20/20

Insights, scoops, and analysis of the most important election season of our lives

  • Mayor Pete Endorses Joe Biden

    March 2, 2020

    Pete Buttlieg endorsed Joe Biden tonight at an event in Texas.

    Here is CNN:

    “When I ran for president we made it clear that the whole idea was about rallying the country together to defeat Donald Trump and to win the era for the values that we share,” Buttigieg said at a campaign stop.
     
    “And that was always a goal that was much bigger than me becoming president and it is in the name of that very same goal that I am delighted to endorse and support Joe Biden for President.”

    There was also this moment which was super sweet:

    Despite the acrimony, it is common for candidates who once sparred in a primary to come together once one drops out.
    That much was made clear Monday night when Biden told supporters that Buttigieg reminds him of his son, Beau, who died of brain cancer in 2015 at the age of 46.
    “I don’t think I’ve ever done this before, but (Buttigieg) reminds me of my son, Beau. I know that may not mean much to most people, but to me it’s the highest compliment I can give any man or woman,” Biden said.
    “Like Beau, he has a backbone like a ramrod. I really mean this. I think about it,” Biden said.

    You can watch it here:

  • Amy Klobuchar Drops Out of the Presidential Race

    March 2, 2020

    Jack Kurtz/ZUMA

    Sen. Amy Klobuchar is ending her bid for the Democratic presidential nomination and planning to endorse former vice president Joe Biden, according to the Associated Press. 

    Since she launched her campaign in February 2019, Klobuchar has endured a turbulent and crowded primary season that, at one point, featured more than two dozen candidates vying for the nomination. The Minnesota senator and former prosecutor pitched herself as a tough-but-funny pragmatic moderate who knows how to work with Republican colleagues, but her national polling numbers remained stuck in the single digits. Early in the race, multiple news outlets published unflattering exposés about her management style. HuffPost reported in February 2019 that at least three people had taken their names out of consideration to lead her campaign, in part because of her history of allegedly mistreating staff. She also received harsh criticism for her time as a prosecutor, particularly for her lack of prosecutions in police-involved shootings.

    But her campaign got a boost in mid-January when the New York Times editorial board endorsed her—as well as Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.)—for the nomination. The Times praised her experience and “ability to unite the party” as key factors for why she would be one of the best candidates to take on Trump, writing that “her lengthy tenure in the Senate and bipartisan credentials would make her a deal maker (a real one) and uniter for the wings of the party—and perhaps the nation.”  

    Klobuchar began picking up steam in the weeks that followed. After finishing fifth in Iowa, she rode a strong debate performance to an unlikely, headline-making third-place finish in the New Hampshire primary—ahead of both Warren and Joe Biden. But the Klomentum couldn’t last forever. After diminishing returns in Nevada and in South Carolina, Klobuchar is reportedly pulling out of the race, a day before Super Tuesday, which includes the primary election in her home state of Minnesota. 

  • Bloomberg’s Biggest Advantage in Virginia Is How Much the NRA Hates Him

    March 2, 2020

    Jack Kurtz/Zuma

    Let’s run the stats: Billionaire politician Michael Bloomberg has, so far, participated in two debates, appeared on zero ballots, and spent close to half a billion dollars on his campaign—ensuring his name is thrust upon nearly every American who turns on a TV or uses the internet. Thanks to that massive spending, recent polls have him hovering around third place nationally. But the first true test of Bloomberg’s grand, expensive political experiment will happen on Tuesday, when his name will appear on a ballot for the first time in 14 states’ primary elections. 

    In Virginia, where there isn’t a clear favorite, Bloomberg has one advantage over all other Democratic candidates: The National Rifle Association really, really hates him. 

