Democrats have a love-hate relationship with Wall Street. Michael Bloomberg's entry into the race will bring that tension into stark relief. | Source: AP Photo / Matt Rourke
As former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg joins the 2020 race, it’s worth taking a look at just how rich this Wall Street billionaire is.
With a net worth of more than $52 billion, Bloomberg isn’t just rich – he’s what Democrats like Elizabeth Warren and Alexandria Ocasio Cortez would call filthy rich.
Michael Bloomberg has made so much money from his company’s Bloomberg Terminals that his net worth makes Trump’s look paltry by comparison. And that’s an astounding amount of personal wealth, because Trump is not only the wealthiest US president in history, he’s also richer than all 44 other presidents combined.
And Michael Bloomberg would still be richer than 17 Donald Trumps put together:
How did Bloomberg accrue such a vast fortune? In party by leasing Bloomberg Terminals to Wall Street financiers since the 1990s, which kept them supplied with a steady flow of the latest financial news and data. The terminals lease for around $20,000 for 12 months, and more than 300,000 financiers use them worldwide.
You do the math.
How will Bloomberg’s entry into the 2020 race fare in a Democratic party highly animated by progressive ideals? Certainly not so well among the progressives.
And Bloomberg’s history of crony capitalism on Wall Street won’t be the only hurdle for him to overcome with progressive Democrats. The controversial “stop and frisk” tactics by the NYPD came to the streets of New York when Bloomberg was mayor.
That’s another way that Bloomberg out-Trumps Trump. The sitting president is a ‘yuge fan of stop and frisk. But if Bloomberg won the Democratic nomination, his challenger would be the one who created it.
Bloomberg will also have to contend with a litany of sexual harassment allegations that have stacked up against him over the years. He may have a tough time going for the Democratic nomination in 2020.
Then again, he also has some enormous advantages.
To begin with, he could outspend any presidential candidate in history on his campaign, using only his personal wealth, and barely make a dent in his net worth. It may seem kind of obscene to American democratic sensibilities that a billionaire could just buy the presidency that way, but Trump did it, on a wave of populist fervor no less.
And the socialist wing of the Democratic Party is only one half of the picture. The truth is that Democrats haven’t won the White House since 1976 without the support of Wall Street.
Bill Clinton and Al Gore began cultivating ties with Wall Street through the Democratic Leadership Council in 1985. In 1992, Clinton became the first Democratic presidential nominee since FDR to raise more money than the Republican.
In 2008, Obama was the first Democrat to raise more Wall Street money than his GOP opponent. Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, and Citigroup were some of Obama’s top contributors.
This election cycle’s crop of “Young Turks” ready for a socialist revolution in America aren’t making any friends on Wall Street. They may not be wooing average Americans either.
Major big-money Democratic donors on Wall Street have said they’ll sit out 2020, or even back Trump, if Elizabeth Warren gets the nomination. Without mentioning him by name, Bill Gates, a longtime Democratic donor, even suggested this week that he’d be open to voting for Trump over Elizabeth Warren.
The average American voter is also alarmed by the radicalism of some of this year’s crop of candidates. A New York Times poll published today found that Democrats in battleground states prefer moderate candidates.
Michael Bloomberg may be onto something. But if he secures the nomination, Donald Trump will go into November 2020 as the “poor guy” in the race.
He already successfully won the White House on a populist campaign of Us vs. The Establishment. That’s tougher to pull off as the incumbent president, but Bloomberg would offer Trump a great opportunity to stay on message.
Last modified: September 23, 2020 1:16 PM
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