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After Rough Debate, Bloomberg Repeats Attack on Sanders Democrats Pile On Bernie Sanders as Urgency Grows
(about 1 hour later)
SALT LAKE CITY — After a poor performance in a ferocious Democratic debate, former Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg faced voters and the news media at a Thursday morning event in Utah as his campaign reckoned with the fallout from the televised verbal combat, which undercut all four moderate Democrats onstage at times and left Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren looking strengthened. LAS VEGAS — The day after a Democratic presidential debate brought out the candidates’ outrage at Michael R. Bloomberg, the focus turned back toward Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who leads polls of Nevada, California and the nation.
Mr. Bloomberg, trying to move on quickly from the debate, used the Utah event to intensify his attacks on Mr. Sanders, the current polling leader in the field. He argued that nominating Mr. Sanders, a self-identified democratic socialist who has passionate support in the party’s left wing, would lead to defeat against President Trump in November. Former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. spent Thursday hammering Mr. Sanders for past positions that were friendly to the gun industry. Mr. Bloomberg warned that nominating Mr. Sanders would be “a fatal error.” And former Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Ind., said he found it hard to imagine that Mr. Sanders could defeat President Trump in a general election.
“If we choose a candidate who appeals to a small base — like Senator Sanders — it will be a fatal error,” Mr. Bloomberg said. “We need Democrats and independents and Republicans to win.” Referring to the suburban moderate voters who helped Democrats win back the House in 2018, he added, “That was the coalition that propelled Democrats to success in the midterms — and it’s the coalition that we need to win in November.” “It would be a very, very tough sell,” Mr. Buttigieg told a crowd of students at a televised event at the University of Southern California. “I think it would be a tough sell with Mike Bloomberg, too. I’m saying we don’t have to choose between these two options. I’m saying there is another way.”
But behind the scenes on Thursday, Bloomberg campaign officials were trying to assess how the debate would affect Mr. Bloomberg’s standing with voters just as he was beginning to break through on a national level. His inability to respond effectively to attacks over his wealth and his record on gender, race, stop-and-frisk policing tactics and other issues as a mayor and businessman in New York risked seriously harming his message that he would be the most competent and capable opponent in a general election against Mr. Trump. The attacks came two days before Nevada’s caucuses, the third contest of the Democratic presidential nominating calendar, and the day after a bitter debate that highlighted the dire situation that Mr. Biden and Mr. Buttigieg face. With Mr. Sanders favored to win in Nevada, they have limited time to try to stop his rise before the delegate-rich Super Tuesday contests on March 3 — when Mr. Bloomberg and his $300 million advertising campaign await.
Campaign officials acknowledged that Mr. Bloomberg, who is typically not one to shy away from conflict, held back when confronted. His campaign manager, Kevin Sheekey, alluded to the candidate’s atypical restraint in a statement, saying, “He was just warming up.” Mr. Bloomberg was in one of those Super Tuesday states, Utah, on Thursday, telling voters in Salt Lake City that Mr. Sanders could not appeal to a broad enough array of voters to win the White House.
“Everyone came to destroy Mike,” Mr. Sheekey said. “It didn’t happen. Everyone wanted him to lose his cool. He didn’t do it. He was the grown-up in the room.” “If we choose a candidate who appeals to a small base — like Senator Sanders — it will be a fatal error,” Mr. Bloomberg said. “We need Democrats and independents and Republicans to win.”
Mr. Bloomberg and his rivals drew a huge audience, and many voters were probably getting their first taste of the former mayor beyond his record-setting advertising onslaught. The debate averaged nearly 20 million viewers on NBC and MSNBC, the biggest live television audience ever for a Democratic debate, and millions more watched online, the networks said. Both explicitly and obliquely, Mr. Biden and his campaign criticized Mr. Sanders’s record on gun control on Thursday, releasing a biting video that captured the Vermont senator saying in 2012, “I don’t know that you hold a gun manufacturer responsible for what obviously a deranged person does.”