    Ever since Virginia’s state legislature flipped blue in November—Democrats took full control of the state government for the first time in more than 25 years—Bloomberg has been public enemy number one for the NRA and the state’s extremely vocal gun rights contingent. As the co-founder and chief financier of Everytown for Gun Safety and Moms Demand Action, Bloomberg spent millions in 2019 to help Democrats, who largely campaigned on a platform of strengthening gun laws. Numerous polls ahead of that election showed gun control was the top issue among voters. Rep. Dan Helmer, a Democrat who beat a Republican incumbent in November, made gun reform central to his campaign and told me the issue was “overwhelmingly” the top concern among voters he spoke with. And since the new Democratic majority took over, they’ve followed through on their campaign promises.

    In the months after the election, gun rights advocates have directed ire at Bloomberg every chance they get. At a massive Second Amendment rally I covered in Richmond in January, I spotted more than a dozen anti-Bloomberg signs. At a Bloomberg campaign event I went to in early February—where the candidate wasn’t even present—gun rights activists disrupted the event, interrupting speakers and heckling attendees. The NRA has gone on the offensive against Bloomberg since he launched his campaign, issuing dire press releases and social media warnings about the billionaire. 

    Stephen Farnsworth, a political science professor at the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, thinks Bloomberg’s unique reputation in the state could certainly help him on Tuesday, but maintains that the state is still up for grabs. “What [Bloomberg] has done historically in Virginia, in terms of supporting candidates who favored gun control, has built up some IOUs among Virginia Democrats,” he says. Polling for the state has been all over the place in recent weeks; a Monmouth University poll last week had Bernie Sanders, Joe Biden, and Bloomberg essentially tied for first place, but a poll released Friday by Wason Center for Public Policy shows Biden edging out a victory on Tuesday.

    “Virginia Democrats have shown a pattern of greater willingness to support moderate Democrats than Democratic electorates in many other states,” Farnsworth adds, explaining how Biden or Bloomberg could win in Virginia. “And that’s one of the reasons why Bloomberg has been wise to spend a lot of money in Virginia.”

    Spend a lot of money, he has: Bloomberg has opened seven campaign offices and hired 80 staff members there, spent millions on ads in the state, and donated $160,000 to the state’s Democratic Party. “If you’re a moderate Democrat, you would look at Virginia as a more appealing place to be than some of the other Super Tuesday states,” Farnsworth says. “And that’s one of the reasons why Bloomberg has been wise to spend a lot of money in Virginia.”

  • Pete Buttigieg Made History. Now He’s Dropping Out.

    March 1, 2020

    Michael Brochstein/Zuma

    After a meteoric rise from little-known midwestern mayor to winner of the Iowa caucuses, Pete Buttigieg is planning to drop out of the race for the Democratic presidential nomination on Sunday, according to the New York Times.

    The former South Bend, Indiana, mayor made history as the first openly gay candidate to win a presidential primary or caucus, and he managed to make a name for himself as a young, moderate voice in the crowded Democratic field. Despite receiving fewer individual votes than Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders in Iowa, Buttigieg—according to the state’s Democratic Party—earned more state delegate equivalents than Sanders, eking out a win that was not announced until weeks after the caucuses took place.

    As my colleague Patrick Caldwell writes, Buttigieg’s campaign represented a landmark moment in US politics:

    An openly gay candidate winning a presidential contest is noteworthy nationally, of course, but it’s especially remarkable given Iowa’s history on LGBTQ rights. It was one of just three states where same-sex couples could wed when the state Supreme Court legalized marriage in 2009. But Iowa opened the door to same-sex marriage through a court ruling, not legislation, and there were signs that the public was wasn’t entirely on board. Three of the seven judges behind the decision were voted out of office the next year, after a vicious campaign by conservative activists. Suburban and especially rural Iowans led the backlash against same-sex marriage.

    Ten years later, Buttigieg’s success in Iowa came thanks to his performance in many of those same rural counties. Sanders outperformed Buttigieg in most of the state’s urban areas, while Buttigieg cleaned up many of the sparsely populated, historically Catholic counties in eastern Iowa that backed Trump in 2016 and opposed marriage equality a decade ago.

