Bloomberg Matchups

I stand by my one question licensing quiz for political pundits:

"Is today the right moment to get excited about a third-party presidential run?" If you answer "yes," you need to find some other line of work.

That said, people do mount independent campaigns, and though they never win, they do influence political outcomes. Thus, the prospect of a Bloomberg bid is worth discussing.

To me, it seems to be all about the matchups. Against Barack Obama's length and "fresh face" appeal, there's little rationale for a Bloomberg bid. Similarly, John McCain's "maverick" branding and Rudy Giuliani's somewhat similar political profile make this hard to pull off. On the GOP side, though, Mitt Romney and (especially) Fred Thompson are positioning themselves as the candidates of tired, old-school conservatism thus creating an opening. On the Democratic side, it's obvious that the best nominee to run against as a third party is Hillary Clinton, who has by the least appeal outside the party's base.

Unfortunately for Bloomberg, the potential Democratic voters likely to be unenthusiastic about Clinton -- working class white men, primarily -- aren't a great constituency for a culturally liberal Jewish mayor of New York City, either. That leaves Bloomberg hoping for a Fred Thompson versus John Edwards matchup in which he tries to get voters in the top-right corner of the Nolan Chart. A campaign like that -- balanced budgets, free trade, vaguely progressive on cultural issues, entitlement reform, mildly environmentalist, progressive on some small-bore economic topics -- is ideally positioned to get a ton of positive coverage from the elite press (and elites generally) plus maybe even 10-15 percent of the electorate depending on how much cash Bloomberg's willing to spend and how effective he is as a campaigner.

Photo by Flickr user ceonyc used under a Creative Commons license

Comments

Dude, all he has to do is credibly come out for total withdrawal from Iraq and he's in it. He'll be to the left of everybody but Kucinich.

Posted by TJ | June 20, 2007 10:25 AM

First, the elites love Fred, he's a glamourous Hollywood actor afterall.

Second, Bloomberg is not a libertarian, he's very pro-gun control, pro-environmental regulations, and, in the Lieberman-Peretz school on Israel and the Middle East. Against anyone other than Kucinich-Tancredo he'd be lucky to crack 10%.

Posted by AJ | June 20, 2007 10:31 AM

If Bloomberg said he would legalize pot, he would automatically get around 40% of the youth vote.
Trust me, I know.

Posted by The Lee | June 20, 2007 10:53 AM

Those must be all the youths who are on the road to joining gangs.

Posted by JP | June 20, 2007 11:15 AM

If Bloomberg shelled out a billion of his fortune for a race he might actually have a chance.

Don't underestimate the power of flooding advertising markets -- plus, with a third party more states might be in play, thus making even more money necessary to run all out in every "in play" state.

Sure campaign money has diminishing returns, but a billion dollars will get you a whole lot of (albeit diminished) returns.

Posted by Brian | June 20, 2007 11:27 AM

For a moment I thought that was going to be the icon for the upcoming budget version of OS - the "Mangey Alley Cat" edition.

Posted by Linus | June 20, 2007 11:36 AM

The scenario for a third-party candidate winning is generally the idea that "times-are-so-crazy-anything-can-happen" -- a notion ever-popular with outrage freaks and the national press, but less so with the public as a whole. Perot was widely discussed as potential winner in Spring '92, but ended up where third-party candidates -- even the most successful -- always do. Even John Anderson was polling 20% at one point in 1980, but receded as the season wore on.

Which takes us to the more commonly touted outlook: that a "split vote" will enable an unpopular incumbent party to improbably hold onto the White House. This assumes that people vote utterly capriciously, with little thought of how it'll affect the election outcome. They will often poll that way well into the election year (why not?; it means nothing), but, come election day, those who have a definite preference between the two top contenders will take their sides -- and those who don't can stay with the third-party-er as a passive/aggressive way of voting against the incumbents.

And that's what a third party is really about: they emerge when incumbent administrations are so unpopular, one alternative doesn't seem enough to hold all those who want to vote against them. Wallace was a halfway house for former Dems not quite ready to go GOP/Nixon; Perot was a way to give Clinton the White House without providing unqualified endorsement. It wasn't surprising that both winners in those years went on to absorb most of the indie voters when they ran for re-election.

