Former New York mayor announces he will not run for president in 2020
Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire former New York mayor and champion of causes such as gun control and climate change, has ended months of speculation by announcing that he will not run for US president next year.
The 77-year-old, one of the richest men in the world, revealed his decision on Tuesday not to join the crowded Democratic field – currently at 16 candidates – but pledged to pour his vast wealth into the resistance movement against Donald Trump.
“I know we can do better as a country,” he wrote in a Bloomberg News editorial. “And I believe I would defeat Donald Trump in a general election. But I am clear-eyed about the difficulty of winning the Democratic nomination in such a crowded field.”
Bloomberg has toyed with a presidential run before as an independent but re-registered as a Democrat last year and spent recent months courting primary voters as a political centrist. However, the fiscal conservative increasingly seemed out of step with a liberal base questioning the morality of economic inequality and the influence of money in politics.
Another billionaire, Tom Steyer, who has been campaigning for Trump’s impeachment, read the runes and decided in January not to make a bid for the White House. It appears that Bloomberg has reached a similar conclusion. His pro-business positions and support for stop-and-frisk policing as mayor of New York would also have come under scrutiny.
Neil Sroka, spokesperson for the progressive political action committee Democracy for America, said: “No surprise. No constituency. He had an additional challenge as a billionaire at a moment when the last thing people want is someone with ungodly sums of money telling them what to do. More importantly, he was pushing an agenda that has little support in the Democratic party and even less outside the Democratic party.”
There will not, after all, be a battle of the septuagenarian New York billionaire businessmen, between Trump and Bloomberg. Sroka added: “It shows Bloomberg has one thing over Trump: he’s not so blindly narcissistic that he got into this race.”
In the editorial, Bloomberg urged Democrats to unify behind a nominee who could defeat Trump, an implied warning against veering to the left as some candidates embrace a Green New Deal and Medicare for All – already painted by Republicans as socialist projects.
Senator Bernie Sanders, a self-declared democratic socialist, is among the early frontrunners. Howard Schultz, the billionaire former chief executive of Starbucks, is considering a run as an independent despite a fierce backlash from voters who fear he will peel off Democratic votes and help re-elect Trump.
Following Bloomberg’s announcement, Schultz tweeted: “I’ve long said there isn’t room for centrist moderation in either party and it appears Mr Bloomberg has come to the same conclusion.”