    “He’s getting support in the areas where we lost the worst on marriage,” Iowa Democratic Party chair Troy Price, who previously ran an LGBTQ rights group that helped sue to legalize marriage, told me last week. “It’s the suburban areas, it’s the rural areas, that’s where he’s doing really well.”

    Buttigieg also gave Sanders a run for his money in New Hampshire, losing by a little more than one percentage point. However, his support dwindled in Nevada, where he came in third place with 14.3 percent of county convention delegates. After a fourth-place finish in South Carolina, Buttigieg is ending his campaign.

  • Bernie Sanders Lost the Black Vote. That’s Probably a Problem Going Forward.

    March 1, 2020

    Bernie Sanders speaks during a campaign event in Spartanburg, South Carolina, on Thursday, February 27.Matt Rourke/AP

    In the ballroom of a convention center in Columbia, South Carolina, Bernie Sanders campaign co-chair Nina Turner stared out at the crowd of supporters that had gathered for what they’d hoped would be another victory party. The group was much smaller than the ones who’d flocked to see her and Sanders throughout South Carolina that week, but it did share one key characteristic with its predecessors: It was mostly white.

    And that was precisely the problem for the Sanders campaign in a state where two-thirds of the primary electorate is Black.

    Former vice president Joe Biden didn’t just win South Carolina—early results show he swept every county and nabbed nearly half of all votes cast. Exit polls suggest Biden had support from 61 percent of Black voters, compared to Sanders’ paltry 17 percent. Turner, who had been the lifeblood of Sanders’ outreach, told supporters in the ballroom that Sanders, according to early internal numbers, had won voters under 44 years old, young Black voters by 40 percent, and first-time voters by 30 percent. But the reality was clear: Sanders had barely beaten his 2016 showing in the Palmetto State, when Hillary Clinton crushed Sanders.

    It surely wasn’t what the campaign had envisioned. After victories in New Hampshire and Nevada and winning the popular vote in Iowa, Sanders had been bullish about his South Carolina prospects. He entered the early contests telling supporters he would do “better than they thought” in South Carolina; in recent weeks, he began saying he might win. 

    There were signs that Sanders optimism hadn’t been unfounded. While polls of the state had Biden with a massive lead over the rest of the field for much of the 2020 campaign, Sanders caught up to him after his early victories. All week, national media had been touting Sanders’ efforts to court the state’s Black voters—particularly younger Black voters, who had shown a preference for Sanders’ liberal stances and record on fighting for civil rights. All across the state, I encountered voters who suggested the strategy might be working. Melinda Williams, who canvassed for Sanders in the poor black neighborhoods of Sumter, told me she’d converted some Biden voters to Sanders after explaining that Sanders had attended Martin Luther King’s 1963 March on Washington and supported Jesse Jackson’s 1988 racial justice and poverty-centered run for president. Tracie Blue sat through a 45-minute roundtable that Pete Buttigieg held with Black community leaders in Greenville on Thursday, before telling me she was thinking about voting for Sanders. “He’s been in the trenches,” she said. “He has been fighting for us and our rights as a people for a very long time.”

    Four years ago, Sanders had been criticized by Black Lives Matter protestors who scoffed at Sanders for failing to explicitly recognize the racial injustice at the base of economic inequality facing Black Americans. This time around, he seems to have taken their concerns seriously. During his last run for the White House, Sanders rejected the idea of reparations for descendants of the formerly enslaved as too unrealistic and politically divisive; this cycle, he’s embraced legislation to study and develop a reparations proposal. His economic justice plans have been strengthened with a racial justice lens, such as his proposal to boost marijuana businesses led by minority entrepreneurs—and he’s done so in consultation with scholars who have pioneered the study of the racial wealth gap. The class-centric rhetoric remains in his stump speeches, but he talks about race more than he used to—and a deep bench of new and returning Black surrogates bridge that gap when Sanders fails to.

