Bloomberg: I’m not dropping out
March 2, 2020
Yes, he’s a Democrat. No, he shouldn’t drop out.
A defiant Mike Bloomberg beat back criticism of himself and his campaign Monday in a Fox News town hall, arguing that he is, indeed, a Democrat and has no reason to follow fellow moderates Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar out of the presidential race.
“I am a registered Democrat, and last time I checked, you could change parties,” Bloomberg said at his town hall in Manassas, Va., a Super Tuesday state.
He argued that Democrats will want him because of his positions on taxes, climate change and guns, not to mention the money he’s poured into such causes and the Democratic House candidates he helped fund in the 2018 midterms.
Bloomberg launched his late campaign in November, casting himself as a centrist alternative to former Vice President Joe Biden and skipping the first four primary states while pouring a half-billion dollars into advertising across the country.
The free-spending billionaire, who will be on ballots for the first time when 14 states vote on Tuesday, said that reality strengthens his case for staying in the race, even as Buttigieg and Klobuchar dropped out on consecutive days. Both endorsed Biden after his dominant win in South Carolina on Saturday.
“I haven’t even faced the voters once in the national level. So tomorrow will be the first day,” Bloomberg said. “They have been in a number of elections. They competed in the four small states.”
He dismissed Biden as a “legislator” who knows how to pass bills but not how to run things — and described frontrunner Bernie Sanders as unelectable, despite how competitive he is across the map in Super Tuesday states.
“Keep in mind, you don’t have to win states. You have to win delegates,” Bloomberg said. “And if you came in second in every state, you might even have a plurality — probably not a majority. The most likely scenario for the Democratic Party is that nobody has a majority and then it goes to a convention where there’s horse trading and everybody decides to compromise on — it doesn’t even have to be one of the two leading candidates. It could be somebody that had only a small number of delegates.”
“If the rules say that you can swap votes or make deals, then you can swap votes and make deals,” he added. “And if you don’t like those rules, don’t play.”
Bloomberg suggested his case to delegates at a contested convention would be that Sanders would lose moderate Democrats — in addition to failing to win over moderate Republicans — and “his ideas are crazy.”
“He is not electable,” Bloomberg said of Sanders.
Insisting that he’s “in it to win it,” Bloomberg refused to say whether he would support Biden if the numbers don’t work in his own favor. But asked whether President Donald Trump or President Bernie Sanders would be better for the county, he responded, “I have said that I would vote for Sanders, but I would not be happy doing it.”
Bloomberg also struggled to show remorse for implementing stop-and-frisk policing, arguing that “police in all major cities use” the controversial practice and that “we didn’t pick on any particular ethnicity” despite its disproportionate impact on black and brown people. He reiterated, however, that he let it get out of hand and has apologized for the mistake.
Source: https://www.politico.com/
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