theatlantic--2020-03-01--Barack Obama and the End of Pete Buttigieg’s Campaign

Tonight , Buttigieg announced that he would be suspending his campaign for the Democratic nomination .
As he stepped to the podium , he wore his trademark smile , but with more reserve .
He paused to embrace the moment ’ s weight .
“ We love you !
” one person shouted .
“ It ’ s so good to be in South Bend , ” he responded .
He joked , he choked back emotion , and he spoke of the hope his campaign had inspired .
He did exactly what he ’ s done throughout the campaign @ @ @ @ @ @ @ That habit , or skill , is part of why people drew the Obama comparison .
But there ’ s a fine line between emulation and mimicry , and if voters pick up the wrong signals , candidates risk being viewed as inauthentic .
Such was the common criticism of Buttigieg when he delivered lines on the campaign trail that mirrored those of Obama .
At one point , he was even accused of plagiarizing the former president .
With nearly two-thirds of voters believing that Donald Trump will win reelection , according @ @ @ @ @ @ @ are still trying to find a way to viscerally connect with voters .
“ What Barack Obama figured out very early on in his career is that when you have people who are in despair , that have been beaten by life or circumstance or policy makers or any level of unfairness , they want hope , ” Anton Gunn , Obama ’ s 2008 South Carolina political director , told me .
“ And so you have to speak to that.
” Several candidates have tried .
Ossoff , who ran for @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in a 2017 special election , quickly gained national attention but finished with 48 percent of the vote—9,000 votes fewer than Karen Handel , who won the seat .
One former senior Ossoff staffer told me that the cadence Ossoff employed “ represents a bit of a steady hand , something familiar.
” He denied that the former House candidate , who is now running for the Senate , imitated Obama intentionally , but added that , for voters , Ossoff ’ s style was refreshing .
“ It says that you care @ @ @ @ @ @ @ you ’ re speaking to give it a necessary thought.
” The country has changed since 2008 , and even if the Obama-esque way of talking to voters—appealing to hope and unity—connects with some Americans , will it ever be able to connect with enough for Democrats to win the sorts of electoral victories Obama did ?
Robert Lehrman , a former speechwriter for Al Gore , told me that he believes people tired of Obama ’ s speeches as early as 2012 .
“ Just like a song doesn ’ t sit @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , people fell out of love with hearing the same platitudes , ” Lehrman said .
Buttigieg ended his campaign with a flourish , his eyes full of fire .
His closing riff was trademark Obama , trademark Buttigieg , trademark appeals to a unified America .
“ What if we were the ones ” to change the country , Buttigieg repeated time and again , echoing Obama ’ s line from Super Tuesday in 2008 .
“ The chance to do that is in our hands .
That is the hope in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in our bellies.
” “ That is the future we believe in .
”

Pete Buttigieg smiled, shifting his weight in front of a bunting backdrop as people chanted his name at his caucus-night rally in Des Moines, Iowa. It was early February. He came bearing a message of triumph. “Tonight, an improbable hope became an undeniable reality.” He paused. The corners of his lips curled up. He allowed the chants to wash over him. “Iowa,” Buttigieg said, “you have shocked the nation.”
The cadence, the emotion: They were familiar. Barack Obama had his own nation-shocking moment in Iowa 12 years ago. “They said our sights were set too high,” Obama bellowed to the faithful who had gathered to celebrate his victory over Hillary Clinton on January 3, 2008. “This was the moment when the improbable beat what Washington always said was inevitable.”
Obama—young, handsome, and from a midwestern state—came preaching hope and unity in the face of division. It worked exceedingly well … for him. But virtually any candidate who has attempted to do the same—from Jon Ossoff in Georgia to Beto O’Rourke in Texas to Buttigieg in the 2020 Democratic primary—has drawn charges of trying to be Obama-lite. You can’t blame these men for trying. Much of the political class still idolizes Obama for his oratory. He could command an audience with a pregnant pause. He made voters feel like he was speaking directly to them even when addressing tens of thousands at a time.
Read: Obama still sounds like a president
Tonight, Buttigieg announced that he would be suspending his campaign for the Democratic nomination. As he stepped to the podium, he wore his trademark smile, but with more reserve. He paused to embrace the moment’s weight. “We love you!” one person shouted. “It’s so good to be in South Bend,” he responded. He joked, he choked back emotion, and he spoke of the hope his campaign had inspired.
He did exactly what he’s done throughout the campaign: connected with people through speech. That habit, or skill, is part of why people drew the Obama comparison. But there’s a fine line between emulation and mimicry, and if voters pick up the wrong signals, candidates risk being viewed as inauthentic. Such was the common criticism of Buttigieg when he delivered lines on the campaign trail that mirrored those of Obama. At one point, he was even accused of plagiarizing the former president. With nearly two-thirds of voters believing that Donald Trump will win reelection, according to a CBS News poll, Democrats are still trying to find a way to viscerally connect with voters. “What Barack Obama figured out very early on in his career is that when you have people who are in despair, that have been beaten by life or circumstance or policy makers or any level of unfairness, they want hope,” Anton Gunn, Obama’s 2008 South Carolina political director, told me. “And so you have to speak to that.” Several candidates have tried.
Read: Everybody vs. Pete
Ossoff, who ran for Georgia’s Sixth Congressional District seat in a 2017 special election, quickly gained national attention but finished with 48 percent of the vote—9,000 votes fewer than Karen Handel, who won the seat. One former senior Ossoff staffer told me that the cadence Ossoff employed “represents a bit of a steady hand, something familiar.” He denied that the former House candidate, who is now running for the Senate, imitated Obama intentionally, but added that, for voters, Ossoff’s style was refreshing. “It says that you care enough about the subject matter upon which you’re speaking to give it a necessary thought.”
The country has changed since 2008, and even if the Obama-esque way of talking to voters—appealing to hope and unity—connects with some Americans, will it ever be able to connect with enough for Democrats to win the sorts of electoral victories Obama did? Robert Lehrman, a former speechwriter for Al Gore, told me that he believes people tired of Obama’s speeches as early as 2012. “Just like a song doesn’t sit at the top of the charts forever, people fell out of love with hearing the same platitudes,” Lehrman said.
