MSNBC hosts presented arguments for a Michael Bloomberg presidency during their coverage of the New Hampshire primary results — despite the former mayor not appearing on the ballot.
AM Joy host Joy Reid compared the candidate to former President Franklin D. Roosevelt and boasted about Bloomberg’s ability to outspend President Trump on Tuesday night.
“I know Republicans who — they don’t mind the fiscal policies of Trump. They like that, but they also want to sleep at night,” Reid said about Bloomberg’s potential appeal to Republican voters. “So if you’re a Republican and you still want Republican policy, but you don’t want the tweets and the madness, you might go to him.
“If you’re a Democrat that just wants to beat Trump at all costs, you see Trump as just this force of evil, and you just want the money that it’s going to take to defeat him, and you think this guy will spend $2 billion to beat him, you might vote for him,” she added.
Chief political analyst Nicole Wallace said that people should “want the guy that’s gonna fight high and low.” She added that the problem for the rest of the Democratic contenders is that they “follow the rules” while Bloomberg is more willing to “hit” Trump “where it hurts.”
Reid finished her pitch by saying, “You can’t beat showbiz without showbiz. And Democrats don’t understand showbiz — even though all of showbiz is on their side in Hollywood. But they don’t understand showbiz. And the other reality is: If you want a Democrat to win, they have to know how to fight like a Republican. He’s a Republican — or used to be anyway.”
The MSNBC segment occurred less than an hour before polls closed in the New Hampshire primary on Tuesday. Bloomberg’s campaign is skipping the first four primary elections, including New Hampshire, choosing to target Super Tuesday states instead, where voters head to the polls in March.
The former New York City mayor has said he would be willing to spend $1 billion to defeat Trump in 2020. So far, he has spent over a quarter of a billion dollars in the Democratic presidential primary.