    “’Soviet,’ ‘communist,’ ‘Bolshevik,’—that’s what they said about my brother, Martin Luther King, Jr,” the scholar and activist Cornel West told a crowd in Columbia last Saturday to assuage fears that a democratic socialist label would harm Sanders in a general election.

    What holds Sanders back from toppling Biden altogether? Older voters—who are also the likeliest voters—are a piece of it, a problem that persists from this 2016 run. Clay Middleton, who worked for both Obama and Clinton in South Carolina and served as a senior adviser to Cory Booker’s campaign, blames Sanders’ unpopularity among them on a lack of retail politics. When Sanders visited the Palmetto State, he favored large format rallies and town halls over intimate gatherings; an analysis from the Charleston-based Post and Courier lists just about a dozen roundtables and meet-and-greets over the 41 campaign stops he’s made over the last two years. “I think older people feel like Bernie is yelling at them,” Middleton says. “Because he does not do any retail politics, older folks doesn’t feel like he comes across as a warm person.”

    Another factor might be the derision Sanders has faced from establishment African American political leaders in the state. On Wednesday morning, James Clyburn, the influential black congressman considered the state’s Democratic kingmaker, endorsed Biden. Preliminary exit polls suggest at least half of South Carolina voters say Clyburn’s endorsement influenced their vote.

    National polling suggests Sanders is doing better with Black voters than his outcome in South Carolina might suggest. An NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll from mid-February showed Sanders gaining ground, about equal to Biden in terms of Black voters. A Hill/HarrisX poll conducted the week before South Carolina found that Sanders surpassed Biden nationally in Black support.

    Still, Saturday’s results could be a problem for a campaign staring down several Southern states on Super Tuesday, where candidates will similarly face a majority-Black Democratic electorate.

    State Rep. Justin Bamberg, a Sanders supporter, thinks the South mentality is one less inclined to accept Sanders’ calls for radical change. Old black voters in particular, he says, distrust the federal government, a belief that runs counter to Sanders’ promises of overhauling it. And the faith in reliable, trustworthy institutions like Rep. Clyburn poses an obstacle to turning the tide in Sanders’ favor. Bamberg tells me the counter is to remind folks that the federal government has served Black South Carolinians well—and that’s true more than ever in a state where states’ rights have been ruinous for women who want control over their bodies and workers who want to organize.

    “It’s difficult to maintain an open mind, particularly in the South,” Bamberg says, noting how schools, churches, and community spaces remain segregated decades after the Civil Rights Act’s passage. “Its foundation is built on resisting change—and that shit’s gotta stop.” 

  • Bernie Sanders Makes His Pitch to Virginia Ahead of Super Tuesday

    March 1, 2020

    Susan Walsh/AP

    Hours after billionaire politician Michael Bloomberg tried to convince a posh Northern Virginia hotel conference room full of women to vote for him, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders held his own rally a few miles down the road. 

    Upwards of 10,000 people attended Sanders’ event, held at sports complex in Springfield, compared to the several hundred who mingled and tepidly cheered for Bloomberg in the morning. A reggae band warmed up the crowd before a slew of Sanders campaign surrogates—including Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.)—took to the stage and delivered fiery messages. “I want Bernie to be angry because we have a lot to be angry about,” Omar said, making a dig at the media’s frequent hand-wringing over Sanders’ demeanor, and his campaign’s extremely online supporters. “The fact that we spend so much money on militarization and don’t have enough money to feed our kids, house people, educate our children, provide medical care for people who are sick in this country. Now if you have someone running for office that is not angry about that, they don’t represent you.” 