Buttigieg ended his campaign with a flourish, his eyes full of fire. His closing riff was trademark Obama, trademark Buttigieg, trademark appeals to a unified America. “What if we were the ones” to change the country, Buttigieg repeated time and again, echoing Obama’s line from Super Tuesday in 2008. “The chance to do that is in our hands. That is the hope in our hearts. That is the fire in our bellies.”
“That is the future we believe in.”


theatlantic--2020-03-03--Progressives Want Henry Cuellar Out. Does His District?

After Pelosi left and the crowd thinned out , Cuellar and I walked upstairs and sat down at a folding table .
Supporters kept interrupting to hug “ Papacito ” and thank him .
One of them even hugged me .
I did not expect him to talk much—he hasn ’ t given many interviews during the campaign .
But he was eager to blast Cisneros and Justice Democrats , who have criticized him for his coziness with corporate PACs .
“ Justice Socialist Democrats are a PAC also , but I guess their PAC is okay , ” he @ @ @ @ @ @ @ they ’ re so pure , but when you start looking at it , everything they do , they misinform in so many ways.
” He paused , and then went more explicitly after Cisneros .
“ She graduated , she went to New York , took the state bar in New York … Think about it .
If you ’ re an attorney , you get your license where you want to practice .
Her plan was to practice in New York , ” he said , emphasizing the last two words @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the bar in New York doesn ’ t prevent Cisneros from practicing in Texas or most other states . )
Cuellar ’ s support for abortion , Trump ’ s border wall , and guns has made him a pariah to lots of Democrats , but he doubled down on his record when we spoke .
“ Democrats in Texas , when I started , it was safe , legal , rare abortion , ” he said , pausing between all three points and counting them out on his fingers .
“ I @ @ @ @ @ @ @ like minors getting abortions without parental consent.
” I asked him whether he considers Trump a personal friend .
There ’ s a pause .
“ No , ” he said .
Then he had to leave .
Cuellar ’ s centrist views on issues like health care and climate change have led Cisneros to believe she has a chance .
She ’ s painted him as a do-nothing congressman who doesn ’ t really get the district .
“ He has been leaning into these stereotypes that South Texas is conservative and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ are , ” she told me when we talked in November .
( Cisneros didn ’ t respond to multiple requests for comment in recent weeks . )
“ It ’ s very interesting to see that once he found out he was going to get primaried , all of a sudden he makes time for these people , ” she said then .
“ But the community knows better .
They know it ’ s because now he has to work for his job.
” Although her campaign has gotten a wave @ @ @ @ @ @ @ from groups like Emily ’ s List and the Texas AFL-CIO , it ’ s a different story in Laredo .
Although she outraised him in the first six weeks of 2020 , relatively few of her donations have come from within the district .
Read : The millennial left is tired of waiting Cisneros ’ s embrace of a full suite of left-wing dreams probably isn ’ t helping her campaign : Championing a Green New Deal is a tough sell in an area where the oil and gas industry is responsible @ @ @ @ @

LAREDO, Texas—Henry Cuellar is not hip. The representative from Texas is one of the last anti-abortion, pro-gun Democrats left in Congress—and he doesn’t apologize for it. He rails against socialism. He goes to church every Sunday and doesn’t drink or smoke. He votes with President Donald Trump more often than just about any other House Democrat.
When I talked with him late last month, he went off on Medicare for All. “Where are we gonna come up with $32 trillion?” he asked me. “What are you going to say to the thousands of people in my district who have insurance? That we’re going to take away their insurance and put them under socialized medicine?”
The congressman’s brand of centrism can feel out of whack in a Democratic Party that has swung to the left and could conceivably nominate a democatic socialist to take on Trump in November. Cuellar has been a target of progressive ire for a long time, but he has skated to reelection ever since he first won his seat, in 2004.
Not this year. In early 2019, Justice Democrats—a progressive PAC that helped Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and others successfully primary incumbent Democrats in 2018—pinpointed the seven-term congressman as among their biggest targets in 2020. In June, they announced their handpicked challenger: a 26-year-old immigration attorney and Laredo native named Jessica Cisneros, who also happens to be Cuellar’s former intern. To say that there’s a difference between them is an understatement: He has an A rating from the National Rifle Association; she’s pushing for tougher gun laws. He’s been in Texas politics since the 1980s; she graduated from law school less than a year ago.
Cisneros has the sexy endorsements—Senators Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Bernie Sanders of Vermont are backing her, as is AOC—and a deluge of national attention. But all of that may still not be enough.
Texas’s Twenty-Eighth Congressional District is huge, stretching from the eastern outskirts of San Antonio to the southern border with Mexico. This swath of the state is reliably Democratic, but unlike most blue districts in the country, it’s largely rural and overwhelmingly Latino—a land of ranchers and fracking and hunting. Driving on I-35 between San Antonio and Laredo, I spotted a billboard advertising the world’s largest deer-head museum. Out of it juts what appears to be a large, actual deer head.
“It’s easy to mistake partisanship for ideology,” says Matt Angle, a longtime Democratic strategist in Texas. “The Twenty-Eighth District is very Democratic, but it’s not very liberal.”
Cuellar is never going to change—and in this district, which heads to the polls today, maybe he doesn’t have to.
Basically everyone in Laredo knows the Cuellar family. Cuellar’s brother Martin is the Webb County sheriff. His sister Rosie is the Webb County tax assessor-collector. All three are up for reelection, and heavily trafficked intersections up and down the city’s main drag are drenched in signs imploring you to vote for one, two, or all three of them.
Cuellar hasn’t had to run a serious campaign in past elections, but he isn’t taking the challenge from Cisneros lightly. He has branded himself as a known quantity, while labeling Cisneros as a socialist who is out of step with the district. When I was in Laredo, television ads for Cuellar seemingly played on loop. One ad says that Cisneros wants to shut down the oil and gas industry.
And although Cuellar may sound and act a whole lot differently from most Democrats today, he still has the backing of the most powerful Democrat in America: House Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
When Pelosi announced at The Texas Tribune Festival, in Austin, in September that she was endorsing Cuellar, some people in the audience booed. Pelosi and Cuellar have a good working relationship, he has said.
