race is defeating the incumbent,” Mr. Hart said. “It’s, ‘Who can beat Trump?’”
The former governor initially rejected making a White House bid last year, in part because his wife had received a cancer diagnosis, but she has been given a clean bill of health, according to Massachusetts Democrats. Mr. Bloomberg and Mr. Patrick both see themselves as the answer to that question, and they may not be alone: Hillary Clinton told the BBC on Thursday that she would “never say never” to running and said she was under “enormous pressure from many, many people to think about it.”
Moreover, Mr. Patrick believes nobody in the race has shown the promise of being able to both unify the party and heal a deeply divided country after the election. Democrats who have spoken to him say he envisions a campaign similar to that of his longtime friend, former President Barack Obama, which would focus more on bringing people together than making a particular ideological case. But unlike Mr. Patrick and Mr. Bloomberg, Mrs. Clinton is not taking active steps toward joining the race.
One adviser to Mr. Patrick noted that, when he first ran for governor in 2006, his signature vow was that he’d be “governor of the whole state” and that he’d make a similar pledge to a fractured country. Polls show the Democratic race is fluid, but that voters are largely satisfied with their existing options. While there is no overpowering figure in the race, Mr. Biden still leads most national polls, and voters in the early states have largely gravitated toward a short list of options including him, Ms. Warren of Massachusetts, Mr. Sanders of Vermont, and Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Ind.
It is a reflection of the unsettled nature of the Democratic race that both men may join the primary fray so late. But Mr. Patrick and Mr. Bloomberg would likely approach the campaign very differently, starting with their activities this week. Mr. Bloomberg, who has flirted with a White House run several times previously, usually as an independent, has already faced withering criticism from several candidates, including Ms. Warren and Mr. Sanders, who have derided him as yet another billionaire seeking to buy control of the political system. Mr. Patrick faces questions about whether he will be able to hire a strong campaign staff and raise the money needed to compete in a national election on such short notice.
If Mr. Patrick runs, he is likely to file to become a candidate in New Hampshire before the deadline for entry there on Friday. Mr. Bloomberg, however, has indicated he would skip all four of the early primary and caucus states in a presidential campaign, focusing instead on the so-called Super Tuesday primaries in March, and he may not even take the step of putting his name on the ballot in New Hampshire. The two have mapped out divergent strategies: Mr. Patrick is eyeing a relatively conventional path to the nomination through the early states, while Mr. Bloomberg envisions spending a huge sum of money contesting Super Tuesday in early March, leaving the current Democratic field to battle over early states like Iowa and New Hampshire.
Even Mr. Bloomberg’s close advisers acknowledge his intended strategy would be an experiment, with the potential to fizzle if another candidate comes out of the early states with runaway momentum.
Mr. Bloomberg took an incremental step toward mounting that kind of candidacy on Tuesday, flying to Little Rock, Ark., to file paperwork to contest the state’s March primary. He is contemplating a trip to North Carolina, another Super Tuesday state far from the Iowa-New Hampshire circuit, as soon as this week, people close to him said.
Michael John Gray, chairman of the Arkansas Democratic Party, met briefly with Mr. Bloomberg in Little Rock and said he had the potential to generate “a lot of buzz” there because few presidential candidates have visited so far.
“You do that by showing up in places where people don’t show up,” Mr. Gray said.
In contrast, Mr. Patrick and his allies have been reaching out to Democrats in the early primary and caucus states. The former governor initially rejected making a White House bid last year, in part because his wife had received a cancer diagnosis, but she has since been given a clean bill of health, according to Massachusetts Democrats.
Mr. Patrick, who has not responded to requests for comment, spent part of Tuesday on the phone with Democratic officials, explaining his thinking about how he could make a last-minute entry into the primary.
Yet longtime Democrats said that if Mr. Patrick had any hopes of getting the nomination, he would need to act quickly and have more than a little luck come his way.
“He’s got to move fast,” said former South Carolina Gov. Jim Hodges, noting that Mr. Patrick is little known in a state he would likely count on because of its large population of black primary voters. Indeed, Mr. Patrick has already missed the filing deadlines in Alabama and Arkansas.
But Mr. Hodges had little difficulty imagining a favorable scenario for Mr. Patrick.
“If Biden doesn’t do well in the first two states, that would clearly create an opportunity for Patrick in South Carolina,” he said, referring to Iowa and New Hampshire.
Mr. Bloomberg’s emerging campaign is still finalizing elements of its strategy, but in addition to skipping the earliest-voting states it is likely to involve running television and digital ads on a national scale and targeting Mr. Trump as an adversary well before the general election.
His polling has found Democratic voters receptive to a message about his biography in business and government. Central to Mr. Bloomberg’s thinking is that he will be able to project his positive message on a vastly greater scale than his opponents’ attacks.
Howard Wolfson, an adviser to Mr. Bloomberg, said the former mayor would present an appealing figure to primary voters who are “increasingly looking for the strongest general election candidate to challenge the president.”
“Electability is key — and we believe that given his unique set of accomplishments in business, government and philanthropy, Mike is that candidate,” Mr. Wolfson said. “We have a great story to tell and the means to make sure everyone hears it.”
Still, even in his own polling Mr. Bloomberg is an underdog: One close ally said his positive message could lift him into third place under the right conditions, according to Mr. Bloomberg’s polling, but that getting into first place would be difficult. For that, Mr. Bloomberg would need to embrace some political gambles, like his Super Tuesday gambit.
For both Mr. Bloomberg and Mr. Patrick, there is still the matter of hastily constructing a full-scale operation just a couple of months before voting begins. That task may be easier for Mr. Bloomberg, who already employs a set of full-time advisers and has the wealth to immediately find more.
On Tuesday, Mr. Bloomberg filed his paperwork, then sat down for lunch with the mayor of Little Rock, Frank Scott Jr., at one of the city’s best-known BBQ joints. For some, the setting evoked the challenges faced by another Democrat who entered the primary late and based his campaign in the Arkansas capital — the retired general Wesley Clark, who mounted a short-lived candidacy for the 2004 nomination.
“Having worked for Wes Clark I can tell you, it’s really hard to build this boat on the water,” said Jamal Simmons, a Democratic strategist.