The billionaire ex-New York mayor's campaign faltered after underwhelming debate performances and criticisms of his stop-and-frisk policing policy and past statements about women.
ADVERTISEMENTMike Bloomberg, the billionaire former New York City mayor who jumped into the 2020 presidential race late and spent over $500 million on an unorthodox campaign, has ended his bid for the Democratic nomination.
Bloomberg, who sat out the first four nominating contests in the Democratic primary, had banked heavily on success on Super Tuesday and afterward, pouring almost half a billion dollars (as of late February) of his personal fortune into ad spending in the states voting on and after that day.
But Bloomberg, a former Republican and independent who pitched himself as a moderate Democrat who could beat President Donald Trump, was not able to earn those votes effectively following the resurgence of fellow moderate former Vice President Joe Biden.
Bloomberg also suffered from several mishaps during his campaign that appeared to significantly mute any chance he had at building momentum — including underwhelming debate performances in which he was the recipient of blistering attacks.
At the Las Vegas debate on Feb. 19, his first of the cycle, progressive Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., slammed him over his past critical statements about women — calling him "a billionaire who calls women 'fat broads' and 'horse-faced lesbians" — before demanding on the spot that he release the women making the allegations against him from their nondisclosure agreements.
Bloomberg also faced repeated attacks over his mayoral administration's controversial stop-and-frisk policing policy, which gave police wide authority to detain people they suspected of committing crimes. In practice, it was mostly black and Hispanic men who were stopped.
Bloomberg entered the presidential race in November — several months after most of his competitors — following several weeks of speculation. He quickly began spending on states that vote on Super Tuesday and afterward, employing a risky strategy, dubbed by longtime Bloomberg aide Howard Wolfson a "broad-based, national campaign," that saw him skip the four early nominating contests.
Bloomberg's exit from the race doesn't mean he won't continue to shape it. In January, NBC News reported that his massive campaign apparatus and an army of some 500 staffers would march on through the general election — even if he lost the Democratic nomination — shifting their efforts toward working to elect whomever the party selects to face Trump.