    The biggest difference between the two rallies became apparent when I talked voters about why they were there. At Bloomberg’s “Women for Mike” event—which was comprised of mostly older, white women—every person I spoke with said they were supporting Bloomberg because they were single-issue voters who just want to see Trump out of office, and believe the former New York City mayor is the only candidate with the resources to do so. At Sanders’ rally—which was a far more multicultural and younger affair—people told me they were supporting the Vermont senator for a variety of reasons. Many cited Medicare for All as their chief concern, but others told me it was Sanders’ position on issues like his support of the Green New Deal, ensuring a tax on the top 1 percent of earners, and wiping out student debt as reasons why they’re supporting Sanders. 

    Though a recent poll of the state has Biden in the lead, Sanders still leads FiveThirtyEight‘s average of polls in the state, with Bloomberg in striking range. Much of Virginia’s suburbs, like Springfield, are filled with more moderate Democrats, who might not be rushing to the ballot box to vote for Sanders. But, as he has in other states, Sanders’ campaign is banking on a huge turnout in working class voters who haven’t always felt represented and shown up to the ballot box. Del. Lee Carter, the state’s only socialist lawmaker who was elected in 2017 to represent a formerly deep-red district not far from Springfield, told the crowd that he has faith that people will turn out the vote. “There are millions of people throughout this country in urban areas, rural areas, and suburbs that don’t feel like they have a voice in our politics,” he said.

  • Someone at MSNBC Told Another Person At MSNBC That Someone Not At MSNBC Told Them That Tom Steyer Is Dropping Out. Then That Person (The Second MSNBC Person) Tweeted It.

    February 29, 2020

     

    By the actual wording of this tweet, I confess that it is possible that the second MSNBC employee actually literally saw the report from the first MSNBC employee while watching MSNBC.

    Update: According to some other people on Twitter, Steyer has now in fact dropped out.

    Update 1.5: MSNBC does not have a Roku app, and it makes it very hard to watch MSNBC when you are home on a Saturday night trying to follow the news.  Just something to think about, MSNBC.

  • South Carolina Democrats Not Terribly Taken With Former Republican Mayor at Center of Controversial Racial Policing Policy

    February 29, 2020

  • Biden Wins the South Carolina Primary

    February 29, 2020

    Former Vice President Joe Biden addresses a crowd during a campaign event on Friday in Spartanburg, South Carolina. Sean Rayford/Getty Images

    Joe Biden won the South Carolina Democratic primary on Saturday, breathing life into the former vice president’s campaign after he’d bombed out of Iowa and New Hampshire and seen his polling wobble in the Palmetto State. 

    It was at least in part a vote for pragmatism, moderation, and strategic calculation. Although Biden has a devoted constituency in the state, across South Carolina I spoke with people looking to pick a candidate who would go on to defeat President Trump—people essentially turning themselves into pundits, trying to game out who is and isn’t electable. Nobody in the Democratic primary benefits more from the punditization of voters than Biden.

    According to exit polls, Biden won every demographic polled except 18- to 29-year-olds and voters who had never attended a religious service, both of whom preferred Bernie Sanders, who came in second place. Biden’s win was propelled by the support of 60 percent of African Americans, while he virtually tied Sanders among white voters.

    The Biden campaign has leaned heavily on the premise that the former vice president is the most electable candidate with the best shot at unseating Trump. But nothing undermines the promise of electability like the reality of defeat. After coming in fourth in Iowa, fifth in New Hampshire, and a distant second in Nevada, even Biden supporters in South Carolina began to wonder if he was really the best person for the job. Polls showed Biden with a commanding lead in the fall, which dropped precipitously after his poor performances in Iowa and New Hampshire but then rebounded in the week leading up to South Carolina’s primary. Biden had a 15-point margin over Sanders in the Real Clear Politics average heading into primary day. The vice president had a strong showing at a chaotic debate in Charleston on Tuesday and won the endorsement of the state’s most important Democratic politician, Rep. Jim Clyburn, on Wednesday, whose support, exit polls show, convinced many voters previously on the fence to support Biden.