Read: The search for the next AOC
In late February, Pelosi trekked to Laredo for a string of fundraisers for Cuellar. She made a pit stop at Cuellar’s campaign headquarters, where she spoke with a few dozen cheering supporters. I thought the place would have metal detectors and white tablecloths. When I got there, I realized it was in a strip mall next to a barbecue joint, and had a plastic sign. The building looked like it might have previously been a bar. When Pelosi and Cuellar walked in together, 30 minutes after their scheduled arrival, the crowd erupted in cheers. “We assume that Henry will win, but we don’t take anything for granted,” Pelosi said. “The word assume—ass of you and me. Assume nothing.”
After Pelosi left and the crowd thinned out, Cuellar and I walked upstairs and sat down at a folding table. Supporters kept interrupting to hug “Papacito” and thank him. One of them even hugged me.
I did not expect him to talk much—he hasn’t given many interviews during the campaign. But he was eager to blast Cisneros and Justice Democrats, who have criticized him for his coziness with corporate PACs.
“Justice Socialist Democrats are a PAC also, but I guess their PAC is okay,” he said. “They try to say they’re so pure, but when you start looking at it, everything they do, they misinform in so many ways.”
He paused, and then went more explicitly after Cisneros. “She graduated; she went to New York, took the state bar in New York … Think about it. If you’re an attorney, you get your license where you want to practice. Her plan was to practice in New York,” he said, emphasizing the last two words in a high-pitched voice. (Taking the bar in New York doesn’t prevent Cisneros from practicing in Texas or most other states.)
Cuellar’s moderate views have made him a pariah to lots of Democrats, but he doubled down on them when we spoke. “Democrats in Texas, when I started, it was safe, legal, rare abortion,” he said, pausing between all three points and counting them out on his fingers. “I have an issue with extreme positions, like minors getting abortions without parental consent.”
I asked him whether he considers Trump a personal friend. There’s a pause.
“No,” he said. Then he had to leave.
Matthew Busch / Bloomberg / Getty
Cuellar’s centrist views on issues like health care and climate change have led Cisneros to believe she has a chance. She’s painted him as a do-nothing congressman who doesn’t really get the district. “He has been leaning into these stereotypes that South Texas is conservative and that we like things the way they are,” she told me when we talked in November. (Cisneros didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment in recent weeks.) “It’s very interesting to see that once he found out he was going to get primaried, all of a sudden he makes time for these people,” she said then. “But the community knows better. They know it’s because now he has to work for his job.”
Although her campaign has gotten a wave of national attention, and high-profile endorsements from groups like Emily’s List and the Texas AFL-CIO, it’s a different story in Laredo. Although she outraised him in the first six weeks of 2020, relatively few of her donations have come from within the district.
Read: The millennial left is tired of waiting
Cisneros’s embrace of a full suite of left-wing dreams probably isn’t helping her campaign: Championing a Green New Deal is a tough sell in an area where the oil and gas industry is responsible for many well-paying jobs.
“Just because you can critique Cuellar for being more conservative than the average primary voter doesn’t mean they’re going to tilt further to the left and vote for Cisneros,” says Mark P. Jones, a political scientist at Rice University.
I heard roughly the same from voters I talked with in Laredo. “There’s this idea of moderation that I feel the left has gone so far away from,” said Ralph Garcia, a 36-year-old photographer. “With Cisneros, we’re only going to get one flavor. If we go with Cuellar, we get a little bit of both.”
Adrian Zapata, a 34-year-old insurance broker who lives in Laredo and voted early for Cuellar, told me that he appreciates Cuellar’s opposition to abortion. “It’s against everything we believe in,” he said, referring to the district. Zapata said there are grandmothers in their mid-to-late 30s who would rather take care of more children at home than have their daughter get an abortion. “I think that says something for the deep pro-life stance we’re engrained with,” he told me.
Religion is everywhere in Laredo: Rosaries hang from rearview mirrors; bumper stickers tell you to vote with Jesus. “A lot of families have lived here for generations and are resistant to change,” Jones says.
When I was there, what felt like the entire city had gathered for a parade to celebrate George Washington’s birthday—a local tradition that’s happened every year since 1898. As the U.S. Customs and Border Protection float rolled by, Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the U.S.A.” blared so loudly that the sidewalk vibrated. CBP’s mascot, a roughly eight-foot-tall bald eagle named the Enforcer, flailed its arms in the air, tossing lollipops to the crowd. A few minutes later, Cuellar—accompanied by his wife and two daughters—waved from the back of a black Dodge pickup truck. A float behind it displayed a sign that said vote biblical values!
As Cuellar went by, a small pocket in the crowd started shouting, “Jessica! Jessica!” Cisneros walked a few feet into the parade route. “The people of the district deserve a debate,” she shouted at Cuellar. Imelda, the congressman’s wife, tossed Cisneros a beaded necklace. Then the pickup kept going.


theatlantic--2020-03-03--The Texas Congressman Who Isn’t Afraid of the AOC Left

After Pelosi left and the crowd thinned out , Cuellar and I walked upstairs and sat down at a folding table .
Supporters kept interrupting to hug “ Papacito ” and thank him .
One of them even hugged me .
I did not expect him to talk much—he hasn ’ t given many interviews during the campaign .
But he was eager to blast Cisneros and Justice Democrats , who have criticized him for his coziness with corporate PACs .
“ Justice Socialist Democrats are a PAC also , but I guess their PAC is okay , ” he @ @ @ @ @ @ @ they ’ re so pure , but when you start looking at it , everything they do , they misinform in so many ways.
” He paused , and then went more explicitly after Cisneros .
“ She graduated ; she went to New York , took the state bar in New York … Think about it .
If you ’ re an attorney , you get your license where you want to practice .
Her plan was to practice in New York , ” he said , emphasizing the last two words @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the bar in New York doesn ’ t prevent Cisneros from practicing in Texas or most other states . )
Cuellar ’ s moderate views have made him a pariah to lots of Democrats , but he doubled down on them when we spoke .
“ Democrats in Texas , when I started , it was safe , legal , rare abortion , ” he said , pausing between all three points and counting them out on his fingers .
“ I have an issue with extreme positions , like minors getting abortions @ @ @ @ @ @ @ whether he considers Trump a personal friend .
