Bloomberg announces Nutter endorsement as he zeroes in on Pennsylvania
December 20, 2019
Michael Bloomberg has snagged a big-name endorsement in the critical voting state of Pennsylvania.
Michael Nutter, a longtime Hillary Clinton supporter and mayor of Philadelphia from 2008 through 2016, has been tapped as national political chair for Bloomberg’s still-developing campaign for the Democratic nomination. In that role, he will advise on strategy and travel around the country in a surrogate role.
Pennsylvania is critical for any Democrat seeking to defeat President Donald Trump next year: Barack Obama won the state in 2008 and 2012, only to see Clinton lose it to Trump in 2016. Philadelphia, a blue city in the purple state, hosted the Democratic National Convention that year.
“Mike Bloomberg is my kind of leader,” Nutter said in a release issued by Team Bloomberg Friday morning. “He cares about the drug crisis, gun violence, the environment and access to high-quality healthcare for all Americans.”
He pegged him “a man with a plan.”
That’s the messaging Bloomberg’s camp is hoping will resonate with voters who might be wary of a candidate who became a Republican to run for office in 2001, and owes his political career to Rudy Giuliani — then the New York mayor helping the city heal after the Sept. 11 terror attacks, and now a national defender of Trump.
Realizing that as a centrist billionaire he is unlikely to win over left-leaning Democrats just on the strength of his financial commitments to climate change and gun control, Bloomberg’s campaign has poured more than $100 million of his own personal wealth into a blitz of ads that underscore his managerial experience.
Bloomberg called Nutter “an innovative mayor who made one of America’s biggest cities stronger and safer.” He will head to Philadelphia on Saturday to open his first field office in the state there.
He will then go to Detroit and Milwaukee, both in battleground states, to set up headquarters there as well. This is all being done in the service of generally skipping the first four voting states and instead focusing on Super Tuesday.
Source: https://www.politico.com/