Bloomberg Puts $40 Million Behind Democrats for 2024
Campaign ad aims at gangsters, banks, “greedy corporations”
Michael Bloomberg has spent $40 million since April 1 on political contributions aimed at keeping Democrats in power in Washington, federal records show.
The largest donation, $19 million on May 20, 2024, was to FF Pac. Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York who briefly ran for president in 2016 as a centrist Democrat, is the largest individual donor to that political action committee.
Bloomberg has become very rich—Forbes estimates his worth at $104.7 billion—by building a company that sells terminals with data, analytics, and messaging capability to financial institutions and other customers. So it’s somewhat ironic, verging on comical, that the FF Pac is airing an ad that says, “Kamala Harris has taken on gang members…taken on big banks to pay back people they ripped off…now she’s running to take on greedy corporations who jack up prices….”
The New York Times has given lengthy, front-page nasty treatment to the Republican donors in this political cycle. A news article denounced Dr. Miriam Adelson as “rabidly partisan,” drawing a formal complaint to the newspaper from the CEO of the UJA-Federation of New York, a longtime partner of the New York Times in its Neediest Cases Fund. Another front-page Times article gave similarly hostile treatment to Timothy Mellon, a Republican donor that the 5th-generation Sulzberger-managed Times described as “a wealthy banking heir.”
Yet Bloomberg’s Future Forward Pac donation has garnered only a six paragraph item in the Times online, which described Bloomberg’s political giving as “nearly $20 million,” omitting the other money that brings the total sum to $40 million.
Meanwhile, the editors at Bloomberg’s news and opinion organization are touting their own Bloomberg/Morning Consult poll that says, as as “senior executive editor” at Bloomberg Opinion, Tim O’Brien, put it in a social media post, “Harris pulls away from Trump in six of seven swing states, per a Bloomberg/Morning Consult poll. Usual caveats about margins of error, the election is months away, etc, etc. Still: Trump has clearly blown his ample pre-RNC momentum and Harris is surging.”
This is quite a trick: Donate $40 million for Democrats to use to mention “big banks” and “greedy corporations” in the same breath as “gang members,” while commissioning polls that show the ads are having the intended effect of helping Harris and hurting Trump. All financed by the roughly $25,000 per user, per year Bloomberg terminal fees paid by those same banks and corporations. The bankers and corporate users can click on the terminal to find headlines by Bloomberg about how its own poll shows the Bloomberg-backed candidate is winning.
If there’s any consolation here, it’s that, at least so far, the scale of Bloomberg’s investment in electing a President Harris to “take on greedy corporations,” even at $40 million, is far, far less than the bigger and far-sighted philanthropic bets Bloomberg has made over the years. Bloomberg earlier this month announced a $600 million gift to four historically black medical schools, including $175 million to Meharry Medical College in Nashville. In July, he announced a $1 billion gift to help make medical school free for most students at Johns Hopkins. In 2021 he announced $750 million to add 150,000 seats to public charter schools. Of that, $100 million went to Eva Moskowitz’s Success Academy and $100 million went to Geoffrey Canada’s Harlem Children’s Zone Promise Academy.
In the big picture, all of that will be part of Bloomberg’s legacy, along with a mayoralty that, in comparison to what has come afterward, looks all the more impressive in retrospect, rebuilding confidence in New York City after the September 11 terrorist attack. If Bloomberg really thought Trump was as great a threat as Harris claims, he’d be spending on the election at the $600 million, $1 billion, $750 billion level, as he did on his own 2016 campaign, not the $40 million level. Even if Bloomberg puts significantly more money in between now and Election Day, the scale of it seems like a low-conviction bet.
For someone like Bloomberg, who cares a lot about climate change, abortion rights, and gun control, the means of commercials denouncing “greedy corporations” may justify the ends of electing a president and Congress who will advance his policy goals. At Bloomberg’s age and wealth, he’s probably not paying too close attention to how the political guys word the television commercials.
Yet taking on “greedy corporations” can be a display of greedy government. Harris is backing what Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform calls the highest capital gains tax rate in American history: 44.6 percent. “Under the Harris proposal, the combined federal-state capital gains tax rate will exceed 50% in many states. California will face a combined federal-state rate of 57.9%, New Jersey 55.3%, Oregon 54.5%, Minnesota 54.4%, and New York 53.4%,” Americans for Tax Reform warns.
In between interview snippets last night, CNN showed Harris telling a Georgia voter that a “tax credit” for “access to capital for small business” is “something we’ll be rolling out next week.”
That’s Kamalanomics—plan to raise taxes and regulation to levels that crush small business, then promise tax credits to offset the damaging effect of her own policies.
Bloomberg has built a fabulous business and made some shrewd philanthropic choices. But the Democrats he’s trying to elect just spent a convention denouncing the “billionaire class” and are now spending Bloomberg’s own money denouncing Bloomberg’s customers. Another Harris ad complains, “Donald Trump fights for billionaires and large corporations. I will fight to give money back to working and middle-class Americans.”
It sure would be a shame if Bloomberg’s money makes it harder for some future would-be entrepreneur to follow his footsteps in building a fortune in financial technology. If some young future Michael Bloomberg sees that commercial about bankers and “greedy corporations,” he might get scared off, decide to avoid the evil business world altogether, and just go straight into government. It’d be a loss.
Why reading two newspapers is better than one: The New York Times runs a 1000-word story, headlined, “Former Las Vegas Official Convicted in Journalist’s Murder,” that begins, “A former county official was found guilty on Wednesday of murdering a longtime Las Vegas reporter who wrote articles critical of him. The highly unusual case had raised fears about press freedom in the United States and in particular the risks facing local journalists.”
The Wall Street Journal runs a short Associated Press version of the same story. It begins, “LAS VEGAS (AP) — A Democratic former politician was found guilty of murder on Wednesday by a Nevada jury that decided he’ll serve 20 years to life in prison for killing an investigative journalist who wrote articles critical of his conduct in office two years ago.” The AP story goes on to explain, “Telles, an attorney, practiced civil law before he was elected in 2018. He lost his primary for a second elected term after German’s stories appeared in the Las Vegas Review-Journal in May and June 2022.”
You can read the entire Times article without finding out that the journalist-murdering politician was a Democrat. I find it hard to believe that if a Republican politician had killed a journalist, the Times would omit the party affiliation. In fact, the Times would probably try to link it somehow to Donald Trump’s criticism of the press, though actually, media failure had become a bipartisan consensus issue, at least until the Harris honeymoon.
Bill Hammett: The Manhattan Institute’s Reihan Salam has a post marking the death of William “Bill” Hammett, who, as president of the Manhattan Institute from 1980 to 1995, helped to build that think tank into the significant public policy research organization that it was and is. Institutions matter, ideas matter, but behind the institutions and ideas are individuals, a point that Hammett, a libertarian, might have appreciated.
Thank you: The Editors is a reader-supported publication. A subscription is a lot less expensive than a Bloomberg terminal. If you can spare the $8 a month or $80 a year, please sign up today to ensure your full access, sustain our growth, support our editorial independence, and help hold the New York Times accountable.
It is nothing short of bizarre that polls cite a "margin of error" as if they were being scientific. However, the public is seldom told the response rates for the polls. My recollection from 2020 is that response rates were about 7%. To get projections from such a non-representative sample pollsters must weight the tiny number of responses to create an accurate picture of those who will vote. Doing so is at best an art, and can't be dignified with the scientific veneer of a "margin of error" metric.
When is the last time you took a call from a pollster? I stopped when candidates started doing push polls of the sort that asked "If you knew that candidate Y did awful thing Z, how would that change your view?"