There ’ s a pause .
“ No , ” he said .
Then he had to leave .
Cuellar ’ s centrist views on issues like health care and climate change have led Cisneros to believe she has a chance .
She ’ s painted him as a do-nothing congressman who doesn ’ t really get the district .
“ He has been leaning into these stereotypes that South Texas is conservative and that we like things the way they are , ” she @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
( Cisneros didn ’ t respond to multiple requests for comment in recent weeks . )
“ It ’ s very interesting to see that once he found out he was going to get primaried , all of a sudden he makes time for these people , ” she said then .
“ But the community knows better .
They know it ’ s because now he has to work for his job.
” Although her campaign has gotten a wave of national attention , and high-profile endorsements from groups like Emily @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , it ’ s a different story in Laredo .
Although she outraised him in the first six weeks of 2020 , relatively few of her donations have come from within the district .
Read : The millennial left is tired of waiting Cisneros ’ s embrace of a full suite of left-wing dreams probably isn ’ t helping her campaign : Championing a Green New Deal is a tough sell in an area where the oil and gas industry is responsible for many well-paying jobs .
“ Just because you can critique @ @ @ @ @ @ @ average primary voter doesn ’ t mean they ’ re going to tilt further to the left and vote for Cisneros , ” says Mark P. Jones , a political scientist at Rice University .


theatlantic--2020-03-04--Why Michael Bloomberg Spent Half a Billion Dollars to Be Humiliated

The billionaire chuckled ; he ’ d already pulled two bills from his wallet .
He put them in the basket—another few bucks toward what must be a record for the largest amount of money spent in the shortest amount of time with the least to show for it .
Bloomberg spent $ 500 million in 16 weeks , and dropped out less than 12 hours after polls closed on Super Tuesday , the first time he was on the ballot .
Why , when you ’ ve got $ 60 billion and you ’ re a 78-year-old Jew , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Sunday sitting in church in Alabama ?
Because reaching out to voters , especially in a historically and emotionally important place like Selma , is what running for president demands .
So Bloomberg did it , even though that meant sitting silently while the hometown congresswoman , Terri Sewell , looked out at the congregation and said that Biden isn ’ t rich , but he ’ d “ earned ” his spot in the church .
Remember one month ago , after the Iowa caucus collapsed , and Biden ’ s campaign @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a distant fourth there wasn ’ t a problem , and neither was coming in fifth in New Hampshire ?
The Bloomberg campaign was putting together the kind of on-the-ground operations pitched to potential hires as “ Think about getting to do everything you ’ ve ever wanted to in a campaign.
” Then Biden won South Carolina , a single state that he was always expected to win ( though he won by a margin larger than he had dared hope ) , and the chin-strokers and anti–Bernie Sanders panickers instantly transformed @ @ @ @ @ @ @ enough .
By the time Bloomberg took his seat in the pew , his top aides and most prominent supporters had started to realize that the implosion of his campaign couldn ’ t be stopped .
It ’ s like Bloomberg was playing blackjack with a 16—maybe good enough to win , but he was still nervously waiting to see what the dealer flipped over .
That was the optimistic take .
Most of Bloomberg ’ s campaign was a tight operation , complete with the former police detail he hired as private @ @ @ @ @ @ @ lapel pins with eagle heads on them to help look the part of the Secret Service , which isn ’ t protecting any of the Democratic candidates yet ) .
A veteran of both Clintons ’ campaigns , whose company has mastered everything , down to the lighting that makes even iPhone pictures look good , ran logistics .
But the Selma visit was a mess .
Instead of anyone organizing the four presidential candidates and thousands of people in attendance ready to re-create the 1965 walk across the Edmund Pettus Bridge , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ into a megaphone and another standing in front of those waiting to march doing an uncanny impersonation of Martin Luther King Jr. delivering his “ I Have a Dream ” speech .
Bloomberg ’ s staff walked him to a spot at the front of the crowd that they thought had been set aside for him .
But it hadn ’ t been .
Biden had left , Sanders was never scheduled to come , and Elizabeth Warren , Pete Buttigieg , and Amy Klobuchar were jammed together halfway down the block where @ @ @ @ @ @ @ woman trying to take control chased after Bloomberg and his team : “ This is not the line !
” she said .
“ This is not the front of the line !
”

The former mayor of New York spent $500 million in 16 weeks, then dropped out less than 12 hours after polls closed on the first day he was on the ballot.
When Joe Biden walked into the Brown Chapel AME Church in Selma, Alabama, on Sunday, the crowd welcomed him to a seat behind the pulpit like he was Norm walking into Cheers.
Michael Bloomberg had been sitting in the front pew for two hours already, the only candidate there from the start of the service. The pastor had introduced him from the altar by telling a story about how Bloomberg initially didn’t want to come. About 10 people had waited until Bloomberg started speaking to stand up and turn their back to him in silent protest. He’d passed around a tin of Altoids (original flavor) to the people sitting next to him. He’d stood for the hymns, just listening.
When Bloomberg got up to speak, he laid the narrow notecards he uses atop an open Bible. He talked about his record as mayor of New York City, and about working with the Reverend Al Sharpton, the New York–based civil-rights leader who preaches at the church every year on the anniversary of Bloody Sunday. But Sharpton wasn’t there to hear it, because he’d taken Biden for a private tour of a memorial nearby. The only time Sharpton spoke publicly about Bloomberg that day was to rib him to put some money for church renovations into the collection basket.
The billionaire chuckled; he’d already pulled two bills from his wallet. He put them in the basket—another few bucks toward what must be a record for the largest amount of money spent in the shortest amount of time with the least to show for it. Bloomberg spent $500 million in 16 weeks, and dropped out less than 12 hours after polls closed on Super Tuesday, the first time he was on the ballot.
Why, when you’ve got $60 billion and you’re a 78-year-old Jew, would you spend so much of your Sunday sitting in church in Alabama? Because reaching out to voters, especially in a historically and emotionally important place like Selma, is what running for president demands. So Bloomberg did it, even though that meant sitting silently while the hometown congresswoman, Terri Sewell, looked out at the congregation and said that Biden isn’t rich, but he’d “earned” his spot in the church.
