Billionaire media titan and former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg has stated for the first time that he is considering a run for the White House.
In an interview with the Financial Times, the three-term mayor of America’s largest city expressed frustration with the current field of candidates from both major parties.
“I find the level of discourse and discussion distressingly banal and an outrage and an insult to the voters,” Bloomberg said, declaring that US voters deserve “a lot better” than the current frontrunners in the Democratic and Republican fields.
Bloomberg’s comments are the first public expression of interest in a presidential campaign since a New York Times report last month that detailed his potential plan for an independent campaign. In that report, based on interviews with unidentified persons close to the former mayor, Bloomberg was said to be willing to spend as much as $1bn of his estimated $37bn personal fortune to win the presidency.
The speculative third-party presidential bid isn’t the first time that rumors of a Bloomberg campaign have reached the public’s ears, but with Bloomberg’s declaration that “I’m listening to what candidates are saying and what the primary voters appear to be doing,” they are by far the most serious. Bloomberg, 73, told the Financial Times that he would need to make a final decision by March, the rough cut-off for an independent candidate to qualify for election ballots in all 50 states.
January’s New York Times report pegged Bloomberg’s mulling of a presidential bid to the current state of the Republican primaries, dominated by Ted Cruz and Donald Trump, both of whom Bloomberg reportedly considers unelectable. But with former secretary of state Hillary Clinton facing a stiffer-than-expected challenge from Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont in the Democratic race, Bloomberg sees a potential opening for a former mayor with moderate-to-liberal views on social issues but a close-knit relationship with the financial industry.
An independent candidate for president has never won the White House, although they have proved to be kingmakers of a kind on occasion. In 1912, former president Theodore Roosevelt split the votes of progressives and Republicans, boosting the chances of the eventual victor, the Democrat Woodrow Wilson. In 1992, Texas billionaire Ross Perot helped Bill Clinton win the presidency by siphoning votes from incumbent George HW Bush, and perennial Green party candidate Ralph Nader has been accused of helping doom Al Gore’s efforts against Bush’s son George W Bush in the 2000 election.
