theatlantic--2020-03-02--Buttigieg and Klobuchar Are Out. What Now?

Read : Barack Obama and the end of Pete Buttigieg ’ s campaign Whether Sanders or Biden can fill that space among college-educated white voters could prove a crucial factor in a potential one-on-one contest .
“ This is the demographic that likely determines if Biden or Bernie wins , ” the Democratic pollster Andrew Baumann , who is not affiliated with any campaign , told me last night .
“ My money is on Biden.
” Buttigieg ’ s departure in particular is the rare event whose long-term implications may be easier to see than its near-term ones .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ fears that the moderate vote is being split among too many candidates—Buttigieg added to the well of goodwill he established during his impressive ascent .
After his remarkably sure-footed performance as a candidate , his future as a presidential contender—and likely a Cabinet officer if Democrats win in 2020—seems assured .
Yet his departure ’ s significance for this primary may be less predictable .
The immediate reaction of many Democrats was that most of his voters would flow toward Biden .
That wasn ’ t an unreasonable conclusion : Buttigieg has generally @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , and his speech last night raised alarms about the direction Sanders would set for the party .
But others are cautious about assuming that most of Buttigieg ’ s remaining backers will switch to Biden , whose nostalgia for the clubby Washington , D.C. , of old drew regular scorn from the former mayor of South Bend , Indiana .
( That might change if Buttigieg endorses Biden , as he ’ s reportedly considering doing . )
“ As always , it ’ s complicated , ” the longtime Democratic strategist @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the race .
“ It ’ s not as clean as most [ people ] think .
Warren is a factor here.
” Indeed , the biggest tactical question following Buttigieg ’ s departure is whether his supporters re-sort more along ideological or class lines .
At his events in Iowa and New Hampshire , I found more voters considering Warren—another brainy , policy-focused candidate—than either Biden or Sanders .
( The same was true of Buttigieg at Warren events . )
The link seemed less about ideology than about demonstrable fluency and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ drawn to Klobuchar , who centered her appeal on her grounded midwestern common sense , may find the transition to Biden an easier one .
Another reason : In Iowa and New Hampshire , the states where Klobuchar ran best , her support tilted more heavily toward moderate voters than Buttigieg ’ s did .
So far , neither Sanders nor Biden has proved himself particularly well-suited—especially in stylistic terms—for the white-collar white voters common at events for Buttigieg , Warren , and Klobuchar .
Sanders ’ s best showing among white voters @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in Nevada , with 24 percent , according to the entrance poll ; in the other states that have voted , he hasn ’ t exceeded 21 percent of their vote .
Biden posted a very strong 39 percent among college-educated white voters in South Carolina , but before that his numbers had reached only 15 percent in Nevada , 16 percent in Iowa , and a bruising 6 percent in New Hampshire , according to the Election Day polls .

The college-educated white voters both candidates attracted are up for grabs. Whether Biden or Sanders wins them over could prove crucial to the race.
Updated at 2:37 p.m. ET on March 2, 2020.
The sudden withdrawals of Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar from the Democratic presidential field sharpen one of the race’s most important remaining questions: How will college-educated white voters split if the contest narrows into a binary choice between Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden?
One of the most surprising trends of the primary’s early stages is that even as the Democratic Party grows more dependent on white-collar suburban white voters, the candidates those voters most favor have failed to gain traction. Buttigieg finished first among college-educated white voters in Iowa, second in New Hampshire and Nevada, and third in South Carolina. Elizabeth Warren and Klobuchar, who quit the race today with plans to endorse Biden, have also run well with this cohort.
With Biden reaffirming his advantage among African Americans in South Carolina on Saturday and Sanders running well among Latinos and working-class white voters, college-educated white voters may be the piece of the Democratic coalition that remains the most fragmented. The departures of Buttigieg and Klobuchar, the fading prospects of Warren, and the possibility that Michael Bloomberg’s campaign could look much less viable after Super Tuesday are combining to create a huge vacuum.