    “I just want to make the right choice to beat our incumbent,” said Stephanie Rainey, 47, of Spartanburg. She was attending a Tom Steyer event with a friend the night before the primary, but she had narrowed her choice to Biden and Sanders. Again and again on the campaign trail, voters told me they were making the same calculation. Some worried that Sanders’ progressivism would render him unelectable, but many had begun to see his large crowds and fervent supporters as a sign that the democratic socialist from Vermont might in fact be in the strongest position to take on Trump.

    Eloise Conyers, 64, has supported Biden the entire primary and planned to vote for him. As for her friends, she said at a Biden event in Sumter on Friday, “They want the person who will win, and that will be Biden or Sanders.” Bonnie, 65, a Florida voter who had just moved to South Carolina and attended a Biden rally on Thursday, said she was leaning toward supporting Biden. “Anybody who can get that pathological liar out of the White House,” she said, declining to share her last name. But then she wondered if Sanders might actually get the job done. “He attracts the same type of crowd as Trump,” she conceded. 

    At events across the state, voters wavered between candidates as they worked out the electability question for themselves. A large number of people remained unsure even in the final week. At a Pete Buttigieg event in North Charleston on Monday, Andrea Woodfield said she liked the young former mayor from Indiana, but that “my heart says we need Biden in South Carolina.”

    The high expectations here for Biden were based on his longtime relationships in the state, including with the African American community. African American support propelled Barack Obama to a 30-point win in 2008 and gave Hillary Clinton a nearly 50-point win in 2016. But there were signs that the community that voted more as a bloc in previous primaries with fewer candidates had splintered this year, with seven Democrats on the ballot. Many younger Black voters turned to Sanders, and a significant portion of voters here went with billionaire Tom Steyer, who poured an estimated $18 million into television ads alone.

    Those inroads were made in part because Biden’s campaign had taken Black support in the state for granted, according to many operatives. In a Black neighborhood of North Charleston, Rebecca Rushton, 51, pointed out a Biden campaign office but said she hadn’t ever encountered Biden canvassers in her neighborhood. At a Steyer event in Columbia on Friday, Robert Donald, 63, said he was supporting Steyer over Biden in part because “I don’t like the idea of other people selecting who I vote for.” Steyer had put in the work, he felt, and Biden hadn’t. 

    Whatever Biden may have lost in African American support, however, he might have made up for among South Carolina’s moderate white Democrats, as well as independents and Republicans who can vote in the state’s open primary. Wealthier suburbs across the country have moved toward the Democratic Party since 2016, propelled in part by more moderate and conservative women who dislike Trump. South Carolina is no exception. In 2018, Democrat Joe Cunningham won the South Carolina congressional district that runs along the state’s coastline with suburban voters in Charleston and Myrtle Beach. Trump had carried it two years earlier by nearly 13 points. Democratic strategist Tyler Jones, who worked on Cunningham’s campaign, predicted that these same voters would play a larger role than before in South Carolina’s primary and would largely go for Biden. “With Joe’s race, we won that seat because we brought in new voters who were repulsed by Trump and were willing to vote for a reasonable mainstream Democrat,” Jones told Vanity Fair this week. “We still have those voters. It’s the first time we have had them since 2006, and they will be voting on Saturday in South Carolina.” 

    With Super Tuesday just three days away, Biden won’t have much time to bask in his victory or build momentum. It will become clear whether South Carolina will launch Biden’s comeback, positioning him as the main obstacle to Sanders—or whether Biden will remain mired in a messy, crowded field from which only Sanders has figured out how to emerge.

  • “Good Morning, Women for Mike! I’m Mike for Women!”

    February 29, 2020

    Carolyn Kaster/AP

    Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire politician who is throwing an ungodly amount of money into his own presidential campaign, wants people to know that he supports women. “Good morning, Women for Mike! I’m Mike for women!” the former New York City mayor said, kicking off his “Women for Mike” campaign event in McLean, Virginia, on Saturday, four days before the state votes in one of the 14 Super Tuesday primaries. And there are other things Bloomberg’s campaign wants his supporters to know about him. Prior to Bloomberg speaking, jumbo screens around the stage flashed a slideshow of  facts one might not know about Mike: His favorite color is maroon. He is left-handed, like Lady Gaga, Barack Obama, Leonardo DaVinci, and uh, Napoleon. He once lost a fight to a groundhog. And he once acted on TV opposite Miss Piggy. 

