SELMA, Ala. — Mike Bloomberg began his presidential campaign apologizing to black New Yorkers for race-based policing tactics. Yet three months later, as he sprints into Super Tuesday, he finds himself competitive in Southern states with large African-American voting blocs.
In fact, Bloomberg is polling better in the Deep South than he is on the coasts — even though the billionaire ex-New York mayor is a walking personification of the coastal elite.
He held a slim lead in an Arkansas poll earlier this month. He was hot on Joe Biden’s trail in a recent poll of Democratic and independent voters in Oklahoma — though both surveys pre-dated Biden’s blowout victory in South Carolina over the weekend. And the Alabama Democratic Caucus, which backed Hillary Clinton in 2016, endorsed Bloomberg in February, demonstrating his favorability among one of the most influential black political groups in the state.
All three will hold primaries on Tuesday, when Bloomberg will appear on ballots for the first time this election to test his theory that a self-funded candidate can prevail in the Democratic primary while skipping the first four voting states.
This counterintuitive rise of a white, Wall Street billionaire who resisted police reform and only re-joined the Democratic Party as he was mulling a White House bid in 2018 is a story of unprecedented ad spending, persuasive surrogates and a fair amount of self-reflection for a man unaccustomed to public mea culpas. It’s also a story of an unusual degree of splintering between black voters in this Democratic primary — between Biden, Bloomberg and Bernie Sanders — compared with past ones.
“The support for Mike Bloomberg is a perfect example of supporting a less-than-ideal candidate for the sole purpose of defeating the current president," said Christina Greer, author of the book Black Ethnics: Race, Immigration, and the Pursuit of the American Dream.
Bloomberg has spent nearly $200 million on TV and radio ads in Super Tuesday states, half of that in California and Texas. But he’s also spent heavily in Southern states where it’s cheaper to advertise, shelling out $8.2 million in Alabama, $2.8 million in Arkansas, $3.7 million in Oklahoma and $6.3 million in Tennessee. Voters in those states often view his ads more than 30 times a day, according to data from Advertising Analytics.
His ads — he is running three dozen different ones — portray him as the best fit to beat President Donald Trump, a high priority for black Democrats, and are airing in cities with large black populations like New York, Atlanta and Chicago.
While Bloomberg has gained traction in the South and among black voters nationally, he is faring poorly in northern and coastal states where his roots run deeper. His home state of Massachusetts is heavily favoring Bernie Sanders, slightly ahead of even its own senator, Elizabeth Warren. California, where Bloomberg tapped into his reserves to flip House seats blue in 2018, is also solidly behind Sanders.
On Sunday, Bloomberg joined his Democratic contenders in Selma to march over the Edmund Pettus Bridge that African Americans crossed 55 years ago in a peaceful demonstration for voting rights that turned violent when armed police attacked them.
Before the Bloody Sunday anniversary march, Bloomberg delivered remarks at the Brown Chapel AME Church. He highlighted racial income gaps, as he has throughout his campaign. “The average wealth of a black family is 10 percent of the average wealth of a white family. If we can sit here and not try to do something about that, shame on us,” he said.
He has honed in on financial empowerment in an effort to appeal to voters who might be wary of stop-and-frisk, a policy he defended for years after leaving office. During his campaign, an old audio clip surfaced of him speaking flippantly about it.
Bloomberg received a mixed reception here: About 10 church attendees stood up and turned their backs to him as he spoke, but others who lined the streets to watch the procession said they plan to vote for him.
“My people live in New York — my sister — and I go up there and visit, and they told me all the good things he did being the mayor of New York City,” said Emma McDonald, a 60-year-old Alabama resident. Her husband concurred, saying he was moved by Bloomberg’s stewardship of New York City after the Sept. 11 terror attacks.
Another common refrain is the strength of his money. Bloomberg has already spent more than half-billion dollars on the primary and plans to multiply that investment in a general election against Trump.
“I feel like he’s the stronger candidate out of the ones that can go toe-to-toe with Trump. I feel like he’s a billionaire, so he doesn’t need a dime like he says from any of the lobbyists — he’s basically doing it from his heart,” Levante Love, a 27-year-old Detroit resident and campaign volunteer, said at a Bloomberg rally there in early February.
Since his late entry into the crowded race, Bloomberg has courted a constituency that initially seemed beyond reach. One week before he joined the race, Bloomberg stood before hundreds of black parishioners in a New York City church to acknowledge the failures of stop-and-frisk, which a federal judge deemed unconstitutional during his final months in office. He then rolled out a criminal justice reform plan in Jackson, Mississippi, and an economic platform in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Black Americans overwhelmingly vote for Democrats in general elections, but many of them — particularly older ones — lean toward candidates in primaries who evince reliability instead of insurgency. That’s benefited Biden, who served for eight years as Obama’s vice president, and flummoxed Bernie Sanders, whose dominance in this election stems from a diverse mix of younger voters, rather than older African Americans.
Biden was limping along until Saturday, when he seized nearly 50 percent of the South Carolina vote and 61 percent of the black vote. His performance is shaking the pillars of Bloomberg’s candidacy, and the former New York City mayor needs to substantially seize some of Biden’s territory in order to succeed on and beyond Super Tuesday.
The black vote is key in all Southern states voting on Tuesday, many of which will almost certainly favor Trump in the general election. Black voters made up 54 percent of the Democratic primary base in 2016 and were responsible for electing Democrat Doug Jones to the Senate in the deep-red state.
"Right now the candidate who can compete and vie for black votes with Biden is Bloomberg,” Cornell Belcher, a former aide to President Barack Obama who is advising Bloomberg, said Saturday evening after Biden’s landslide in South Carolina. “You’re not going to be the nominee of the Democratic Party if you’re not going to compete strongly for black voters.”
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