Why I'm Glad Mike Bloomberg Is Out of the Race

On March 4th, with the primary elections rapidly approaching, candidate Mike Bloomberg announced that he would be dropping out of the 2020 presidential race. The multi-billionaire had joined the Democratic ballot just three and a half months prior, using his late entry as an oddly successful campaign strategy despite his eventual withdrawal. 

I want to preface the rest of this piece by admitting whole-heartedly that I am not particularly into politics. I consider myself to have my personal views firmly in check for most of the relevant issues, and I generally keep up with current events on a surface level, but I will be the first person to tell you that I am not nearly passionate or informed enough to make any serious political statement in a public setting. That being said, I think it is important to keep this in mind as it illustrates the sheer magnitude of the serious political statement I am about to make in a public setting.

I make an active effort to avoid openly discussing politics at all costs, and I still jumped at the chance to tell everyone how thrilled I was that the Mike Bloomberg campaign called it quits.

It didn’t matter who you were, where you were, or what you were doing; Mike Bloomberg made sure you would see his advertisements. They were inescapable. During the winter months, I was bombarded by Bloomberg’s campaign rhetoric on just about every website, TV channel, radio station, and streaming service I visited. There were several-minute-long info sessions and 15-second TV spots; heart-wrenching gun violence narratives and goofy Christmas videos with dad jokes; Trump attack ads and… well, whatever this is. I saw it all, and I saw it all the time. Eventually, I was so dumbfounded by Bloomberg’s unrelenting YouTube ads that I decided to visit his YouTube page out of morbid curiosity. I clicked on the most recent upload, got halfway through the video until realizing that it was just playing a different Mike Bloomberg ad before the actual video began, and then promptly decided that I would absolutely not be voting for Mike Bloomberg.

And I wasn’t the only one getting overexposed to these ads. Over the course of his brief campaign, Bloomberg spent more than $500 million in advertising, translating to an average of $5.6 million spent every single day. With its ludicrous spending, the campaign had produced and broadcasted an absurd 185 unique video advertisements through February 17, a figure that would only continue to grow in the remaining two weeks of the campaign and doesn’t even account for the many, many audio ads that ran on seemingly every podcast and radio station in the nation. This aggressive marketing push set a new all-time high for primary ad spending, nearly doubling the previous record despite Bloomberg’s late entry into the race.

There’s nothing wrong with running an aggressive ad campaign; in fact, given the current state of our country’s politics and the nature of the 2020 race itself, I think making a strong marketing push, especially on new-school media platforms like YouTube and Spotify, is a very good idea and will be a crucial strategy for any Democratic candidate’s success. But in the case of Mike Bloomberg, this tactic was used to such an extreme degree that, contrary to the confident tone and inspirational messages of his promotional materials, he seemed utterly desperate and even a bit insecure. Bloomberg himself did not exactly improve this reputation, either, as nearly all of his appearances in debates and interviews were very apparently sloppy and often featured confusing, contradictory statements. As time went on, it became increasingly clear that the Bloomberg campaign wasn’t simply focusing on advertisements, but rather the campaign was the advertisements. He joined the Democratic race solely on the assumption that he could buy our votes—and then failed.

The funny thing is that many of Bloomberg’s harshest critics (myself included) actually agreed with many of the sentiments his ads had promoted. Of all the major candidates, regardless of where they landed on the increasingly binary political spectrum, the actual politics he supposedly stood for were among the least polarizing of the bunch, and there were certainly plenty of opposing candidates who seemed far crazier than he ever did. But the philosophy and the strategy behind his campaign and the lack of just about any real substance to his campaign material became unbearable.

Mike told us he would get it done. He told us what “it” was that he would get done. He even told us why he would get it done. But not once did he tell us how he would get it done. Instead, when asked, he simply reminded us 184 more times that he would get it done, and at the end of the day, I’m just relieved to never have to hear about it ever again.