Remember one month ago, after the Iowa caucus collapsed, and Biden’s campaign was trying to explain how coming in a distant fourth there wasn’t a problem, and neither was coming in fifth in New Hampshire? The Bloomberg campaign was putting together the kind of on-the-ground operations pitched to potential hires as “Think about getting to do everything you’ve ever wanted to in a campaign.” Then Biden won South Carolina, a single state that he was always expected to win (though he won by a margin larger than he had dared hope), and the chin-strokers and anti–Bernie Sanders panickers instantly transformed Biden into a juggernaut.
It was enough. By the time Bloomberg took his seat in the pew, his top aides and most prominent supporters had started to realize that the implosion of his campaign couldn’t be stopped. It’s like Bloomberg was playing blackjack with a 16—maybe good enough to win, but he was still nervously waiting to see what the dealer flipped over. That was the optimistic take.
Most of Bloomberg’s campaign was a tight operation, complete with the former police detail he hired as private security (they wore earpieces and green lapel pins with eagle heads on them to help look the part of the Secret Service, which isn’t protecting any of the Democratic candidates yet). A veteran of both Clintons’ campaigns, whose company has mastered everything, down to the lighting that makes even iPhone pictures look good, ran logistics. But the Selma visit was a mess. Instead of anyone organizing the four presidential candidates and thousands of people in attendance ready to re-create the 1965 walk across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, there was just a man shouting half-directions into a megaphone and another standing in front of those waiting to march doing an uncanny impersonation of Martin Luther King Jr. delivering his “I Have a Dream” speech. Bloomberg’s staff walked him to a spot at the front of the crowd that they thought had been set aside for him. But it hadn’t been. Biden had left, Sanders was never scheduled to come, and Elizabeth Warren, Pete Buttigieg, and Amy Klobuchar were jammed together halfway down the block where they were supposed to be. A woman trying to take control chased after Bloomberg and his team: “This is not the line!” she said. “This is not the front of the line!”
So Bloomberg’s team walked him back to where the other candidates were, and shoved him in with everyone else. But Warren and Klobuchar held on to each other, pulling through the crowd at one point. Buttigieg attached himself to Sharpton. The billionaire in the suit with the thread count so high you could see it was left without his fellow presidential contenders once again, accompanied by people who had joined him in church, including Columbia, South Carolina, Mayor Steve Benjamin. “Ain’t gonna let nobody turn me around,” the crowd started to sing, and Bloomberg began to move, sort of, shuffling along in his black tasseled loafers. A woman called out to ask him to fund a museum for one of the women who’d led the Bloody Sunday march. He didn’t seem to hear her.
A top aide assessed the chaos, the way Bloomberg was getting bumped around, and offered to pull him out and take him to his waiting plane.
“We don’t have to do it,” he told Bloomberg. The candidate dismissed that immediately. “We have to go over the bridge,” he said. His staff pulled him forward. Tom Steyer’s wife, Kat Taylor, had just finished singing an Aretha Franklin song, and Steyer, who’d driven six hours overnight from South Carolina after dropping out the day before the gathering, was on the mic talking about how he wanted everyone to know that he supports reparations.
Bloomberg pushed ahead. He went over the bridge.
The first time I wrote a story taking Bloomberg’s presidential plans seriously was in October 2007. He was gearing up to run as an independent. I talked with then-outgoing Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska about him possibly being Bloomberg’s running mate, and didn’t get a no. Moderates and independents were having visions of a candidate who could appeal across the usual political divisions, and of an unlimited spending bonanza. Some were speculating about what Kevin Sheekey and Patti Harris, then Bloomberg’s top advisers (and still riding on the plane with him yesterday), would be able to pull off at the national level. Bloomberg’s team talked about laying low until late in the race, then having him come in as a potential savior. “The country’s in big trouble and someone’s got to pull it out,” I quoted Bloomberg saying at the time.
Read: The Bloomberg whisperer
In 2016, Bloomberg again worked up a whole plan to run as an independent, and to try to force a split Electoral College so that the House of Representatives would get to pick the president instead. But four years ago, almost to the day, he pulled the plug at the last minute, deciding that it wouldn’t work. “It weighed on him,” one person who was involved told me at the time, “but at the end of the day, the fact that this was probably the last shot wasn’t enough to make him want to do it.”
He then decided he actually had one last last shot. Somehow, everything about politics has changed, and he showed up this time as a Democrat, telling Democrats what he thought Democrats should do, but not knowing quite what to do when they fired back.
On Sunday night, he was in San Antonio, Texas, in an old airplane hangar that had been turned into an event space. There was a six-piece mariachi band onstage. There were three food trucks (barbecue, tacos, and hamburgers) that had been paid well enough to hand everything out for free. Sitting on the open bar, there was a bowl of Texas-specific Bloomberg campaign buttons. And there was Bloomberg, giving the kind of no-frills speech he’s best at. (No one has ever voted for him for the razzmatazz.) “He has fight in him,” Connie Reyna, a 56-year-old medical transcriptionist in a Make Mother Earth Great Again cap, told me, and then added, not even realizing how much his slogan (“Mike can get it done”) had been drilled into her by all the advertising, “I think he can get it done.”
“Mike! Mike! Mike!” the crowd chanted. At one point, when he mentioned Donald Trump’s impeachment, a few yelled “Lock him up!” and Bloomberg laughed, almost giggling. He said he’d flip the state. “Blue! Blue! Blue!” they shouted. He was having a good time. Never much of a handshaker, he did one round of working the crowd, then turned before going out the door and did another. The next morning, having flown to Washington, D.C., he was even more in his element, in front of 18,000 at the national conference for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the pro-Israel lobby, people who probably didn’t catch the error when he said that Jews “can’t even agree who’s the funniest New Yorker: Jerry Steinfeld, Larry David, or me.”
By the time Bloomberg arrived at George Mason University for a Fox News town hall on Monday evening, though, everything seemed cooked. Sheekey and Harris, the latter in an embroidered Get It Done shirt, watched from a balcony, a few feet away from the reporters they’d let in to watch the event live. Bloomberg is more at ease in a town-hall format, and he seemed to be winning over the audience by talking about management expertise and the vagaries of interest rates. At the first commercial break, he sat silently on his high-top chair until people started calling out to him for photos. Then he eagerly worked the crowd.