    Flanked by a riser packed with dozens of supporters—all women—more than a dozen of women gathered on stage to introduce Bloomberg and say great things about him. These weren’t campaign volunteers who were paid to be there; rather they were women who have worked for Bloomberg for decades. Led by Fatima Shama, Bloomberg’s national director for women’s outreach who served in his administration when he was mayor, these women had a clear message to Bloomberg’s supporters: He has a proven record of supporting women. 

    It’s a message Bloomberg is really, really hoping will catch on. After weathering two brutal beatdowns in as many debates from Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) for his long record of sexist comments and for his use of non-disclosure agreements to muzzle former employees, Bloomberg is doing all he can to repair his image among women voters. He’s since released three women from their NDAs specifically related to comments he allegedly made (though he hasn’t done anything about NDAs that might’ve concerned allegations against his company more generally). And in his speech on Saturday, he went straight for Trump on the issue of women’s rights. “Under this president, so many values I hold dear are at risk, because President Trump has attacked women and women’s rights from the moment he swore the oath of office,” Bloomberg said. “And he threatens women’s health and women’s safety through his policies and his judicial appointments.” He pledged to fight for women’s health and rights on his first day in office “with the goal of insuring that every woman has access to reproductive healthcare.” 

    The pitch certainly resonated with the people I spoke with at the rally, who brushed off Bloomberg’s record of sexist comments, telling me that they’re voting for Bloomberg because they think he’s the only candidate with the money to take down Trump. “All we want is a strong candidate who can defeat Trump. That’s all we want,” María Luisa Wright, a Virginia voter who had previously supported Joe Biden, told me. Her husband, Devon Wright, chimed in to say that Bloomberg’s money could scare Republicans into supporting campaign finance reform, especially after his financial contributions to the Old Dominion state helped flip the state legislature blue. “Mike can bury the entire Republican party in money and suddenly they’ll find religion on campaign finance reform,” he said.

    Another woman I spoke with—who wished to remain anonymous because she is a federal worker—told me she had previously supported Warren but found her attacks against Bloomberg and the other nominees too divisive. “How is she going to unite the country, middle America, when she’s fighting with other Democrats?” the woman told me. With four days until Virginia’s primary, Bloomberg is trailing Biden and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).

    Bloomberg, who once allegedly told a pregnant employee to “kill it,” left the stage with a simple message for supporters: “If you are ready to once again have a president who supports and empowers women, and if you are ready to have someone in the White House who doesn’t attack women’s rights but instead fights for them using the full power of the presidency, then welcome to Bloomberg 2020.”

  • Stephen Colbert Played a “Billionaire Guessing Game” With Elizabeth Warren and I Can’t Stop Laughing

    February 27, 2020

    There hasn’t been much cause to laugh during this election. Cry? Sure. Plenty of heaving anxiety sobs. But true belly chuckles are hard to come by. Then I watched this viral Stephen Colbert clip, and it made me LOL, IRL.

    As diehards know, the The Late Show with Stephen Colbert host is from “first in the South” primary state South Carolina, which gave the idea for this sketch with the Massachusetts senator, ahead of the vote on Saturday. The fuller clip is worth your time, too:

  • The Most Racist Thing I Saw Today Was Republicans Telling Lucy McBath and Lauren Underwood They’re “For Sale”

    February 26, 2020

    During Tuesday night’s debate in South Carolina, former New York City Mayor and billionaire philanthropist Michael Bloomberg almost said what he was probably thinking: That he “bought” the Democratic majority in the House of Representatives when he spent $100 million through his super PAC on Democrats during the 2018 midterms. 