Read: Barack Obama and the end of Pete Buttigieg’s campaign
Whether Sanders or Biden can fill that space among college-educated white voters could prove a crucial factor in a potential one-on-one contest. “This is the demographic that likely determines if Biden or Bernie wins,” the Democratic pollster Andrew Baumann, who is not affiliated with any campaign, told me last night. “My money is on Biden.”
Buttigieg’s departure in particular is the rare event whose long-term implications may be easier to see than its near-term ones. By leaving when he did—amid some Democratic fears that the moderate vote is being split among too many candidates—Buttigieg added to the well of goodwill he established during his impressive ascent. After his remarkably sure-footed performance as a candidate, his future as a presidential contender—and likely a Cabinet officer if Democrats win in 2020—seems assured.
Yet his departure’s significance for this primary may be less predictable. The immediate reaction of many Democrats was that most of his voters would flow toward Biden. That wasn’t an unreasonable conclusion: Buttigieg has generally drawn more support from moderates than liberals, and his speech last night raised alarms about the direction Sanders would set for the party.
But others are cautious about assuming that most of Buttigieg’s remaining backers will switch to Biden, whose nostalgia for the clubby Washington, D.C., of old drew regular scorn from the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana. (That might change if Buttigieg endorses Biden, as he’s reportedly considering doing.) “As always, it’s complicated,” the longtime Democratic strategist James Carville told me after Buttigieg quit the race. “It’s not as clean as most [people] think. Warren is a factor here.”
Indeed, the biggest tactical question following Buttigieg’s departure is whether his supporters re-sort more along ideological or class lines. At his events in Iowa and New Hampshire, I found more voters considering Warren—another brainy, policy-focused candidate—than either Biden or Sanders. (The same was true of Buttigieg at Warren events.) The link seemed less about ideology than about demonstrable fluency and expertise. By contrast, white-collar voters drawn to Klobuchar, who centered her appeal on her grounded midwestern common sense, may find the transition to Biden an easier one. Another reason: In Iowa and New Hampshire, the states where Klobuchar ran best, her support tilted more heavily toward moderate voters than Buttigieg’s did.
So far, neither Sanders nor Biden has proved himself particularly well-suited—especially in stylistic terms—for the white-collar white voters common at events for Buttigieg, Warren, and Klobuchar. Sanders’s best showing among white voters with at least a college degree was in Nevada, with 24 percent, according to the entrance poll; in the other states that have voted, he hasn’t exceeded 21 percent of their vote. Biden posted a very strong 39 percent among college-educated white voters in South Carolina, but before that his numbers had reached only 15 percent in Nevada, 16 percent in Iowa, and a bruising 6 percent in New Hampshire, according to the Election Day polls.
Instead, college-educated white voters have gravitated toward three lagging candidates. In Iowa, they gave a combined 61 percent of their vote to Buttigieg, Warren, and Klobuchar. In New Hampshire, it was 64 percent. Even in Nevada they provided a 52 percent majority of their vote to the three. That number declined in South Carolina, as those contenders looked less viable over time. But even there they captured one-third of the vote among college-educated white voters.
Looking forward to Super Tuesday, the latest CNN survey shows the trio drawing 43 percent of college-educated white voters in California, which is as much as Sanders, Biden, and Bloomberg combined. NBC/Marist polls released yesterday show Buttigieg, Warren, and Klobuchar at 45 percent among them in Texas (nearly as much as Sanders, Biden, and Bloomberg) and 38 percent in North Carolina (where the other three did combine for a majority). Among white voters without a college degree, Buttigieg, Warren, and Klobuchar took only about one-fifth of the vote in both the Texas and North Carolina polls.
Read: The two things that sank Buttigieg’s candidacy
The trio have faced common problems in the race. All have struggled to establish a beachhead with minority voters. While Buttigieg ran about as well among white voters without a college degree as among those with one, both Klobuchar and Warren have struggled to reach beyond their “wine track” base. While Warren still has a formidable fundraising and organizational base, she hasn’t finished anywhere near first in any of the four contests so far.
The result: A huge bloc of college-educated white voters is now parked with two candidates who just left the race and a third who, at this point, has a vanishingly small chance of actually becoming the nominee.