Later, a question about guns came up, and a man in an orange Guns Save Lives hat stood up and started yelling at Bloomberg. Everything broke down. Four protesters stood up, waving homemade LGBTQ-rights flags and yelling at him to release former employees from nondisclosure agreements that they’d signed with his company (and that Warren had hammered him for on the debate stage in Las Vegas). The man who’d been shouting about gun rights was angry.
“We don’t do that; we don’t protest!” he yelled at the gay-rights protesters as Fox News security took them out but left him in his seat. Bloomberg promised to talk with him after, and the hosts quickly went to break. In the room, the chaos continued.
“Thank you for saving our children’s lives!” a woman called out.
“What are you talking about? He’s for infanticide! He’s for full-term abortion!” another woman yelled back.
The viewers at home didn’t see the couple hundred people who cheered and applauded him. That was the core of Bloomberg’s problem. People showed up at his events and shouted “We like Mike!” Elected officials endorsed him. But to many of the people who care the most, the most active and noisy, Bloomberg is just wrong—about guns, about abortion, about soda sizes, about whatever. “He’s a moderate, protested by the left and the right—you can use that,” a campaign aide told reporters as we headed out of the town hall, trying a cheery spin.
Bloomberg started yesterday morning in Little Havana, Miami, annoyed. He knew all the questions would be about whether he’d drop out, and he’s never been a man who takes criticism well. Biden hadn’t changed, nor had Bloomberg’s assessment of Biden as weak and unelectable. But Biden didn’t look weak, and hard-core Democrats really wanted to believe that he wasn’t. So Bloomberg was supposed to drop out—and unify a party that doesn’t seem to care how much it owes its current power to his money. He wasn’t helping Sanders by staying in, he insisted: “I’m trying to help myself.” Asked if he’d come in third on Super Tuesday, he said, “There’s only three candidates. You can’t do worse than that.” And when someone pointed out that he’d forgotten about Warren, he said, “I didn’t realize she’s still in. Is she?” Asked if he should drop out, he said, “Joe’s taking votes away from me. It goes in both directions. Have you asked Joe if he’s going to drop out?”
Read: The real power of Bloomberg’s money
Then he got on a charter plane to Orlando, to visit a field office and to lay a wreath at the Pulse nightclub with the moderate-Republican parents of a victim of the June 2016 shooting there, the kind of folks his campaign was supposed to (and did, for a time) attract. A few hours later, he arrived at what was meant to be a victory party in West Palm Beach, down the road from Mar-a-Lago—the latest troll of Trump in a campaign that intentionally, and repeatedly, mocked the president. Instead, Sheekey, the former mayor’s campaign manager, was making an aggressively ambiguous prediction to reporters as polls closed: “Mike Bloomberg is either the candidate for the party or the single most important person helping that candidate defeat Donald Trump.”
When Bloomberg showed up at the victory-party-that-wasn’t, the crowd was ecstatic. There were 2,200 people, including Judge Judy, waving American flags and cheering his name, all of them captured by a crane camera. He gave a speech as if he were the one who’d just done the trouncing, even though the crux of that speech was insisting that it didn’t matter how many delegates he won.
Bloomberg finished the night with what seemed to be a genuine smile on his face. Many of the people working for him finished the night trying to figure out if they were rooting for some way for him to continue, or for being able to start planning the vacations they could afford with the money he was paying them.
“You can’t be a fucking savior,” a very involved Democratic donor who’d been heavily skeptical of Biden and curious about Bloomberg told me over the phone on Tuesday morning, “and then be a dud.”
So: Why did he do it? He really wants to be president. He has for years. The reason he never ran before is that he didn’t want to lose. He didn’t want to be embarrassed. And in the end, he finished last night winning American Samoa. He probably could have bought American Samoa for all he spent.
This morning, after Bloomberg decided to quit the Democratic race, I remembered a moment in Little Havana yesterday. Bloomberg had agreed to hold a constituent’s young daughter for a photo. He tried to smile and make it work. But she wouldn’t stop squirming.
“All right,” Bloomberg said to her father as soon as the photos were done. “All yours again.”


theatlantic--2020-04-16--An Unprecedented Divide Between Red and Blue America

The question for Trump this fall will be whether he can offset that weakness by matching or building on his dominant advantage in exurban , small-town , and rural communities .
In Wisconsin this week , the GOP lost ground with those voters too , but by and large , polling still shows Trump holding a strong position among them .
And because most rural communities are facing fewer cases of the disease so far , they may be much more receptive than big-city leaders and voters to Trump ’ s calls to reopen the economy as quickly as possible @ @ @ @ @ @ @ economic trends all point toward the same possibility : Just as the disease is unfolding very differently in larger and smaller places , the gap between voter preferences there in the presidential race could reach astronomical , and possibly unprecedented , heights .
Epidemiologists and other medical experts disagree on whether the disease will ultimately besiege smaller places to a greater extent than it has so far .
But there ’ s no question that it ’ s exacted its heaviest costs on major cities and their inner suburbs , including New York @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , New Orleans , Los Angeles , and Seattle .
“ Densely populated urban areas are uniquely vulnerable to rapid spread of the virus , ” said Larry Levitt , the executive vice president for health policy at the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation .
The research conducted at The Atlantic ’ s request by Kolko , the chief economist at the employment website Indeed , quantifies that dynamic .
Using a comprehensive county database maintained by The New York Times , Kolko calculated the number of coronavirus cases per million people within four @ @ @ @ @ @ @ metropolitan areas of at least 1 million people ; those in metros of 250,000 to 1 million ; those in small metros with less than 250,000 ; and those in counties outside of metro areas .
The consistent result was that , in most states , heavily populated areas are suffering many more cases per person .
Perhaps the most extreme example : The counties in New York State that fall under the largest metro category—New York City and its environs—have 12,454 cases per million residents .
That ’ s compared with 3,304 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , 1,556 in the smaller metros , and 915 in the nonmetro counties .
In Michigan , where the Detroit area has been ravaged by the disease , the caseload drops from 4,787 per million residents in the largest counties to 1,000 per million in the midsize metros , 874 in the smaller metros , and just 346 in the nonmetro counties .
