Bloomberg spending millions in Missouri. Will it be enough to win March 10 primary?
Michael Bloomberg has spent more than $9 million blanketing the airwaves in Missouri. His rivals for the Democratic presidential nomination have yet to invest a dime on TV advertising in the state.
He has 45 full-time campaign staff in five offices around the state, making his Missouri payroll by far the largest in the race and stoking criticism that he’s trying to buy the nomination.
Team Bloomberg shrugged off complaints about the billionaire candidate’s spending spree.
“The first thing Democrats say is we want to beat Donald Trump, and Mike is willing to spend what it takes to do that,” said Ryan Hawkins, senior adviser to Bloomberg’s Missouri campaign. “This is the most important election of our lifetime, so somebody who says we’re trying to buy it, they can cry me a river.”
Bloomberg, 78, the former mayor of New York City who joined the 2020 presidential race only three months ago, is hoping his $60 billion fortune — amassed with his financial information and media company — will help carry him to the Democratic nomination.
His deep pockets are on full display in Missouri, historically a bellwether state that has largely fallen off the presidential radar over the last two decades as it has trended increasingly Republican.
But with many expecting the Democratic race to remain in flux, even after 14 states divvy out 1,357 delegates on Super Tuesday, Missouri’s March 10 primary could once again be a factor.
And no candidate has spent more money to compete for the state’s 78 delegates than Bloomberg.
The question is whether that flood of cash will be enough.
The current frontrunner for the Democratic nomination, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, commands an army of Missouri volunteers, many of whom never stopped campaigning for the self-proclaimed Democratic Socialist after he lost the 2016 primary to Hillary Clinton by just 2,000 votes.
His campaign is opening offices in St. Louis and Kansas City this week.
Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who reinvigorated her flagging candidacy with a withering critique of Bloomberg in the last Democratic debate, has had paid staff in Missouri longer than any other contender -- around a dozen, with field offices in Kansas City and St. Louis.
Former Vice President Joe Biden has a handful of staffers and some key endorsements, most notably one of the state’s senior Democrats, U.S. Rep. Emanuel Cleaver of Kansas City. Polls of Missouri primary voters have been sporadic so far, but the few released show Biden with a consistent double-digit lead.
Former South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg has visited Kansas City and St. Louis, and his campaign says it has had volunteer networks for several months in nearly every Missouri congressional district.
“There’s a lot of excitement,” said Lauren Gepford, executive director of the Missouri Democratic Party. “I think there’s still a ton of people who are uncommitted. They really want to get Trump out of office, but they’re not sure who they want yet.”
The Missouri Democratic Party will hold a “Show-Me Showdown” featuring speeches from multiple presidential contenders at the Kansas City Convention Center on March 8.
“It’s looking like they’ll all be there,” Gepford said.
Bellwether state
Missouri’s primary will be “critically important” to the 2020 campaign, said Cleaver.
“I told (Vice) President Biden on the day that I endorsed him that he — I reminded him — that he and Barack Obama almost won Missouri,” Cleaver said, noting that Obama lost in 2008 by just shy of 4,000 votes, a 0.1 percent margin.
Missouri has historically been a bellwether state, voting for the eventual winner of the presidential election with only three exceptions: Adlai Stevenson in 1956, John McCain in 2008 and Mitt Romney in 2012.
The last Democrat to win Missouri was President Bill Clinton in 1996. And since Obama’s razor-thin loss in 2008, the margin for Republicans has grown — Romney won by nine percentage points in 2012, and President Donald Trump won by 19 percentage points in 2016.
Cleaver still supports Biden despite his struggles in early primary states, and thinks Biden can help push the state into the Democratic column in November.
But he concedes that Bloomberg’s massive spending in Missouri is going to have an impact.
“I think it would be highly untruthful for me to say spending all that money in Missouri is not going to make a difference,” Cleaver said. “Whether it’s 5 points or more, it will make a difference in that there will be a much more visible Bloomberg team on the ground than Biden.”
Bloomberg has spent nearly all of his money on ads, pouring $9.1 million into broadcast, cable and radio spots in Missouri as of this week, according to an analysis by Medium Buying, a Republican consulting firm which tracks campaign ad buys.
Disclosures with the Federal Communication Commission show that he was the only presidential candidate to buy airtime on network affiliates in Kansas and St. Louis in January and February, steering millions to both TV markets weeks ahead of the primary.
“This is the first time in modern history that you have a Democratic candidate running nationwide,” Hawkins said. “When it’s all about delegates, Missouri is definitely a factor.”
Most of Missouri’s delegates will be allocated proportionally by congressional district, with a few doled out based on statewide vote tally.
The Bloomberg campaign has had staff and volunteers canvassing in all eight districts, Hawkins said.