These voters aren’t guaranteed to become the tipping point in a Sanders-Biden race. They aren’t distributed as evenly across the upcoming states as white voters without a college degree are, so they may not shape the result in as many places. And there’s no assurance that they will coalesce behind one candidate. But there’s no question that there is enough of them to make a difference if they do.
In 2016, white voters with a college degree cast more than one-third of the votes in the Democratic primary, according to a cumulative CNN analysis of all the exit polls conducted that year. It’s highly possible that number will increase this year, as more white-collar white suburbanites, whose recoil from Donald Trump helped Democrats take control of the House in 2018, participate in the nominating process. Compared with the 2016 primaries, the share of the vote cast by college-educated white voters has increased in each of the Democratic contests this year except New Hampshire.
Yet so far, this growing group has drifted away from the chief currents of the competition, settling into the backwaters. Buttigieg’s withdrawal especially may offer these voters their first real chance to steer back into the mainstream of the 2020 race—and more directly influence its outcome.


theatlantic--2020-03-02--The Sanders and Biden Families Have Been Cashing In for Years

In 2004 , Burlington College hired Jane as its president .
While she was in that role , the college entered into a $ 500,000 contract for student activities with Vermont Woodworking School , which was run by Jane ’ s daughter Carina Driscoll .
The contract ended shortly after Jane left the college , in 2011 .
The college shut down the next year , drowned in financial troubles resulting from a multimillion-dollar loan that Jane had obtained to purchase land for its new campus .
The FBI later investigated the deal for alleged fraud , but no charges @ @ @ @ @ @ @ $ 200,000 severance package that Sanders ’ s Senate financial disclosure describes as having been for a “ sabbatical.
” Jeff Weaver , a top adviser to Sanders , has previously told the press that Jane did nothing wrong .
Jane , through the campaign , declined to comment .
By 2000 , Carina , then serving one term as a Vermont state representative , was also working for Sanders .
During the time she was in office , from 2000 to 2004 , Sanders ’ s congressional reelection campaigns paid her $ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the payments were irregular—she would sometimes get multiple payments on a single day , and then not get paid for a month or more .
( In 2018 , Carina ran unsuccessfully for mayor of Burlington with the backing of Our Revolution , the progressive group that Sanders started after the 2016 election , although he is not formally associated with it . )
Carina , through Sanders ’ s presidential campaign , declined to comment .
Starting in the late ’ 90s , Jane was an alternative commissioner on the Texas Low @ @ @ @ @ @ @ position on a commision that had been created after Sanders led efforts to dump nuclear waste in a small border town named Sierra Blanca .
Jane , who didn ’ t have experience with nuclear-waste or land issues , was paid roughly $ 5,000 annually .
Not listed on Sanders ’ s financial disclosures , the payments first came to light when he released several years of their joint federal tax returns in 2016 .
Sanders ’ s state tax returns might have more information—but so far , he hasn ’ t released @ @ @ @ @ @ @ spring and released federal returns that he ’ d been withholding .
Sanders has also benefited from his campaign account over the years , spending $ 8,000 in the late ’ 90s , and then $ 445,000 in 2015 , on purchases of his own book .
In his 2016 Senate personal financial disclosure , Sanders said he received only $ 6,700 in royalties from the 2015 purchase .
Other politicians do this—but when , for example , the Republican National Committee bought Donald Trump Jr. ’ s book in bulk last year @ @ @ @ @ @ @ profit off money raised in his name , with his own authority to spend it .
The personal and professional converged once again after Sanders ’ s first presidential campaign ended .
In 2017 , Jane started the Sanders Institute , envisioned as part think tank , part advocacy group .
She tapped her son David Driscoll , who had worked as an executive at two private companies , as executive director , and he was approved by the board .
He hadn ’ t worked for a nonprofit before , but was @ @ @ @ @ @ @ The institute raised about $ 1.2 million , according to tax returns and public statements it released .
But neither its full donor list nor the number of donations it received is public .
