Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg is blanketing television airwaves in Ohio and Texas with $15 million in television advertising, an eleventh-hour bid to push Democratic nominee Joe Biden past President Trump in two states rich with Electoral College votes.
The late investment was announced after Bloomberg’s political advisers polled battleground states looking for places where an additional barrage of television ads might be effective at moving votes to Biden during the final week of the presidential campaign. After reviewing the data, the billionaire media mogul concluded his efforts might be most effective in Ohio and Texas, in addition to the $100 million he is already spending on Biden in Florida.
“We believe that Florida will go down to the wire, and we were looking for additional opportunities to expand the map,” Bloomberg adviser Howard Wolfson told the New York Times. “Texas and Ohio present the best opportunities to do that, in our view.”
Biden and Trump are tied in Ohio, typically a swing state but one Trump captured easily in 2016. In Texas, Trump leads Biden by 3.2 percentage points in the RealClearPolitics average. That is hardly a comfortable lead in a state that has voted Republican for president for decades but is now proving competitive for Democrats up and down the ballot. The spots in both states are expected to be aired by Bloomberg’s Independence USA super PAC.
Meanwhile, Biden and Trump are running roughly even in Florida, although the former vice president enjoys a small lead of 1.2 points in polling averages.
Bloomberg, the founder of Bloomberg News, spent more than $1 billion of his personal fortune in a bid to win the 2020 Democratic nomination but exited the race after his campaign foundered. Also on Tuesday, Axios reported that Bloomberg plans to unload $20 million on Democrats running down-ballot in Arizona, North Carolina, and Texas who are running on an agenda of aggressively confronting climate change.
