Michael Bloomberg endorses Joe Biden as Democratic candidate; Bernie Sanders laments low turnout of younger voters

Michael Bloomberg dropped out of the presidential race and backed Joe Biden on Wednesday, throwing the financial might of the Democratic Party’s biggest benefactor behind the former vice-president’s campaign as Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont vowed to wage a long battle for the nomination. Sanders, regarded a week ago as having a clear upper hand over Biden, sounded chagrined as he faced reporters after losses in states from Maine to Texas where he was hoping for huge turnout of Democrats — yet where a surge in voter participation lifted Biden instead. Sanders now faces pressure to show he can expand his political base well beyond what he has achieved so far: He acknowledged that he had not yet managed to transform the electorate in his favour by bringing a great wave of young people to the polls. The sudden shift in political momentum favoring Biden has redefined the Democratic race at breakneck speed. Since Saturday night, when Biden won South Carolina in a landslide, much of the Democratic establishment has aligned behind him: Two top rivals, Pete Buttigieg and Senator Amy Klobuchar, dropped out and endorsed Biden on Sunday and Monday; he won 10 states Tuesday, including Texas and North Carolina; and Bloomberg backed him on Wednesday. Only Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts remains as the other major candidate in the race. Her campaign said Wednesday that she was assessing her path forward in view of another night of dispiriting election returns, including a third-place finish in her home state, that left Warren without a single victory after a month of primaries and caucuses. Sanders said on Wednesday that he had spoken with Warren, who for months had been his most formidable rival from the populist wing of the Democratic Party. But Sanders said he applied no public pressure on her to stand down and shared no knowledge of her private intentions, if he had any. Some supporters have urged Warren to take her time while others are pressing her to capitalise on what leverage she has now by dropping out and endorsing Biden, according to Democrats who have spoken to her. But Warren made it clear to one supporter Wednesday that she was not going to act hastily and that it may be at least another day before she makes up her mind. In a further boon to Biden, Bloomberg, a multibillionaire, signalled in his concession speech that he intended to keep wielding his personal fortune against President Donald Trump. The former New York City mayor had previously pledged to keep deploying large sums of money to help Democrats in the General Election, even if Bloomberg did not become the nominee, though recently the Sanders campaign said it would not welcome that kind of help. [caption id=“attachment_8120061” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] Michael Bloomberg, then a Democratic candidate for president, campaigns in Blountville, Tennessee on Friday. By Brittainy Newman © 2020 The New York Times[/caption] “I am clear-eyed about our overriding objective, and that is victory in November,” Bloomberg said, adding, “I will not be our party’s nominee, but I will not walk away from the most important political fight of my life.” Advisors to Bloomberg said on Wednesday that they had not yet settled on a detailed spending plan for the general election, but Bloomberg is said to be keenly interested not only in the presidential race but also in Democratic efforts to take full control of Congress. Members of his enormous campaign staff were told that it would take days or perhaps a week for final decisions to be made about how Bloomberg might reorient his campaign machinery now that he is no longer a candidate. Both of the Democratic frontrunners were in something of a regrouping phase Wednesday, as Biden’s campaign raced to harness his new momentum and Sanders sought to refocus his rattled political operation for a newly-gruelling fight. The Biden campaign has told allies that it is seeking to rapidly hire new campaign staff to fill out its presence in states across the map, where the former vice-president has built little or no organised infrastructure because of his financial difficulties for so much of the race. Sanders’ team is hoping that his more developed campaign apparatus might give him a chance to slow Biden’s rise in the half-dozen states that vote next week, most significantly in the large swing state of Michigan. Addressing reporters in Burlington, Vermont, on Wednesday afternoon, Sanders described the upcoming Michigan primary as “enormously important” and said he had high hopes to win. Repeating a litany of criticism he leveled at Biden in his election-night speech Tuesday, Sanders indicated he would focus over the next week on attacking Biden’s record of supporting what he described as “disastrous trade agreements” that had been particularly damaging to Midwestern states like Michigan. In a refrain calling out Biden, Sanders several times said “Joe is going to have to explain” various other parts of his record, including his support for the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the 2008 bailout of the financial industry. Biden has not faced a sustained challenge from any other candidate in weeks, having been largely written off by his rivals after his embarrassing fifth-place finish in New Hampshire. It remains to be seen whether Biden will be able to fully extend the explosive energy that has propelled his campaign over the past few days, and how deftly he might be able to grapple with a determined opponent like Sanders on the campaign trail and in future debates. But Sanders also acknowledged that he was disappointed by the results from contests this week in 15 states and territories, of which Biden captured 10. And in a striking and uncharacteristic admission, Sanders conceded that his campaign had not managed to generate the soaring turnout among young people that he had been counting on to secure the nomination. “Have we been as successful as I would hope, in bringing young people in? And the answer is no,” Sanders said. “We’re making some progress.” Campaigning in West Beverly Hills, California, on Wednesday, Biden brandished the breadth and diversity of his support to reject Sanders’ rhetoric casting him as an instrument of the political establishment. “The establishment are all those hardworking, middle-class people, those African Americans, those single women,” Biden said, referring to voters who turned out in force for him this week. Biden and Sanders supporters will be looking for wins next Tuesday in primaries and caucuses in Michigan, Missouri and four other states. Bloomberg’s exit, and his immediate move to back Biden, had the potential to anger supporters of Sanders, who have long regarded Bloomberg as a malignant force in the 2020 campaign, and stoke resentment among progressives that party power brokers were again taking exceptionally aggressive steps to thwart Sanders’ candidacy. But Bloomberg’s decision to leave the race came primarily from an unsparing assessment of his own feeble prospects. According to two people briefed on his deliberations, Bloomberg reached the decision to withdraw from the race Wednesday morning, after meeting with his inner circle of advisers at the Upper East Side town house that is the headquarters of his political and philanthropic empire — several miles away from the Times Square campaign office where in just a few months he assembled an enormous team of aides in a late-starting bid for the presidency. Bloomberg’s advisors had acknowledged to allies even Tuesday evening that it was unlikely he would continue in the race, and by early in the morning Wednesday, Bloomberg had begun to make personal calls to some of his top supporters to inform them of his decision. Appearing before supporters later in the day, Bloomberg said that the delegate math that would have earned him the nomination “had become virtually impossible.”

