Michael Bloomberg hasn’t appeared on a 2020 Democratic presidential ballot yet, but he’s already facing questions over why he hasn’t bowed out to make way for rival Joe Biden.
Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar dropped out of the primary this week and are expected to endorse the two-term vice president in an effort to consolidate support behind him rather than socialist Bernie Sanders ahead of Super Tuesday.
“Should you do the same thing?” Martha MacCallum asked Bloomberg Monday night during a Fox News town hall in Virginia.
“Look, I haven’t even faced the voters once at a national level,” the former New York City mayor responded, referring to how his opponents contested the four early-voting states, how he didn’t, and repeating that he is “in it to win it.”
Although he didn’t rule out endorsing Biden at a later date, Bloomberg reiterated his distaste for Sanders’s ideas and his own doubts over whether the Vermont senator could beat President Trump in the general election because the country doesn’t want “revolutionary” change.
The way Bloomberg described his possible path to the nomination hinted that he was prepared for a contested convention, suggesting a hopeful who wasn’t “one of the two leading candidates” could rack up a plurality of delegates.
“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,” he said. “If the rules say that you can swap votes or make deals, then you can swap votes or make deals.”
While touting his managerial record, Bloomberg admitted he didn’t know “how to pass legislation,” a key skill required to push a president’s policies through Congress. The data-driven information services entrepreneur and philanthropist also confessed that “maybe” he “wasn’t paying attention” to the number of New York City residents detained through his police department’s use of stop and frisk, which skyrocketed while he was mayor.
Fox News had to cut to an early commercial during the broadcast after several protests broke out simultaneously, including from demonstrators with slogans such as “Release the NDAs” and “We will not be silent!” Bloomberg has signed at least three nondisclosure agreements with women who complained of experiencing discrimination at his company, Bloomberg LP.
