The NPR Politics Podcast - Michael Bloomberg Qualifies For Wednesday Debate As Sanders Secures Double-Digit Lead

Episode Date: February 18, 2020

Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg will appear on Wednesday's debate stage in Nevada, after qualifying in this morning's NPR/PBS Newshour/Marist poll. He is likely to draw attacks from Democrats on stage for his campaign's unprecedented ad spending that enabled his rise in the polls.And Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders has opened up a double-digit lead in the Democratic nominating contest with 31% support nationally, up 9 points since December.This episode: campaign correspondent Asma Khalid, political reporter Danielle Kurtzleben, and senior political editor and correspondent Domenico Montanaro. Email the show at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hi, this is Miss Molly, and I just finished up teaching point class at Melissa Hoffman Dance Center in Hudson, New Hampshire. This podcast was recorded at 2.13 p.m. on Tuesday, February 18th. Things may have changed by the time you hear this, but I'll still be demanding pointed feet and straight knees. Enjoy the show. A five, six, seven, eight. Now, if they all said that in unison while being on pointed feet, I'd be quite impressed. She sounds tough. My grandmother was a ballet dancer. I'm scared. Well, hey there, it is the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Asma Khalid. I'm covering the presidential campaign. I'm Danielle Kurtzleben. I also cover the campaign. And I'm Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent. So tomorrow, Democrats will take the debate stage again, this time in Nevada.

And ahead of that debate, we've got a new NPR-PBS NewsHour Mayorist poll out today with some pretty big news. Domenico, why don't you just start by giving us the headlines? Well, number one, Bernie Sanders, the Vermont senator, has opened up a double-digit lead. He's got 31 percent of the votes, his highest number so far in our poll. And he's above now Michael Bloomberg, who is now second, rocketed to second in our poll. He's got 19 points. He's leapfrogged former Vice President Joe Biden, who's now down to 15 percent. That's astounding.

It really is quite something considering how long Joe Biden led in a lot of these polls. But, you know, if you're going to make the point that I'm the most electable candidate, you got to win somewhere. And there hasn't been a lot of winning so far. And importantly, our poll gives Mike Bloomberg his fourth poll above 10%, which qualifies him for Wednesday's debate. So this will be the first time he'll actually be on a debate stage. And we're going to talk more about that in a second. But Danielle, first, why don't you just give us a quick background of who Michael Bloomberg is?

I feel like for a lot of our listeners, we just keep referencing the fact that he is a billionaire. He has a lot of cash. But beyond that, who is he? So Michael Bloomberg was a three-term mayor of New York City. And we can get into later some of the controversies about that mayorhood, because there were some policies, most pointedly stop and frisk, that he is getting a lot of attention for and a lot of bad attention for. In this field, I think we can pretty safely put him as one of the more moderate candidates. For example, he just put out a college affordability plan today. It is not on the free college end of the spectrum.

It is more on the expanding Pell Grants end of the spectrum to generalize. He is also in favor of a public option, not single payer. That's the sort of candidate he is. So kind of competing for votes with, say, a Joe Biden and Amy Klobuchar or Pete Buttigieg. If you're assuming voters are ideological, then yes. Yes. And he's somebody who's threatened to run as an independent previously for president. This was somebody who has eschewed traditional party labels. He had grown up a Democrat. He ran for mayor in New York for the first time as a Republican. Then he switched to become an independent and now has come back to become a Democrat. He spent hundreds of millions of dollars to win three terms as mayor. So this is the first time this campaign season that Bloomberg will actually be on a debate stage with his rivals.

And it's worth noting that it's also the first time that most folks in the country are actually going to hear from him outside of his sort of unfiltered TV ads that he's had. So, I mean, this is a different scene for him. I mean, how do you feel like folks are going to respond to him? Listen, you have one guy on this stage who has said there should not be billionaires. That is, of course, but for bringing a lot of money into the political system and spending a lot of it and using that money to just sort of steamroll his way into this race. I mean, listen, Bloomberg has just made this huge splash, jumped in and made a giant jump in the polls. And you can see just by virtue of that, of him suddenly being a strong contender among all these people who have been fighting it out for so long, that there will probably be a lot of elbows thrown at him. Not only that, but he has a lot of past

controversial policy positions. And there are multiple stories out there about really, really inappropriate things that he has said to women over the years. So there is a lot to take aim at him for. You know, look, this is really a vote of no confidence in a lot of the other moderates in this field. The fact that Mike Bloomberg has been able to shoot up in the polls the way he has. He's spent more than $300 million of his own money to be able to vault him into this second place position. And he's got to stand up to the scrutiny in this debate. He has not debated for 11 years. He's 78 years old.