David Axelrod, the architect of Barack Obama’s presidential campaigns, said Mr. Bloomberg’s debate debut was “kind of a disaster, and predictably so.” In a speech at a Las Vegas community center later in the day, Mr. Biden implicitly criticized that position again.
But he said Mr. Bloomberg’s voracious budget for television advertising — the former mayor has spent hundreds of millions of dollars so far — could paper over some of the deficiencies exposed on the debate stage. “One of the reasons he’s making gains is he’s reaching a lot of people that way,” Mr. Axelrod said. “Imagine if I stood up here and said today, ‘I voted to give immunity to the tobacco companies,’” Mr. Biden said. “Imagine if I stood here and said to y’all that I think that, or I voted for, giving immunity to oil companies for the pollution, the damage they do to groundwater supply, to the air, et cetera. Folks, it’s just flat-out immoral. ”
Mr. Bloomberg’s team sought to capitalize on an effective debate moment for him, posting a video on his Twitter account Thursday morning that showed him emphasizing his business experience. But the video was deceptively edited to make it seem as if his statement had left the other candidates speechless for about 20 seconds. Mr. Biden went on to more directly criticize Mr. Sanders for his past opposition to the Brady bill, which required background checks for gun purchases.
“I’m the only one here, I think, that’s ever started a business, is that fair?” Mr. Bloomberg asks in the clip. The video then cuts to shots of the other candidates, set against the sound of crickets chirping. The shots are spliced together to make it appear as though the candidates could not respond to the question — when, in reality, Mr. Bloomberg moved on after pausing for about a second. Yet as he walked out after the event, a reporter asked whether Mr. Biden believed that Mr. Sanders had changed his views on guns.
The video was viewed nearly two million times within hours of being posted. This month, Twitter said it would begin labeling or removing such manipulated videos on its platform, though the company said the rules would not go into effect until March. “I do think he’s changed his views,” Mr. Biden allowed, “and I’m happy for that.”
A Twitter spokeswoman said Thursday that the company would have “likely” labeled the Bloomberg video as manipulated media had the new policy been in effect, though it would not have removed the clip. While Mr. Sanders’s rivals sought to chip away at his popularity, he laid low on Thursday. He appeared at no public events and conducted interviews with three local TV stations in Las Vegas and Reno, his campaign said.
For Ms. Warren, who led the assault on Mr. Bloomberg as she sought to preview the strengths she would bring to a fall debate against Mr. Trump, the debate resulted in her single best day of fund-raising by far. Her campaign announced Thursday afternoon that she had brought in more than $5 million since she walked onto the stage the previous night. In a brief exchange aired on CNN from his campaign hotel in Las Vegas, Mr. Sanders criticized the wealth of Mr. Bloomberg, who is worth more than $60 billion.
But it was not clear if her performance would help her significantly in the Nevada caucuses on Saturday: Roughly 75,000 Nevadans had already voted before the debate took place, a huge number compared with 2016, when about 84,000 Democrats took part in the caucuses. “Mr. Bloomberg himself is worth more, one person, than the bottom 125 million Americans,” he said.
If Ms. Warren was the dominant figure in the debate, Mr. Sanders was perhaps the luckiest: The front-runner in Nevada and national polls, he emerged largely unscathed from the debate as his moderate rivals focused on ripping into Mr. Bloomberg and one another. After Mr. Sanders’s victory in the New Hampshire primary and his tie in the Iowa caucuses, he is the best positioned in the field to keep building momentum heading into the Nevada caucuses, the South Carolina primary and the Super Tuesday contests in 16 states and territories three days later on March 3. The Sanders campaign was relieved on Thursday that he had emerged from Wednesday’s debate unscathed, a result that it attributed to his resilience and supporters’ loyalty.
