Do or Die Today in Super Tuesday Primaries for Elizabeth Warren and Michael Bloomberg!

Dear Commons Community,

Political rivals, Elizabeth Warren and Michael Bloomberg, need good showings in today’s Super Tuesday primaries to remain viable candidates for the Democratic Party presidential nomination.   The Massachusetts progressive senator who seeks to limit the influence of the wealthy on policymaking and the former Mayor of New York City, who is determined to use his fortune to advance centrist policies have exchanged fiery and exasperated barbs at the last two Democratic presidential debates, and Warren has aired hundreds of thousands of dollars in attack ads against him.

But the pair find themselves in similar political positions heading into the single most important day on the Democratic presidential primary calendar, a date both campaigns have long pointed to as the real start to a long march to the Democratic National Convention in Milwaukee this summer. Strong performances from a triumphant Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and a resurgent former Vice President Joe Biden in early states have significantly weakened Warren and Blooomberg’s candidacies. Both campaigns may find it difficult to justify their continued existence to allies without surprisingly robust performances tonight, when roughly one-third of all the delegates to the convention will be handed out.  As reported by The Huffington Post.

“The pressure is likely greater on Bloomberg, who has fewer long-standing ties to the Democratic Party, and based his very entrance into the race on the idea that Biden would limp into Super Tuesday ― a possibility the former vice president’s nearly 30-point win in South Carolina erased. Two of the most senior strategists in the Democratic Party suggested on Saturday night that Bloomberg should exit the race.

“The reality is Bloomberg needed Biden to lose South Carolina to have any chance,” David Plouffe, who managed former President Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign, said on MSNBC. A few channels over on CNN, top Obama strategist David Axelrod had similar musings: “As long as Biden is competitive in this race, where’s the path for Bloomberg?”

Warren has faced less explicit pressure, but polling indicates she could win at most just one of the first 18 states to vote ― her home state of Massachusetts. Some progressives are growing increasingly antsy about her presence in the race and fear she could limit Sanders’ delegate advantage. One previously neutral left-leaning group, Democracy For America, endorsed Sanders on Monday. And other groups could seek to push Warren out of the race after Tuesday. 

“If you get to a point where the difference between Biden and Bernie is down to five points, and Warren is that five points, there’s going to be a lot of pressure on her to drop out,” a Democratic strategist said, requesting anonymity to avoid alienating Warren and her campaign.

Both Warren and Bloomberg received a boost recently, when Pete Buttigieg and May Klobacher dropped out of the race potentially making it easier for them to hit the 15% viability threshold necessary to receive delegates in states and districts across the Super Tuesday map.

At a Bloomberg event in Houston on Thursday morning, an older-leaning but diverse crowd munched on a plentiful spread of breakfast tacos and picked up free T-shirts from the campaign, listening to Bloomberg deliver an brief stump speech and take no questions before jetting off to a campaign stop in Oklahoma, another Super Tuesday state.

“You’ve all heard our slogan, ‘Mike will get it done,’” Bloomberg said, in the midst of a speech that portrayed him as uniquely positioned to use his combination of money and management experience to pass gun control and climate change legislation. “If you haven’t heard it, then we spent a lot of money for nothing.”

Bloomberg is, if nothing else, right about how much money he’s spent. His campaign has spent more than $64 million on television ads in Texas alone. By comparison, Biden has spent just over $217,000; Warren and a super PAC backing her have spent just under $950,000; and Sanders has spent $4.5 million, according to a Democrat tracking ad buys in the state. Bloomberg has a whopping 19 field offices in the state, and has visited six times. The campaign claims to have the only presence in the heavily Latino areas along the U.S.-Mexico border, and is hosting more than 30 events a week.

He’s repeated this type of heavy investment across the Super Tuesday map, hiring more staffers, spending more on ads and opening more offices in any other candidates. But at least in the largest states ― Texas and California ― his investments place him in third and fourth place, according to polling averages.

Bloomberg’s relatively low rate of return has Biden allies in a tizzy, arguing the billionaire is effectively boosting Sanders by stealing ideological moderates and Black voters from the former vice president. On Sunday, a super PAC supporting Biden, Unite The Country, suggested Bloomberg should drop out of the contest.

“Bloomberg’s $500 million in advertising is basically serving as the Bernie Sanders super PAC, dividing the large share of Democratic voters who do not identify in the super-liberal lane of the party,” the group’s leaders wrote. “Mayor Bloomberg should decide soon if he wants to be the reason why Bernie Sanders is the nominee of the party.”

The Bloomberg campaign has rejected that argument, arguing the first four states are electorally insignificant. “Mike Bloomberg has not been on the ballot yet,” Bloomberg campaign manager Kevin Sheeky said not long after the South Carolina results rolled in. (The campaign has a point: Ten times as many delegates will be awarded on Tuesday as in the first four states combined.)

The Biden campaign, full of energy after South Carolina, has been eagerly suggesting voters could switch en masse from Bloomberg to the former vice president. “I know y’all dated, flirted, dabbled with Mike Bloomberg a little bit,” said Richmond Mayor Levar Stoney, a Biden endorser, at a rally in Virginia on Sunday. “All is forgiven, it’s time to come home.”

But interviews with Bloomberg voters in Houston indicated there may be more resistance to Biden than otherwise thought. Many of them viewed Sanders as an equally existential threat as Trump, and were deeply disappointed in the rest of the Democratic field.

“This election is huge. American Democracy is under threat from the left and the right,” said David Hoyer, a physician who said Bloomberg would “end the lying, the nonsense and the craziness.”

He quickly ticked through the flaws of the rest of the field: “Sanders is gonna lose, Warren is a nutcase. The Republicans will roll over Buttigieg. Biden is too old.”

Getting Bloomberg out of the race may prove to be easier said than done. While he has no television ad time reserved after Tuesday, a multibillionaire can snap his fingers and restart the ad blitz. Asked on CBS’s “60 Minutes” on Sunday night if he would stop running if he wasn’t in the top three after Super Tuesday, Bloomberg responded quickly: “No, of course not.”

Warren’s first words after arriving onstage at her rally in front of 2,000 people in Houston on Saturday night were blunt: “I want to be the first to say the outcome of the first four contests haven’t gone exactly as I hoped.”

Earlier in the day, Warren had finished fifth in the South Carolina primary, following up back-to-back fourth-place finishes in New Hampshire and Nevada and a third-place finish in Iowa. But Warren, more than any other non-billionaire candidate in the race, invested early and often in the Super Tuesday states. Her campaign has 60 organizers on the ground in Texas, and started knocking doors and calling voters back in August.”

I believe both Warren and Bloomberg will be seriously looking at the viability of their candidacies after tonight.

Tony

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