Bloomberg and Biden spoke by phone on Wednesday morning, a person briefed on the call said. Shortly after Bloomberg announced his exit, Biden posted an appreciative tweet saying he would be counting on Bloomberg’s help to defeat Trump.

Bloomberg’s candidacy was unprecedented in its financial firepower, amounting to a no-expenses-spared effort to take control of a presidential race. His Democratic rivals accused him of seeking to buy the presidency, and Bloomberg often came close to embracing that idea: In his speeches, he frequently made allusions to his vast personal fortune and presented himself to Democratic voters as the candidate with “the record and the resources” to win the General Election. But Bloomberg never escaped a set of serious political vulnerabilities that his advisers identified from the outset, including his long record of supporting stop-and-frisk policing and numerous accusations made by women about harassment and gender-based discrimination by Bloomberg and his company. Both issues came to the fore in the Democratic debate in Las Vegas last month that signaled the beginning of Bloomberg’s downfall, as Warren left him reeling with a barrage of criticism about his conduct toward women. Biden and Sanders, too, harried Bloomberg for his policing strategies in New York, questioning his sensitivities on matters of race in a manner Bloomberg defended stiffly and in incomplete or misleading terms. The campaign cost Bloomberg more than half a billion dollars in advertising alone. He also spent lavishly on robust on-the-ground operations, with more than 200 field offices across the country and thousands of paid staff. His operation dwarfed those of Democratic rivals who ultimately won states in which he had installed many dozens of employees and spent heavily on radio, television and direct mail ads. It also enabled his campaign to produce a staggering volume of attention-grabbing — and, to some Democrats, cringe-inducing — commercials and other activities aimed at antagonising Trump. The same week Bloomberg wilted in the Las Vegas debate, his campaign ran advertisements on the city’s huge electronic billboards taunting Trump: “Donald Trump eats burnt steak,” read one of them. Bloomberg used his wealth to assemble an enormous campaign team of more than 2,400 staff members. He concentrated more than 100 offices in Super Tuesday states, where his infrastructure quickly exceeded that of his opponents. For instance, in Warren’s home state of Massachusetts — where Bloomberg himself grew up — he established six field offices across the state, four more than Warren and five more than Biden, who ultimately won there. But as a full picture of the results came into focus on Tuesday, Bloomberg had won only a single contest, in the territory of American Samoa. Alexander Burns and Rebecca R Ruiz c.2020 The New York Times Company