Mike Bloomberg won the Iowa caucuses

[Zorro]

The Democratic candidate who gained the most from the unmitigated debacle in Iowa is not Pete Buttigieg or Bernie Sanders, though both have claimed victory there. The biggest winner was Mike Bloomberg.

The billionaire former New York mayor entered the race with a novel strategy of skipping the first four states, hoping the results were a discouraging muddle, and using television ads and paid campaign staff to put himself in contention on Super Tuesday. This approach was, and remains, a real long shot. But the morning after the Iowa fiasco, Bloomberg announced he would double his spending on television ads, which had already approached saturation levels. He does not have a reputation for knowingly throwing good money after bad. The impossible now looks merely improbable.

From Bloomberg’s point of view, the campaign thus far has gone better than he had a right to hope. His stated thesis for his campaign is that President Trump must be defeated at all costs and that none of the other candidates is likely to beat him. He hopes to sell himself as the genuine article to Trump’s fakery: an actual billionaire with the management skills to turn the country around. If one of the candidates who competed in Iowa were emerging as a strong front-runner, Bloomberg could look more like a self-indulgent ego-tripper than a potential savior. But that hasn’t happened. And the chaos in the Democratic Party and Trump’s White House are making Bloomberg’s argument for him.

In a misguided attempt to make the caucus process more transparent and efficient, Democratic Party officials in Iowa inadvertently made it into an embarrassing display of dysfunction. They altered procedures that Iowa voters were accustomed to, and not everybody understood the new rules. They made it unclear how victory would ultimately be measured. Most fatefully, they threw an untested cellphone app into the mix. What could possibly go wrong?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/mike-bloomberg-won-the-iowa-caucuses/2020/02/06/aa110f1e-4928-11ea-b4d9-29cc419287eb_story.html

[MrsCoffee]

1. Lol.

[N_E_1 for Tennis]

2. I'm only a whisper in a hurricane...

But he took me back to undecided.

[Squinch]

8. I'm undecided because I love Liz but I don't think she

will be as strong against the GE onslaught as Bloomberg.

He's not my favorite guy, but I think he would wipe the floor with Filthy Donnie, and turn him into a quivering mass of jelly in the process. Which I would love to see.

I'm waiting to see how AA community reacts to Bloomberg. His current policies seem to be progressive, but I don't know if the AA community can forgive stop and frisk. They are historically our smartest voices.

If it looks like he is able to get AA support, I think he'd be unstoppable.

[N_E_1 for Tennis]

11. He knows trump...

They have interacted many time with each other, social circles and all that stuff. He knows how to beat him, he gets under trumps skin...that’s great...that’s when trump make stupid mistakes.
His base loves it, but most of America doesn’t. Plus he has the money to outspend trump. His ads say all the correct words to entice independents and voters that only vote every once in a while to take notice of him.

[njhoneybadger]

3. I Agree

Mike can beat tRump.

[Johnyawl]

4. If Biden continues to stumble...

...I'm predicting that a whole lot of Biden supporters will be swinging to Bloomberg.

[Laelth]

5. If Bloomberg is nominated, whom do you think he would choose as his VP running mate?

I may start a poll on this. It's an interesting question, imo.

-Laelth

[stopbush]

7. Kamala Harris.

[Laelth]

13. Interesting.

Care to explain why you think that would be his first pick?

-Laelth

[stopbush]

14. Bloomberg is about showing tRump to be a fraud.

A big part of that fraud involves convincing the rubes that he’s a strong man and a bully. It’s all a transparent façade, at least to anyone with half a brain.

tRump also hates strong women, women like Kamala Harris, a no-bullshit former prosecutor and AG who is fearless in facing down bullshit. She’s young and a safe choice to give up her Senate seat when elected VP (Gov. Newsom gets to name a temporary replacement - Adam Schiff? - and CA will later vote to send a D to the Senate to replace Harris). Harris went after tRump in her short-lived campaign for POTUS.

Harris helps with the black and women vote, too.

And, she didn’t go through the actual primary voting, which could have made her damaged goods in a sense.

I think they’d make a dynamite pair.

[Laelth]

15. Well said. Thank you for the response. n/t

-Laelth

[stopbush]

6. I made a post to this effect on Monday. Nice to see the WaPo catching up.

[ElementaryPenguin]

9. He absolutely did.

[DeminPennswoods]

10. When people voted for Trump, aside from the racists,

many believed his TV persona as a successful businessman who could get things done. There is a big misconception that Americans don't like government. They do, but they like government that works, not the dysfunctional partisan mess (caused primarily by the GOP) that currently exists where little to nothing gets done to solve the problems affecting the vast majority of Americans.

Bloombergian competence is what most Trump voters expected, but what they (and we) got was an incompetent boob instead.

[BusyBeingBest]

12. He zoomed straight past the Iowa circus, and his poll numbers went up.

Kind of unfair, but yeah.

[The Mouth]

16. " 'fair' is a place you go to ride ponies and eat cotton candy"

my father told me.