But by Thursday morning, former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s campaign was signaling its own interest in lacing into Mr. Sanders. Mr. Biden’s Twitter account posted what the campaign said was footage of an interview with Mr. Sanders on the day of the 2012 mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. “Senator Sanders’s opponents have thrown everything they can at him since the launch of his campaign and they’ve failed to stop his campaign to build a political revolution because of his consistent, lifelong record of standing with the working class,” said Mike Casca, a campaign spokesman.
“You raise important issues,” Mr. Sanders is seen telling an anguished woman. “I don’t know that you hold a gun manufacturer responsible for what obviously a deranged person does.” The Democratic candidates’ urgency to contrast themselves with Mr. Sanders came as expectations grew among rival campaigns and political operatives that he was likely to win Nevada’s caucuses on Saturday.
“It’s time to hold gun manufacturers accountable,” the Biden campaign video concludes, leaning in on an issue that some supporters hoped for months that Mr. Biden would elevate. Mr. Biden was scheduled to deliver remarks on ending gun violence later Thursday in Las Vegas, the city where in 2017 the deadliest mass shooting in modern American history unfolded. Perhaps in an acknowledgment that they are not likely to emerge on top, Mr. Biden, Mr. Buttigieg, Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts all plan to be out of the state when the caucus results start to be announced on Saturday afternoon.
And Mr. Bloomberg, in his Utah remarks, seemed to signal that he would use the coming weeks to target Mr. Sanders more aggressively. Referring to the Vermont senator, Mr. Bloomberg argued that voters “don’t want hand waving and finger pointing — they want common-sense ideas that can become real policy.” “I think Nevada is unfathomable,” said David Axelrod, the architect of Barack Obama’s 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns. “Second place is anybody’s guess. And second place is meaningful by the unwritten measuring sticks that the punditocracy creates. Everybody is going to be watching who finishes second.”
After campaigning in Utah on Thursday, Mr. Bloomberg will continue on to other Super Tuesday states, where a combined 34 percent of all the delegates to the Democratic National Convention will be rewarded. More critical to the campaigns than Nevada are the 16 states and territories with contests on Super Tuesday. And reliable public polling data is available in just a few of those states.
Reid J. Epstein and Katie Glueck contributed reporting from Las Vegas, and Davey Alba and Matt Stevens from New York. In Texas, a recent University of Texas/Texas Tribune poll found Mr. Biden and Mr. Sanders in a dead heat. In Virginia, a Monmouth University poll released this week found Mr. Bloomberg joining Mr. Sanders and Mr. Biden in a statistical tie for first place. Mr. Sanders has led recent public polls of California, the biggest Super Tuesday prize on the map.
Mr. Buttigieg exhibited unusual urgency on Thursday, sending a fund-raising appeal that for the first time issued a target he said the campaign must meet to stay afloat.
“We are the best shot at defeating Donald Trump,” he wrote. “But the reality is, if we can’t raise $13 million before Super Tuesday, we might never get that shot.”
Hours before that please-help-or-we’re-sunk appeal, Mr. Buttigieg’s campaign released an unsigned “state of the race” memo that warned Mr. Sanders was on the verge of building a “seemingly insurmountable delegate lead.”
Mr. Buttigieg, who has struggled for months to attract black and Latino voters, found himself facing a sometimes skeptical audience in Los Angeles.
Valerie Gutierrez, a junior at the University of Southern California who attended Mr. Buttigieg’s event, said she was undecided but leaning toward voting for him, despite fears about his limited appeal.
“The fact that he’s not able to get the diverse minority group under his coalition is a bit worrisome for me, because I’m someone from a minority background,” she said.
Michael Sutter, a U.S.C. senior who said he had already voted early for Mr. Buttigieg, echoed the former mayor’s warning that Mr. Sanders could not defeat Mr. Trump.
“Bernie is a little bit too far out there,” he said. “He’s going to scare people away.”
Sydney Ember contributed reporting from Las Vegas, Giovanni Russonello from New York and Louis Keene from Los Angeles.