“We’re everywhere on the ground in Missouri,” Hawkins said. “Everyone else is still scrambling in the early states. That puts us in a great position. We’re not taking Missouri for granted. Missouri is important.”
Sanders, who leads the field in delegates and raw vote through the early contests, can’t come anywhere near Bloomberg’s spending.
But the Sanders volunteers on the ground in Missouri say they don’t need to.
Our Revolution is a progressive political action organization that spun out of Sanders’s 2016 presidential campaign. It has chapters in Kansas City, St. Louis, Columbia, St. Joseph and Springfield.
Dylan Burd, vice president of Our Revolution Kansas City, said Sanders supporters in the Kansas City area organize phone banks every Wednesday, canvassing every weekend and training to organize friends and neighbors, among other activities.
And they’ve been essentially doing it for four years.
“A lot of our volunteers have been heavily involved and engaged since the 2016 election,” Burd said. “While Mayor Bloomberg has spent an outrageous amount of money, I don’t think you can buy enthusiasm. Our ground game is made up of people who are deeply committed, with a volunteer infrastructure we’ve been building on since 2016 to have in place for this 2020 election.”
Sanders’ Missouri campaign says it has recorded 1.5 million of what it calls “voter engagement attempts” a term that takes in door knocking , phone calls, texts and contact with voters through the campaign’s app.
“Bernie Sanders and the people of Missouri know democracy is not for sale and votes must be earned, not bought,” said Freeland Ellis, the campaign’s Midwest press secretary.
Sanders barely lost Missouri in the 2016 primary, maintaining a lead over former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton most of the night until results were reported in Jackson County and St. Louis County that pushed Clinton into the lead.
Endorsements
Their presence on the ground in Missouri varies, but each of the 2020 candidates are working to nail down local endorsements ahead of the primary.
The lone statewide Democratic incumbent is Auditor Nicole Galloway, who is also the party’s presumptive nominee for governor.
Galloway hasn’t met with any presidential contenders, her spokesman confirmed to The Star, and she is not planning on endorsing anyone before the primary.
Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas said he has met with Bloomberg, Buttigieg, Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and billionaire Tom Steyer, as well as top staffers from the other campaigns.
He would like to make an endorsement, but said he’s approaching the decision cautiously.
“I realize it’s valuable,” Lucas said. “Not because I’m special, but because my office is.”
Lucas said he’s been pressing candidates on housing policy, an issue that has gone largely uncovered in the presidential debates, specifically how the candidates will reform the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
“I want a concrete path for how we can rebuild America’s cities,” Lucas said.
Lucas said he discussed shared experiences with Buttigieg and Bloomberg as mayors, but also noted that he’s “not just going to say because you’re a mayor I got to like you, I’ve got to pick one.”
Cleaver, a former mayor of Kansas City, said mayors “deal with all of the issues that people walk into their kitchen thinking about every day.”
“But here’s the problem,” he said. “Unless you’re mayor of a diverse city and unless you’re the mayor of a large enough city to have the whole gamut of issues, it’s not going to equip you to be governor of state or maybe president.”
Cleaver later added: “I don’t want anybody to think you can walk out of a municipal building and be fully equipped to be president.”
Former Kansas City Mayor Sly James disagrees, announcing his support for Buttigieg last September specifically because of his experience as mayor of South Bend.
“Mayors can’t get away with the type of partisan fighting and gridlock we’ve seen in Washington,” he said at the time. “They get things done.”
Warren’s campaign launched a week of phone banking and canvassing across the state on Sunday, highlighted by a rally with St. Louis County Council Chairwoman Lisa Clancy and St. Louis Alderwoman Annie Rice.
Kansas City Councilwoman Melissa Robinson also endorsed Warren last week.
Warren has yet to visit the Kansas City region since becoming a presidential candidate, but she rallied more than 1,000 people in the Power & Light District for then-Senate hopeful Jason Kander in 2016.
Jason Noble, Warren’s spokesman and a former reporter at The Star, said metropolitan Kansas City has seen the results of “rising voter engagement and real successes from women candidates in contested races — making it a natural place for the Warren campaign to begin building out its 2020 infrastructure.”
Sanders won the endorsements last week of state Rep. Rasheen Aldridge and Alderwoman Megan Green, both of St. Louis.
Green said she decided to support the Vermont senator because he’s committed to “supporting and empowering the multiracial movement of working class people that is necessary to address the real threats to our democracy.”
Biden, in addition to Cleaver’s endorsement, points to the support of former Ambassador Kevin O’Malley, a St. Louis native who served under President Obama.
“Joe Biden has built a broad and diverse coalition in Missouri and across the country,” said campaign spokesperson Meira Bernstein, “the exact type of coalition that we know it will take to beat Donald Trump.”
This story was originally published February 23, 2020 at 5:00 AM with the headline "Bloomberg spending millions in Missouri. Will it be enough to win March 10 primary?."