Bernie and Jane Sanders said that they made a $ 25,000 initial donation , and Our Revolution gave a $ 105,000 loan .
The organization shut down after Sanders began his second race for president ; most of its paperwork remains undisclosed .
The most significant thing the institute did was host a December 2018 gathering for top supporters @ @ @ @ @ @ @ an informal kickoff to his anticipated campaign .

Donald Trump has set a new bar for presidential self-dealing. But two of the Democratic front-runners have their own, lower-level history of mixing family and politics.
Since the 1970s, Senator Bernie Sanders, who has spent his entire career railing against the political establishment, and Joe Biden, who likes to point out that he was for years the poorest member of the Senate, have repeatedly directed campaign dollars to close relatives. As mayor of Burlington, Vermont, Sanders even directed taxpayer money to his wife. Some of these practices were touched on in reporting at the time, but the full picture has acquired new importance in the context of the campaign against Trump, whose golf outings alone have sent millions of taxpayer dollars to his family-owned firm.
Just about every person who’s ever run for office has had a brother knocking on doors, an aunt licking envelopes, or a spouse and kids featured in a campaign commercial. But that’s usually volunteer work. Sanders put his wife on the Burlington city payroll and made a company of hers, Progressive Media Strategies, a top recipient of campaign cash. His congressional reelection campaigns paid one of his stepdaughters more than $50,000 over four years; a nonprofit his wife started, the Sanders Institute, paid her son, David Driscoll, a $100,000 salary. Biden has a sister and son whose companies received large contracts from his last presidential campaign; about one-fifth of the $11.1 million raised by that campaign went to companies that employed close relatives.
It is perfectly legal to pay family members with campaign funds or put them on the payroll as long as they provide a bona fide service and their salary is fair. Dozens of members of Congress, from both sides of the aisle, have employed family members on their campaigns. Political families, and the money they distribute to their members, have existed as long as politics has. Approximately 40 of President Ulysses S. Grant’s family members and family connections benefited from his presidency. Both Franklin D. Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower had sons working in their White House. John F. Kennedy appointed his brother Robert as attorney general, which led Congress to pass anti-nepotism laws banning close relatives of the president from working in the executive branch. Then there’s Trump.
Yet the ethics of the practice are clear: “It is unsavory for politicians to be making payments to their family members when there are other alternatives out there,” Robert Maguire, the research director for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a nonpartisan good-government group, told me.
Neither Michelle Obama nor Hillary Clinton were paid by their husbands’ campaigns or the federal government. Maya Harris advised her sister, Kamala, during her presidential campaign, but was unpaid. Other candidates in the 2020 race regularly leaned on family members to appear with them or on their behalf on the campaign trail. Pete Buttigieg and Elizabeth Warren never had family members on their payroll. Amy Klobuchar’s campaign has reimbursed her husband for $1,058.22 in expenses. One of Mike Bloomberg’s daughters worked for him early in his time as mayor, but she was unpaid. Tom Steyer had never run for office before this year.
Neither the Bidens nor the Sanderses have gone as far as Trump. The president’s trade negotiations with China run parallel to Ivanka Trump’s company trademarks being approved in Beijing; he pursues diplomacy with Indian, Russian, and Turkish leaders even as his sons pursue government approval for Trump Organization projects in those countries. The amount of taxpayer money that the president has spent on visits to his golf resorts alone—$115 million as of last Thanksgiving—is exponentially greater than even the broadest estimate of what the past 50 years of government service have generated for the Sanders and Biden families combined.
That hasn’t stopped Trump from looking for openings, trying to pretend that everyone else acts as he does. Trump tried to get Ukraine to investigate the Burisma gas company (and got impeached for it), because he wanted to give the false impression that Biden had improperly intervened in Ukraine to benefit his son Hunter’s business interests. If anything, the affair demonstrated how oddly oblivious Biden has been to money being made off his name by his family.
The Biden and Sanders practices, even when “juxtaposed with the outright profiteering of the Trump administration,” are also potential examples of nepotism, Maguire said. “It’s not a direct comparison, but it does make it more difficult for people to levy criticisms of him.”
