Politics

With brash talk and big bucks, Mike Bloomberg opens a Detroit base Saturday

December 19, 2019, 10:20 PM

Mike Bloomberg's late-starting presidential campaign lands in Detroit this weekend, and it's previewed with the type of brashness a billionaire's bucks can buy.


The ex-mayor of New York is the world's eighth-richest man. (Photos: Bloomberg campaign)

The Democrat opens his first Michigan field office Saturday at Eastern Market, Chad Livengood posts at Crain's.

The Detroit office will serve as Bloomberg's state headquarters as he builds out "a massive ground operation," said Tim O'Brien, a senior adviser to the Bloomberg campaign.

"I'm not just blowing smoke," said O'Brien. ... Nobody is going to have a field operation the size of ours. It's going to be one of the biggest ones ever fielded in U.S. political history."

Modest bunch, these Bloomies. (No surprise -- Forbes ranks this oligarch as the world's eighth-wealthiest man at a net worth of $55.6 billion, Livengood writes.)

Elizabeth Warren beat him to Detroit, opening the 2020 campaign's first field office here last weekend. But the former New York mayor is in our face more often, thanks to a TV ad blitz.

Bloomberg is already the first Democratic presidential candidate to go on the air in Michigan with a sustained television advertising campaign, booking about $1 million in ads in December on broadcast TV stations across the state, public records show. ...

Bloomberg's campaign aides say the field offices they open in Michigan in the coming weeks will remain open after the March 10 primary — a luxury most presidential campaigns can't afford in a grueling primary where campaign staffers bounce from one state to the next over a period of several months until the nomination is decided.


Read more:  Crain's Detroit Business


Leave a Comment:

Photo Of The Day