How does he hold up? Is he going to be somebody who is able to sort of parry what we're going to see as a lot of attacks from other candidates? I'm struck by what you said there, Domenico, about him not having debated for 11 years, because one of the things about these debates this cycle is I do think it takes some warming up to the formats of these debates is kind of tricky. You don't get a lot of time to talk or to get a chance to rebut what you want to say. It's really different than going out there and delivering your stump speech. For Democrats who are concerned that Joe Biden can't stand up to Trump or Pete Buttigieg looks too young or Elizabeth Warren, they're not sure if her message can win over. Mike Bloomberg's got to

be a primetime player as soon as he steps on that stage. He's got to be able to show that his, you know, his attitude, his persona is something that's going to stand by itself and look like it could stand up to Trump. It's worth noting that Bloomberg is going to be on the debate stage at a pretty pivotal moment for the campaign, which is when this race is turning more towards a diverse electorate, you have Nevada and South Carolina, which has a lot more African-American, Asian, Latino voters than we've seen in previous states. And Michael Bloomberg's past in New York City as mayor, it's kind of checkered when you look at issues like Stapp and Frisk, his Muslim surveillance program, and there's a whole bunch of issues where I'm kind of curious how much he'll be attacked on some of those things on the debate stage. There's a couple of things there. First of all, Nevada is about 41 percent nonwhite, 19 percent Latino from 2016, 13 percent black, 4 percent Asian. South Carolina is a different ballgame, mostly African-American is showing that he's holding up pretty well with voters of color. And I think one of the pieces of that is the fact that he's

willing to spend whatever money it takes to show that he's made up for what those sins of the past may have been with those voters. I've also heard him even in the D.C. Virginia media market on black radio advertising, talking about he features a woman who was having a difficult time getting into New York as a minority business owner and said, Michael Bloomberg, help me. You hear that message over and over and over again pounded into you. You start to believe those ads more than you start to believe the attacks. So criticism from minority communities as well as sort of his just big dollar ad spending. Those are two themes we've already begun to hear criticism about from some of Michael Bloomberg's Democratic rivals. Yeah. And I expect that that's going to be front and center at the debate because

it's everyone's looking at a potential Bloomberg versus Sanders race if, you know, some of these other moderates implode in Nevada and South Carolina. All right. Well, let's take a quick break. And when we get back, we'll talk more about what we'll be watching for in tomorrow night's debate. Support for NPR and the following message come from Rothy's. Rothy's are stylish, sustainable shoes made for life on the go. Carefully crafted from repurposed plastic water bottles, Rothy's are fully machine washable. Best of all, they're comfortable and have zero break-in period,

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manage events in 170 countries around the world. Listen now. And we're back. So both the Bernie Sanders campaign and the Michael Bloomberg campaign are sort of messaging that this is kind of turning into a two person race from here. You know, Domenico, do you feel like that's a fair assessment? You've got a whole bunch of other candidates who are actually going to be competing in Nevada who are going to be on stage tomorrow night. I think that's a lot of spin from the Bloomberg folks, because the fact is they're not competing in these first four states and they need to be able to keep their name out there. And look, you've got candidates like Elizabeth Warren, Amy Klobuchar, Pete Buttigieg,

who really do need to show some improvement with voters of color and show that they have the momentum going into Super Tuesday. And so, Danielle, I'm really intrigued specifically by Elizabeth Warren because she has had a history in some of these debates of appearing a little bit more reserved. And I am curious if she will take a different tactic tomorrow night, specifically because she has such a clear contrast foil in Michael Bloomberg. Right. And not only that, but she has yet to win a state or even come in second. So she definitely also just kind of has to get out there and zero parallelism with her campaign intended. She has to get out there and fight. Right.

