Despite spending over $500 million on his presidential campaign, “Mini” Mike Bloomberg came up short on Super Tuesday.
According to CBS News, the former New York City mayor responded to his dismal performance on one of the most crucial primary days of the year by throwing in the towel, ending his campaign for the White House and reversing course to support none other than former Vice President Joe Biden.
“Three months ago, I entered the race for president to defeat Donald Trump. Today, I am leaving the race for the same reason: to defeat Donald Trump — because it is clear to me that staying in would make achieving that goal more difficult,” Bloomberg said in a statement Wednesday morning, according to CBS. “I’m a believer in using data to inform decisions. After yesterday’s results, the delegate math has become virtually impossible — and a viable path to the nomination no longer exists.”
Bloomberg’s support for Biden mirrors that of two other former Democratic primary hopefuls, former small-town Mayor Pete Buttigieg and Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar, who both dropped out of the running ahead of Super Tuesday to throw their support behind the former VP, NPR reported.
Doomed from the start
Fox News reported that Bloomberg’s campaign had indicated as early as Tuesday night that it “may be on the brink” of collapsing. The former mayor skipped the early primary contests, opting instead to focus his efforts on Super Tuesday and beyond, but he had been plagued in recent weeks with poor debate performances and a host of resurfaced video clips wherein he made controversial statements about minority groups.
During an interview in 2011, for instance, Bloomberg complained about young “black and Latino males” who he said “don’t know how to behave” at work.
“There’s this enormous cohort of black and Latino males aged, let’s say 16 to 25, that don’t have jobs, don’t have any prospects, don’t know how to find jobs, don’t know what their skill sets are, don’t know how to behave in the workplace where they have to work collaboratively and collectively,” Bloomberg said, according to The Washington Times.
He also asserted at an event at the Aspen Institute in 2015 that nearly all crime takes place in neighborhoods with high minority populations. “95% of your murders — murderers and murder victims — fit one M.O.,” he said, according to Reuters. “You can just take the description, Xerox it and pass it out to all the cops. They are male; minorities 16 to 25.
“The way you get the guns out of the kids’ hands is to throw them up against the walls and frisk them,” Bloomberg added in the talk, which resurfaced in mid-February. The former mayor also told an audience at the University of Oxford Saïd Business School in 2016 that he “could teach anybody, even people in this room, no offense intended, to be a farmer,” the Washington Examiner reported.
“You dig a hole, you put a seed in, you put dirt on top, add water, up comes the corn,” added Bloomberg, who also faced criticism over allegations that he was trying to “buy” the nomination, NPR noted.
Another one gone
Bloomberg’s exit from the Democratic primary race leaves just a handful of candidates still in the running, including Biden, who walked away from Tuesday’s matchups victorious, Politico reported. He was followed by Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, who was poised to win California as the votes trickled in on Wednesday, as well as Bloomberg and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, both of whom failed to garner even a quarter of the vote in any one state, according to Politico.
President Trump, for his part, reacted to the news with a tweet saying Bloomberg just “didn’t have what it takes.”
Mini Mike Bloomberg just “quit” the race for President. I could have told him long ago that he didn’t have what it takes, and he would have saved himself a billion dollars, the real cost. Now he will pour money into Sleepy Joe’s campaign, hoping to save face. It won’t work!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 4, 2020
Indeed, even with half a billion dollars, Mike Bloomberg couldn’t overcome his repulsive reputation. Another one bites the dust.
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