Inside Bloomberg’s half-billion-dollar belly flop

Mike Bloomberg left the West Palm Beach ballroom where his campaign held an upbeat Super Tuesday party feeling deflated but resolute. He knew the results coming in from across the country looked increasingly grim. But he wanted to assess the final count in the light of day before deciding whether to end his short-lived bid for the White House.

“As the results come in, here’s what is clear: No matter how many delegates we win tonight, we have done something no one thought was possible,” he told hundreds of cheering supporters who donned campaign T-shirts and waved “Mike Will Get It Done” signs.

The billionaire businessman’s ambitious experiment bombed: He didn’t win a single Super Tuesday state, emerging victorious only in American Samoa — a devastating return on his investment of more than half a billion dollars.

Bloomberg placed third or fourth in every state, and he trailed the two leaders by hundreds in the delegate count. His chances would not improve if he continued campaigning. In fact, doing so could hurt Joe Biden, the leading moderate in the race, his advisers reasoned, despite Bloomberg’s demand earlier in the day that reporters ask Biden why he wouldn't drop out for Bloomberg.

So the former mayor flew back to New York with his family on a private jet Tuesday evening and huddled early Wednesday morning with his closest advisers in one of his Manhattan offices. Alongside campaign manager Kevin Sheekey, chair Patti Harris and adviser Howard Wolfson, Bloomberg reviewed the final results from the biggest night of the Democratic primary, one that was essential to his strategy to win the nomination.

They saw no path to success. Democratic voters had been inundated with the most positive — and occasionally misleading — messages money could buy, and they still roundly rejected him. He then opted to drop out of the race and throw his support — and potentially his vast resources — behind Biden in an effort to halt Bernie Sanders’s surge and realize his ultimate goal of defeating President Trump in November.

“Obviously, last night did not go as we hoped,” Sheekey, who has been encouraging Bloomberg to run for president since 2007, told Bloomberg staffers on a conference call late Wednesday morning. 
 

Sheekey said he hadn’t expected Bloomberg to run for president in the first place. 

The billionaire had just spent more than $115 million to help elect a Democratic-controlled House of Representatives, combing through dozens of races before sinking his fortune into two dozen of them.

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