One thing she has done is this week, I believe it was yesterday on the campaign trail, she apparently told NBC News' Ali Vitale that she thinks that Bernie Sanders needs to take responsibility for some of the abuse that his supporters have pointed towards people like those union leaders in Nevada. There was a, for our listeners who are not caught up on this, a union in Nevada put out some messaging saying that they didn't like Medicare for All, essentially. And some leaders of that union then came back and said, listen, we heard we got some really, really rough abuse from Bernie Sanders supporters. So Elizabeth Warren has been saying, you know, Bernie Sanders needs to take greater responsibility for it. To be clear, he has responded. He has said something to the effect of, yeah, we don't want that kind of rhetoric in our movement. But you can see the possibility of Warren taking a bigger swing

at him. Not only that, but broadening this out. If Sanders is sort of the guy to beat now, if he is at the top of the polls, which he is in ours, then you can see a lot more candidates maybe pulling their punches less with Bernie Sanders and really starting to take swings at him. You know, Warren and Sanders have had this sort of, you know, peaceful detente, you know, where they were, they had this non-aggression, where they were really not going to go against each other, because they felt like they were, you know, forwarding this movement. The problem is the movement is leaving Elizabeth Warren behind at this point, you know, the train is sort of leaving the station. And unless she's going to try to nick him and take him down a few notches, you know, she very well may wind up losing

this nomination and not be able to even, you know, come close because, you know, right now she's fighting still this two front battle where she's losing college educated white voters who had been on board with Warren. And she's having this difficult time winning over progressives who have now more coalesced around Sanders. So, Domenico, I want to ask you specifically about two candidates who have had pretty solid debate performances, I would argue, throughout this campaign cycle, and that's Pete Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, and Amy Klobuchar, senator from Minnesota. What do you feel like they need to accomplish in this debate? And also, I mean, broadly in Nevada, because, you know, they didn't have the huge infrastructure,

my understanding was, on the ground compared to, say, a campaign like Bernie Sanders there. I mean, this poll is not great news for them. You know, Amy Klobuchar and Pete Buttigieg are both in single digits. You know, Klobuchar a little bit ahead of Buttigieg at 9 percent, Buttigieg at 8. And if you think about that for Buttigieg, he's down five points since December. And all that's happened between then and now is that he's the delegate leader in this race, by the way. He has 22 delegates to Bernie Sanders, 21. He won the most delegates out of Iowa, got the same number of delegates out of New Hampshire.

Now, what have we all been hearing about since those two races? How white those two states are. More than 90 percent of the voters in both those states are white voters. Can Pete Buttigieg show he can win over a bigger share of voters of color? So far, he hasn't been able to. In our poll, Amy Klobuchar, 4% with black voters and Buttigieg at three. So final question to you both is about the candidate who, Domenico, you mentioned was the front runner, the leader in so many of these national polls early on. And that's a former vice president, Joe Biden.

What does he need to do on the debate stage, do you feel, to kind of reverse the fortunes or maybe even just the narrative that's developed around him at this point? I don't think he can reverse the fortunes on the debate stage. I think he can only continue his slide if he does poorly at the debate. He needs to be able to have a solid debate performance, look steady, sound crisp, and needs to be able to, frankly, make sense in what he's saying. He needs to be able to further his arguments and make strong cases against some of his rivals. The big thing for Biden is he can't have a terrible finish in Nevada and then lose South Carolina. He's got to win South Carolina.

Otherwise, it's very difficult to see what, if any, path he has going forward. Right. And that comes right back to how much of an impact does this debate have? Whether Biden does a super great job, a moderately fine, he made it job, or a terrible job, there's always that question of how much voters care after the debate. Debates have, for example, helped Amy Klobuchar in New Hampshire. That said, in the overwhelming number of cases this election cycle, we haven't seen much of a bump.

So it is possible that if Joe Biden does a super fantastic or a super terrible job that maybe it will have no impact. So this is like this is the thing with debates. It's always a guessing game. All right. Well, that is a wrap for today. We will be back in your feeds tomorrow evening after the debate,

and we will see some of you at our live show tomorrow night in Thousand Oaks, California. By the way, there are still some tickets available for that show, and you can get them at nprpresents.org. I'm Asma Khalid.

I'm covering the presidential campaign. I'm Danielle Kurtzleben. I'm also covering the campaign. And I'm Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent. And as always, thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.