I think if Bloomberg runs, he'll be more like Anderson than Perot. The Democratic base -- like the GOP one entering 1980 -- is right near majority status, having secured 48%+ in three straight elections; it's not likely to bleed much to an indie. The GOP, on the other hand, is in free fall; yet there are those among the 60-70% currently hating Bush who are constitutionally incapable of pulling the Dem lever (as Dems couldn't vote for Reagan, at first). Bloomberg could get 5-10%, but the only effect nationally will be to turn a clean Dem win into some kind of electoral landslide.

Posted by demtom | June 20, 2007 12:15 PM

what do think would happen if Gore ran as an indie?

Posted by judson | June 20, 2007 12:24 PM

It must be said for the record that Bloomberg is by far the best Mayor NYC has had at least since Lindsay.

- Anyone who does business with the City will agree that this is the most efficient, least corrupt administration in memory. And 311 really works!

- On race relations, the improvement from Giuliani (admittedly a low bar) has been night and day.

- Bloomberg has been more willing than almost any other major politician I can think of to straightforwardly make the case that maintaining public services is more important to peoples' quality of life than low taxes. His response to the 2002-03 budget crisis, after some initial missteps, was exemplary.

- Really farsighted policy on the environment. not just congestion pricing -- which took amazing guts to push -- but a whole raft of green building, renewable energy and efficiency initiatives.

- Mayoral control of the schools. OK, the jury is still out in terms of results, but certainly he's invested more of his political capital in improving K-12 education than the vast majority of big-city mayors.

Admittedly there are two major negatives, civil liberties (which i personally don't care much about) and relations with public employees. But given the needs we'd like government to meet, the kind of competent, effective public sector that Bloomberg has delivered should be especially valued by progressives.

I still hope he doesn't run, though.

Posted by lemuel pitkin | June 20, 2007 1:02 PM

I'm so disgusted with Matt I don't even know what to say.

Posted by Mitch Schindler | June 20, 2007 1:55 PM

I find myself in agreement with lemuel here: on a point-by-point comparison, Mike Bloomberg, as Mayor, stacks up considerably better than Rudy Giuliani on almost every issue (their personalities, though, are supposed to be more-or-less the same: however Mayor Mike seems to have found a way to bury his personal abrasiveness: Rudy!, by contrast, turned every news conference or public appearance into an audition for "Public Asshole No. 1" - and the media has only lately forgotten to call him on it).

Unfortunately, though, while the prospect of having a President Bloomberg isn't a particularly scary one (to me, anyway); the hard facts of the political dynamic in this country make third-party candidacies a lost cause virtually from the beginning. The main point of discussion about a "third-way" candidate becomes whether or not the can win (usually always "not"), but what effect they will have on the final vote tally for the Big Two, and how.

Posted by Jay C | June 20, 2007 2:45 PM

Wasn't Perot ahead until he quit, claiming the Republicans were going to assassinate his daughter or something?

Posted by SFG | June 20, 2007 3:31 PM

"Wasn't Perot ahead until he quit, claiming the Republicans were going to assassinate his daughter or something?"

Perot was going strong in the polls until he flipped out -- I think the claim was that Republicans were trying to disrupt his daughter's wedding, but I forget.

Let's remember what gave Perot the huge policy opening though: the perception that neither the Republicans nor Democrats were will willing to do anything about the budget deficit, but that Perot would. What is the analogous policy issue today? Unskilled immigration -- but Bloomberg doesn't care about it and isn't positioned to run on the issue in any case.

Posted by Fred | June 20, 2007 3:48 PM

Actually, I'd say Perot's biggest opening was the utter trashing Clinton took in the primaries, first from the GOP/press combo on Gennifer Flowers and the draft during New Hampshire, and then from the Jerry Brown/NY media tag-team prior to the pivotal NY primary. Bush was unpopular, but so was Clinton, at that point.

Perot "led" for a bit, but essentially it was a 3-way tie, with all the candidates hovering in 30-35% range. This changed at the time of the Democratic convention. After the first day, Clinton popped up to the 40s. Perot dropped out on the last or next-to-last day of the gathering, and Clinton shot up to 60% in some polls. The point is, Bush stayed static; the rest was the electorate parking itself temporarily with one opposition candidate or another.

Perot actually held onto some single-digit support even while he was off the scene. When he returned, in spite of his lunatic-sounding "they would have sabotaged my daughter's wedding" story, he gained, and on election day actually outperformed his final polls. All that paid advertising probably had something to do with it.

Posted by demtom | June 20, 2007 4:46 PM