Read : The two states where Trump ’ s COVID-19 response could backfire in 2020 Similar patterns apply across a wide range of states .
In Illinois , where the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ suburbs , the largest metro counties are experiencing seven times as many cases per person as the midsize metros , and more than eight times as many as the nonmetro counties .
In California , where both the San Francisco and Los Angeles areas have been hit hard , the largest metropolitan counties have more than three times as many cases per capita as the small metro and nonmetro communities .
A similar pattern is also evident in Ohio , Wisconsin , and Pennsylvania across the Rust Belt and North Carolina , Florida @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , Kolko ’ s data show .

Updated on April 16, 2020 at 3:59 p.m. ET
The coronavirus pandemic appears destined to widen the political divide between the nation’s big cities and the smaller places beyond them. And that could narrow Donald Trump’s possible pathways to reelection.
In almost every state, the outbreak is spreading much more heavily in the largest metropolitan centers than in less densely populated areas, even when the figures are adjusted on a per capita basis, according to a new analysis by the economist Jed Kolko provided exclusively to The Atlantic.
That pattern threatens to exacerbate one of Trump’s most conspicuous political vulnerabilities: his historical weakness in big metropolitan areas that are full of the minority and white-collar white voters most skeptical of him. From the Virginia governor’s race in 2017, to a sweep of suburban House districts in 2018, to the upset victory in Kentucky’s gubernatorial race last year, Democrats have consistently posted significant gains in these areas under Trump. The pattern continued in the unexpected Democratic victory this week in a highly contested state-supreme-court election in Wisconsin, a state that could be the tipping point in the 2020 presidential race.
The question for Trump this fall will be whether he can offset that weakness by matching or building on his dominant advantage in exurban, small-town, and rural communities. In Wisconsin this week, the GOP lost ground with those voters too, but by and large, polling still shows Trump holding a strong position among them. And because most rural communities are facing fewer cases of the disease so far, they may be much more receptive than big-city leaders and voters to Trump’s calls to reopen the economy as quickly as possible.
These political, public-health, and economic trends all point toward the same possibility: Just as the disease is unfolding very differently in larger and smaller places, the gap between voter preferences there in the presidential race could reach astronomical, and possibly unprecedented, heights.
Epidemiologists and other medical experts disagree on whether the disease will ultimately besiege smaller places to a greater extent than it has so far. But there’s no question that it’s exacted its heaviest costs on major cities and their inner suburbs, including New York City, Detroit, Chicago, Boston, New Orleans, Los Angeles, and Seattle. “Densely populated urban areas are uniquely vulnerable to rapid spread of the virus,” said Larry Levitt, the executive vice president for health policy at the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation.
The research conducted at The Atlantic’s request by Kolko, the chief economist at the employment website Indeed, quantifies that dynamic. Using a comprehensive county database maintained by The New York Times, Kolko calculated the number of coronavirus cases per million people within four different regional categories: those in large metropolitan areas of at least 1 million people; those in metros of 250,000 to 1 million; those in small metros with less than 250,000; and those in counties outside of metro areas. The consistent result was that, in most states, heavily populated areas are suffering many more cases per person.
Perhaps the most extreme example: The counties in New York State that fall under the largest metro category—New York City and its environs—have 12,454 cases per million residents. That’s compared with 3,304 in New York’s midsize metros, 1,556 in the smaller metros, and 915 in the nonmetro counties. In Michigan, where the Detroit area has been ravaged by the disease, the caseload drops from 4,787 per million residents in the largest counties to 1,000 per million in the midsize metros, 874 in the smaller metros, and just 346 in the nonmetro counties.
Read: The two states where Trump’s COVID-19 response could backfire in 2020
Similar patterns apply across a wide range of states. In Illinois, where the coronavirus has battered Chicago and its closest suburbs, the largest metro counties are experiencing seven times as many cases per person as the midsize metros, and more than eight times as many as the nonmetro counties. In California, where both the San Francisco and Los Angeles areas have been hit hard, the largest metropolitan counties have more than three times as many cases per capita as the small metro and nonmetro communities. A similar pattern is also evident in Ohio, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania across the Rust Belt and North Carolina, Florida, and Texas across the Sun Belt, Kolko’s data show.
The few exceptions were states that have suffered large outbreaks in rural areas, such as Georgia (where the caseload in small places is as heavy as in the big cities) and Arizona (where the caseload in nonmetro counties has exceeded that of the biggest places).
The strains on public-health systems have followed these same tracks. Although the big metro areas typically have much greater hospital capacity than smaller places, they are also facing much greater pressure. Hospital systems in cities such as New York City and Detroit have faced widespread infection among health workers, as well as severe equipment shortages.
Large hospitals have reported a far greater surge in demand for medical equipment than smaller hospitals, according to new research from Premier Inc., a company that manages bulk purchasing for hospitals. In the survey, conducted in mid-March before the worst of the outbreak hit, large hospitals reported that they were using 17 times as many N95 masks as usual, Soumi Saha, the company’s senior director of advocacy, told me. Smaller hospitals were using about seven times as many. “The surge in demand that we are seeing currently is truly unprecedented,” Saha said.
These contrasting experiences help explain the divergence in attitudes toward Trump’s handling of the crisis. In a national Quinnipiac University survey released last week, just 37 percent of adults living in cities and 44 percent of those in suburbs said they approved of Trump’s management of the outbreak. By stark contrast, 63 percent of those in rural areas said they approved. In the latest tracking polling conducted by the Democratic firms GBAO and the Global Strategy Group, a majority of Americans in all three regions said Trump failed to take the threat seriously enough at the outset of the pandemic. But the numbers were significantly higher in urban and suburban areas, where almost two-thirds of respondents said he acted too slowly.
Other danger signs are sprouting for Trump in big urban centers. Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix, was the largest county in America that Trump won in 2016. But a new poll, released this week by the Republican firm OH Predictive Insights, found Trump trailing former Vice President Joe Biden there by 13 percentage points. The survey also found Biden leading by nine points statewide, even though Democrats haven’t won Arizona in a presidential race since 1996. These results track with Maricopa’s movement away from the GOP in 2018, when Democratic Senator Kyrsten Sinema won the ordinarily Republican-leaning county by about four points.
