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Michael Bloomberg, in First 2020 Campaign Trip, Heads to Virginia At First 2020 Campaign Stop, Bloomberg Boasts What His Money Can Do
(about 7 hours later)
Michael R. Bloomberg will make his first appearance as a presidential candidate on Monday in Norfolk, Va., using a trip to the coastal military community to address the uproar over President Trump’s clash with Richard V. Spencer, the former navy secretary who was ousted over the weekend, aides to Mr. Bloomberg said. NORFOLK, VA. — Senator Kamala Harris declared her presidential candidacy on Martin Luther King’s Birthday and held her first rally before a crowd of 20,000 in Oakland, Calif., while her colleague Senator Elizabeth Warren addressed thousands on a bitter winter day in Lawrence, Mass., the site of a historic textile workers’ strike. Joseph R. Biden Jr., the former vice president, began his run for president before a crowd of union members in Pittsburgh before launching into a campaign swing that culminated with a rally in downtown Philadelphia.
Mr. Bloomberg, who announced his candidacy on Sunday, is expected to meet for coffee in Norfolk with Nancy Guy, a Democrat recently elected to the Virginia House of Delegates, and make remarks to the news media. Michael R. Bloomberg started his campaign at a hushed diner in downtown Norfolk, Va., shaking hands with a snowy-haired afternoon crowd, drawing a combination of selfie requests and quizzical stares, before strolling to a nearby hotel ballroom and making an efficient statement before a bank of television cameras.
It is not clear precisely what Mr. Bloomberg, the former New York City mayor, will say regarding Mr. Spencer. But his trip takes him to the vicinity of Naval Station Norfolk, the largest naval base in the world, and he has framed his candidacy as a rejection of Mr. Trump’s “reckless and unethical” presidency. Accompanied by a small platoon of aides, including two of his former deputy mayors from New York City and a security team that flitted around a downtown waterfront nearly barren of pedestrians, Mr. Bloomberg described himself as a political pragmatist skilled at wielding his wealth to win elections.
Mr. Trump and Mr. Spencer had been at odds over the handling of the disciplinary case of Chief Petty Officer Edward Gallagher, a SEAL commando who was accused of war crimes, and whose defense Mr. Trump and conservative media adopted as a political cause. In his resignation letter, Mr. Spencer said he could not “in good conscience obey an order that I believe violates the sacred oath I took.” “I know how to win,” Mr. Bloomberg, the former three-term mayor of New York City, said, “because I’ve done it time and time again.”
The brief visit to Virginia may effectively sum up how Mr. Bloomberg aims to approach the presidential campaign: He is starting out not in Iowa or New Hampshire, the traditional leadoff states, but rather in one of the many states that vote in the Super Tuesday primaries in early March. And his opening event is not a speech or a rally with voters, but rather a low-key meeting with one of the politicians who helped Democrats capture control of the Virginia legislature this month. If Mr. Bloomberg’s first in-person appearance as a presidential candidate lacked something in organic political energy, he has already jolted the race through the sheer scale of his political spending, stunning the Democratic political establishment and stirring an outcry from the party’s populist wing. He is airing nearly $1 million in television ads in Virginia alone this week, as part of nearly $35 million in television advertising nationwide. A few bystanders said they had already seen those ads.
Those off-year elections were also an illustration of Mr. Bloomberg’s clout in Democratic politics and his growing role as a financial benefactor for the party — a role he may be eager to highlight for primary voters in the course of the campaign. In his remarks to the news media, Mr. Bloomberg invoked his record as mayor and his advocacy on issues like climate change and gun violence, education and smoking, and positioned himself as a political moderate who could bring the country together.
Mr. Bloomberg’s gun control organization, Everytown for Gun Safety, said it spent $2.5 million to assist Democratic candidates in the Virginia elections. And Mr. Bloomberg has repeatedly intervened to help Democrats in the state over the last decade, often with a heavy focus on that issue. Alluding to the nearby military installation, Naval Station Norfolk, Mr. Bloomberg derided President Trump as a lawless leader and quoted the resignation letter of the president’s former navy secretary, Richard V. Spencer, who quit last weekend after clashing with Mr. Trump over a disciplinary case involving a Navy SEAL accused of war crimes.
“He’ll get a very warm reception in Virginia because he has been so invested in our state,” said former Gov. Terry McAuliffe, whom Mr. Bloomberg spent millions to help elect in 2013. “On the issues that he has helped us define and mobilize voters for, climate change and common-sense gun regulations, the man has been a champion in Virginia.” “I salute Secretary Spencer for not flinching from his duties,” Mr. Bloomberg said. “But the fact remains, we have a president, a commander-in-chief, who has no respect for the rule of law and no concern whatsoever for ethics or honor, or for the values that truly make America great.”
Mr. Bloomberg did not campaign on the ground for Virginia Democrats this year. But all of the leading Democratic presidential candidates — including Joseph R. Biden Jr., Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders and Pete Buttigieg — made visits to the state. But the most consistent theme of the day, from the moment Mr. Bloomberg entered the casual D’Egg Diner, painted in subdued orange and off-white, was the financial firepower he has brought to the Democratic Party and some of its favorite causes.
