With Bloomberg out, NC Democrats confident he won’t stop spending in the state
Democrat Michael Bloomberg built a small army in North Carolina and fueled it with money — more than $15 million in advertising alone.
For all that, he appears to have won a single delegate.
After Bloomberg on Wednesday became the latest to drop out of the race, North Carolina Democrats said they’re confident that he’ll continue to invest in the state.
“I have no doubt that he’ll make his vast resources available to North Carolina,” said Senate Minority Leader Dan Blue of Raleigh, who endorsed the former New York City mayor. “That is going to (help) Democrats up and down the ticket.”
Bloomberg finished third in Tuesday’s presidential primary in North Carolina with 13% of the vote, according to final but unofficial results. That was far behind former Vice President Joe Biden’s 43% and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders’ 24%.
North Carolina was part of a Super Tuesday that reshaped the Democratic primary as a two-person race between Biden and Sanders.
Biden won 10 states including Texas, Minnesota and Massachusetts and jumped to a delegate lead over Sanders. In North Carolina, he captured 96 of 100 counties. Sanders won only Watauga, Buncombe County — home to Asheville — and two other mountain counties.
In quitting the race, Bloomberg said, “(W)hile I will not be the nominee, I will not walk away from the most important political fight of my life.”
On Thursday, the Washington Post reported that Bloomberg will form a new independent expenditure group to support the Democratic nominee and attack President Donald Trump. It said the new group could absorb Bloomberg staffers in North Carolina and other swing states.
Tim O’Brien, a senior adviser to the Bloomberg campaign, told the Post on Wednesday that Bloomberg will put his resources “in the broadest way possible behind Joe Biden’s candidacy.
“We have long-term leases and long-term contracts with the team and the intention was always to put this big machine we have built behind whoever the nominee is,” he said.
James Mitchell, Bloomberg’s state director and a Charlotte City Council member, would not comment Wednesday.
Bloomberg had a paid staff of around 125 in North Carolina and offices across the state, far more than any Democratic candidate. He’d been endorsed by a former governor, the mayors of Charlotte and Raleigh and the Democratic leaders of the state House and Senate.
Biden had a single paid staffer in the state. He spent just $240,000 on advertising in the state, less than five other candidates.
“Joe Biden has invested in North Carolina throughout his career by the way he has conducted himself as a public servant,” U.S. Rep. G.K. Butterfield, an early Biden supporter, said Wednesday. “He did not invest in North Carolina the way many candidates did. Quite frankly it was because of the scarce resources he had.”
After poor showings in Iowa and New Hampshire, Biden saw his fortunes change Saturday in South Carolina. His decisive win there prompted first Tom Steyer and then former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg and Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar to drop out. On Monday they endorsed him.
Other centrist Democrats, concerned about the prospect of Sanders at the top of the ticket, also began to coalesce around Biden.
Polls in North Carolina and Virginia, which had shown the race close in both states, began to show Biden pulling away. In a blog Tuesday, Democratic consultant Thomas Mills wrote that Biden “has had the most extraordinary 48 hours of any politician in recent memory.”
Butterfield said he expects Bloomberg to continue to help Democrats up and down the ballot in North Carolina.
“I am confident that he’ll invest not only in the presidential race but in our effort to make the General Assembly Democratic,” he told The Charlotte Observer.
President Donald Trump, meanwhile, won 94% of the vote in the GOP primary.
“Super Tuesday data shows there was a historic voter turn out for President Trump in the Tar Heel State,” Trump Victry spokeswoman Samantha Cotten said in a statement. “North Carolinians are fired up about the election this fall and will reject whichever socialist the Democrats put at the top of the ticket.”
On Tuesday night N.C. Republican Chair Michael Whatley called North Carolina “one of the top tier states that President Trump needs to carry in order to get reelected.”
“It’s one of the four most important states in the entire country,” Whatley said. “We know it. The Democrats know it. And we know that this is going to be absolutely a tip of the iceberg kind of event for us.”
This story was originally published March 4, 2020 at 3:16 PM.