    Let’s just go on the record. They talk about 40 Democrats. Twenty one of those are people that I spent a hundred million dollars to help elect. All of the new Democrats that came in and put Nancy Pelosi in charge and gave the Congress the ability to control this president, I bough — I, I got them.

    Bloomberg caught himself, but the National Republican Congressional Committee ran with the slip of the tongue in a surreal way by sending “For Sale” signs to 40 Democrats who received support from Bloomberg during the 2018 midterms.

    They thought it would be a clever jab at Democrats beholden to billionaires. And for the most part, sure, fair point. But it’s galling and offensive that the NRCC essentially told two Black congresswomen—Lucy McBath of Georgia and Lauren Underwood of Illinois—that they were “for sale.” The optics aren’t great when, on the same day as the clever packaging, the House overwhelmingly voted to make lynching a federal hate crime. Not to mention the fact that, as my colleague Jamilah King noted, McBath went to civil rights marches as a child with her father, the Illinois chapter president for the NAACP. She has a grainy photo of him with Lyndon Johnson at the signing of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

    Neither McBath nor Underwood is enslaved to the financial whims of a white billionaire, obviously. If they or any other politician want to get money from wealthy, powerful interests, they can, just as Republicans have.

    The NRCC sent Underwood’s package to her office, but addressed it to “Fake Nurse Lauren Underwood,” a tiresome attack on Underwood’s credentials—she studied nursing and is a registered nurse, though the New York Times has pointed out she never worked directly with patients.

    The envelopes represent a sad, petty continuation of attacks by the NRCC against Underwood and McBath, whose son was shot and killed by a white man and who recently endorsed Bloomberg for president.

    The Times reported on the NRCC’s attacks on McBath last July:

    Ms. McBath, who represents Georgia’s Sixth District, has become a particular target for the committee. During the campaign, she said she briefly moved to Tennessee to help her husband work through family issues, then switched her residency back to Georgia. Claiming that she is not a resident of Georgia, the committee sent a gift basket to the Tennessee home of her husband. Fox News, obtaining a copy of the signature, wrote an article featuring a comment from the House Republican campaign arm that reiterated that Ms. McBath is a resident of Tennessee. But a close look at the signature showed that her mother-in-law — “M McBath” — signed for the package — a fact mocked by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

    A spokesperson for the NRCC told the Atlantic‘s Adam Harris: “If you have an issue with Mike Bloomberg saying he bought 40 members of Congress, including Lucy McBath, take it up with him.” McBath took the “attacks” and turned it into a fundraising pitch. 

  • Warren Nailed Bloomberg for Allegedly Telling a Pregnant Employee to “Kill It”

    February 25, 2020

    While delivering a powerful personal story about being discriminated against during her pregnancy, Senator Elizabeth Warren launched a direct attack against former New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg over allegations he told an employee to “kill it,” when the employee told him she was pregnant.

    “This is personal for me,” said Warren, who described being let go at the age of 21 from her job as a special education teacher after she became pregnant. Adding “at least I didn’t have a boss who said to me, ‘Kill it,’ the way that Mayor Bloomberg is alleged to have said to one of his pregnant employees.” 

    Bloomberg has denied these allegations. However, the comment did appear in a 1997 sexual harassment lawsuit against Bloomberg, which he later settled. 

    According the lawsuit, after suggesting his employee should get an abortion, Bloomberg said, “Great, number 16,” apparently a reference to the number of women who were pregnant at the company. 

    Bloomberg has faced dozens of lawsuits throughout the years from women alleging discrimination and harassment at his company, who claim he created a hostile and degrading work environment. 

    Warren has also attacked Bloomberg for his use of non-disclosure agreements, which she called an attempt to “muzzle” women who wanted to speak out against him.

    Bloomberg has since publicly released released three women from non-disclosure agreements specifically related to comments made by the former mayor.