Virginia, with an increasingly diverse and suburban electorate that has contributed to a Democratic surge in recent years, has been a favored destination for Mr. Bloomberg in the past. Early this year he visited the state as part of exploring a presidential campaign, before announcing in March that he would not run against Mr. Trump (and then, months later, changing his mind). Mr. Bloomberg, who is one of the wealthiest men in the country, entered the diner with Nancy Guy, a newly elected Virginia state legislator whose candidacy Mr. Bloomberg supported this fall. He noted to a reporter that the Virginia legislature had flipped this month from Republican to Democratic control, and that he had been able to “help in that process.”
In a January speech in Northern Virginia, he argued that centrist Democrats could offer “bold ideas” in 2020 and that Mr. Trump had made a career of “cheating people and not caring how badly they get hurt.” Speaking to reporters at a nearby Hilton soon after, Mr. Bloomberg noted he had spent “hundreds of millions of dollars fighting the N.R.A.,” including considerable “monies that we provided on gun safety” in Virginia’s recent elections, and had used his fortune to take on the coal and tobacco industries. He named two members of Congress from Virginia, Representatives Elaine Luria and Jennifer Wexton, whose campaigns he supported and spent heavily on in 2018.
Mr. Bloomberg’s newly declared candidacy may test his prediction about the moderate wing of the Democratic Party, which has spent much of the year on defense in the primary campaign, struggling to excite voters who have been drawn to the promises of sweeping political and economic reform offered by Ms. Warren and Mr. Sanders. Ms. Guy, who introduced Mr. Bloomberg at the Hilton, did not quite endorse the former mayor, but she began by thanking a Bloomberg-backed environmental group, Beyond Carbon — “and its founder, Michael Bloomberg” — for its spending in her campaign. Ms. Guy noted that climate issues were particularly salient in her coastal district, and Mr. Bloomberg’s money “probably contributed to my victory, so I’m deeply appreciative.”
Reid J. Epstein contributed reporting. “For years, I’ve been using my resources for the things that matter to me,” Mr. Bloomberg said, noting that those causes included gun control and arresting climate change.
That avalanche of money has led several Democratic presidential candidates to point to Mr. Bloomberg’s campaign as an emblem of a broken system. In Ankeny, Iowa, on Monday, Ms. Warren derided Mr. Bloomberg as a wealthy interloper seeking to “buy a nomination in the Democratic Party,” and she urged voters to show that his approach would fail.
If Mr. Bloomberg were to be successful, Ms. Warren warned, then in the future, elections would be “about which billionaire you can stomach.”
“Michael Bloomberg is making a bet about democracy in 2020: He doesn’t need people, he only needs bags and bags of money,” Ms. Warren said. “I think Michael Bloomberg is wrong and that’s what we need to prove in this election.”
To at least some Democrats, bags of money do not sound like an entirely unappealing asset in the context of a presidential race. And in Virginia, one of the Super Tuesday primary states Mr. Bloomberg is targeting in March, some Democratic leaders say he has earned considerable good will for his prolific spending there over the last decade.
Former Gov. Terry McAuliffe predicted Mr. Bloomberg would get “a very warm reception in Virginia because he has been so invested in our state.”
“On the issues that he has helped us define and mobilize voters for, climate change and common-sense gun regulations, the man has been a champion in Virginia,” Mr. McAuliffe said.
Whether that feeling of gratitude extends beyond Virginia’s political class is a great question mark: The scattered public polls testing Mr. Bloomberg’s appeal to Democratic primary voters have not been particularly encouraging.
In Norfolk, those who turned out to see Mr. Bloomberg at the diner came as much out of curiosity as anything else.
Charles Winstead, a 76-year-old Republican, said Mr. Bloomberg had made small talk with him about his University of North Carolina sweatshirt. The owner of a local lawn and garden equipment business, Mr. Winstead sounded like the kind of voter Mr. Bloomberg hopes to win over in the general election against Mr. Trump: “I like some of the things he does, but as a person I’m not real wild about him,” he said of the president.
But Mr. Winstead said he was not familiar enough with Mr. Bloomberg to find him an appealing alternative, confessing, “I don’t know that much about his politics.”
Others in the low-key crowd were more immediately appreciative, like Tom and Nadia Morris, both 66, who said they moved to Virginia from New York City about a year and a half ago. Mr. Morris chuckled as he disclosed that he was a retired technology employee with the City of New York, and had met Mr. Bloomberg once before when he was mayor.
“So far, out of all the Democrats, he would be my choice,” Mr. Morris said. “There’s really nobody else out there that — it seems to me — that can fit the bill, or that can beat Trump, which is scary in and of itself.”
Ms. Morris was not quite as emphatic, saying she was “very appreciative” of Mr. Bloomberg’s advocacy on gun control but not yet ready to commit to a candidate.
“I think it’s premature, at this point,” Ms. Morris said.
Shane Goldmacher contributed reporting from Ankeny, Iowa, and Reid J. Epstein contributed reporting from Washington.