The results in Wisconsin this week offered an even more visceral measure of Trump’s continuing risk in major population centers. In the state’s supreme-court election—whose timing was extremely controversial, given the pandemic—the liberal Jill Karofsky decisively ousted the conservative incumbent Daniel Kelly.
Karofsky showed formidable strength across the state’s population centers, even though they are confronting the most serious outbreaks of the disease. Although the number of polling places in Milwaukee was limited to just five, Karofsky amassed a 70,000-vote advantage in that county. She also carried Dane County, which includes the state capital of Madison, by a crushing 62-percentage-point margin. That’s far larger than Hillary Clinton’s advantage there in 2016 (48 points) or the Democrat Tony Evers’s lead in the 2018 governor’s race (51 points).
“Dane County is the fastest-growing county in the state: massive electronic-medical-records [industry], plus biotech—and that’s not even counting the big insurance-industry component, the University of Wisconsin, and state government,” said Charles Franklin, a law and public-policy professor at Marquette University’s law school and the director of its respected public poll. “Not only does [the county] grow, but its turnout rate goes up year after year, and it’s even more Democratic from race to race to race.”
Karofsky also posted notable gains in two sets of suburban counties that are closely watched during election season. The so-called WOW counties outside of Milwaukee—Waukesha, Ozaukee, and Washington—are perhaps the most Republican-leaning major suburban counties north of the Mason-Dixon line. But, as Franklin noted, Trump won them in 2016 by less than Mitt Romney did in 2012. More recently, former Republican Governor Scott Walker carried them by a smaller margin in his losing 2018 campaign than he did in his winning 2014 race.
This week, Karofsky significantly reduced the GOP’s margin in all three counties—not only compared with Trump’s wins, but also compared with another state-supreme-court election last year. “In the WOW counties, I believe there is something systematically happening,” Franklin said. “Though it has not converted them from red to blue, it has converted them from deep red to less red.”
Just as strikingly, Karofsky won all three of the so-called BOW counties around Green Bay—Brown, Outagamie, and Winnebago—which Trump had carried comfortably in 2016, and Walker more narrowly in 2018.
Republicans, with justification, argue that the results may be skewed because the election took place on the same day as the Democratic presidential primary, which may have tilted the turnout more toward Democratic voters.
But these results are consistent with one of the most powerful political through lines of the Trump era: a recoil from his vision of the Republican Party among urban and suburban voters. In 2016, Trump lost 87 of the 100 largest U.S. counties, by a combined nearly 15 million votes. That was significantly larger than Romney’s 11.6-million-vote deficit in the 100 largest counties. In 2018, Republicans were routed in suburban House districts not only in metropolitan areas that were already trending toward the Democrats—including New Jersey and Northern Virginia and Chicago, Detroit, and Denver—but also in places where the GOP had previously remained strong, such as Richmond, Atlanta, Houston, Dallas, and Orange County, California.
Read: Big cities won’t snap back to normal
Geoff Garin, the veteran Democratic pollster, said that since 2018, Trump has not offered any concessions in policy or style to the moderate, white-collar suburban voters who stampeded away from the party.
“I haven’t seen anything to suggest that what happened to Trump and Republicans in the suburbs in 2018 has abated, and it’s hard to think of anything they’ve done or even tried to do that would make their situation any better in the suburbs than it was,” Garin said. If anything, Trump’s volatile behavior during the coronavirus outbreak has highlighted the concerns that many white-collar voters express about his temperament, Garin said: “that he doesn’t tell the truth, [that] he refuses to listen to experts, that his whole leadership style is erratic and chaotic when the country needs stable and steady leadership.”
In a measure of that vulnerability, national polls released last week by Monmouth University and CNN both found that fewer than 40 percent of college-educated white voters said they approved of Trump’s response to the outbreak; the OH poll found Biden leading Trump by 14 percentage points among the same voters in Arizona, another stunning margin.
To varying degrees, Republicans in the Trump era have been able to make up for their suburban decline with commanding margins among exurban, rural, and small-town voters, who are more likely to be blue-collar, white, and Christian. Despite his deficit in the 100 largest counties, Trump won more than 2,600 counties overall in 2016, more than any nominee of either party since Ronald Reagan in 1984.
But since then, there have been hints that Trump might struggle to replicate these results. In the 2018 House races, the share of the total vote won by Democrats increased by roughly the same amount in rural and more urban places compared with 2016, according to calculations by Bill Bishop, a reporter for The Daily Yonder website, which tracks rural issues. Andy Beshear, the Kentucky Democrat, notched some rural gains in his winning governor’s race last year, and Karofsky this week notably improved on recent Democratic showings in the rural northwest corner of Wisconsin.
Still, even with those gains, it’s not all good news for Democrats. The party won less than 40 percent of the total 2018 House vote in the most rural counties, according to The Daily Yonder’s classification system. Big rural margins also helped Republicans oust Democratic senators in Missouri, North Dakota, and Indiana that year. Karofsky still lost most of the counties in Wisconsin’s northwest. And the debate over how quickly to reopen the economy could align Trump with many rural communities against most Democrats and public-health experts.
Many big-city mayors are dubious that it will be safe anytime soon to reopen their economies on a mass scale, and they’ve warned that economic recovery could come slowly. “There may also be bigger challenges getting people back to work in urban areas,” Levitt, of the Kaiser Family Foundation, said. “People in cities rely much more heavily on public transportation, and they work and shop in much closer quarters.”
“The piecemeal fashion that we entered into these ‘stay at home’ orders could prove disastrous if we take a similar approach to exiting these orders,” Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson texted me on Thursday. “A more coordinated approach to relaxing and ultimately ending these harsh restrictions—whether it is national, statewide or regional—is our best insurance against the virus raging back and making all of our sacrifices for naught.”
A divergence in the economic recovery of urban and nonurban areas—coming after a comparable split in their experience with the disease itself—could put Trump in a difficult position. It could force him to generate even bigger margins in small communities to offset a potentially weaker performance than last time in the largest ones. In all these ways, the virus’s effect on America is coursing through the channels already cut by its existing geographic and political differences. It should surprise no one if a current this powerful and destabilizing only deepens that divide.