The main instance of Sanders paying family members is the close professional ties he has had with his wife, Jane Sanders, for decades. He didn’t have much money before he was elected mayor of Burlington, in a surprise 1981 victory—it was the first full-time job he’d held in years. His first act in office was creating a youth-services department, and he immediately put in charge the woman he’d begun dating at his victory party, giving her a corner office on the third floor of city hall. At first, she worked as a volunteer youth coordinator, but later she began raising money that would then be used to pay her a salary.
Campaigning for her husband in Indianola, Iowa, ahead of the caucus at the end of January, Jane cited this as an advantage, recalling that Sanders was “frugal, very frugal with taxpayer dollars, but [he] created some new departments—including a youth department, which I headed up.”
Early in her tenure, Jane spoke of how she enjoyed the “added clout” of her post in city hall, explaining that she’d turned down a job organizing youth at a neighborhood center. But her work regularly went beyond running youth services; in her first year on the job, she sent a letter to all department heads asking that they detail their job descriptions. This went on, including serving aldermen with a lawsuit from the mayor and admonishing the full board of aldermen for not being more receptive to a visiting official from Northern Ireland speaking about human-rights conditions. (She told the Burlington Free Press that she’d almost not said anything, because of her “personal relationship” with the mayor, but decided to anyway.) The youth-services department she ran put out a newsletter that promoted the mayor’s record to voters.
Jane and Sanders were living together while he was approving her paychecks. After paying her $4,900 in 1982 (about $13,000 today), the mayor put her on what became a $21,000 annual salary (about $54,000 today) as part of a formal seven-person expansion of the city’s staff. Her position “was not advertised and no applicants were considered aside from [her], according to Sanders,” the Burlington Free Press reported in 1985.
“For a man who once proclaimed himself an enemy of patronage, Mayor Bernard Sanders has done a remarkable turnaround on the issue in a relatively short time,” the Free Press complained in a 1983 editorial. That same year, Sanders responded. “I’m tired of hearing innuendo, especially regarding Jane,” he said. “If she is not competent to do the job, I want to hear someone say it. Cronyism is hiring people for specific jobs because they are friends and not because they are qualified. If someone can explain to me that Jane is not qualified for the job, I’ll listen to them.”
But that’s the way the arrangement looked to at least one city alderman at the time, despite Jane’s salary eventually being approved by the board. “Now she is a girlfriend,” Paul Lafayette told the Free Press. “But how much closer can you get? I’m not saying she’s not qualified. But the mayor’s no different than any other guy. He’s putting people around him that he’s comfortable with. If that’s not cronyism, what is?”
With the distance of some years, Lafayette has relaxed about the situation. He liked the work Jane did. “Bernie creates a lot of action,” he told me Wednesday, “and Jane was one of those people who created stuff on her own.”
A story in the Burlington Free Press from 1981 describes Bernie Sanders’s relationship with Jane, his girlfriend at the time (Burlington Free Press)
After Sanders and Jane married, in 1988, he sought a legal opinion about whether employing her had qualified as nepotism. The city attorney told the couple that she was “not barred from continuing to serve in her position,” according to a copy of the letter, which is part of Sanders’s mayoral archives. Jane’s $21,000 salary was high enough that a constituent wrote to him—in another letter that’s in Sanders’s mayoral file—to say she was “surprised to see that she was paid as well as she was,” and that “it’s terrific to see numbers like that in print pertaining to a woman in city hall holding down an important and responsible job.”
Maguire, the CREW research director, was skeptical.
“There is what is legally sound, and there is the question of whether you’re giving the appearance of nepotism,” he said. “It’s one thing to say, ‘Look, we got this cleared.’ And maybe they really did scrutinize it and it was fine. But just the mere fact of making the decision that results in funds and payments to someone in your household is problematic. A person who wants to make sure they’re on the right side of the ethical line should say, ‘I should recuse from this decision; someone else should make this decision.’” He added, “It seems like waiting eight years to realize this is problematic is itself problematic.”
After Sanders won Vermont’s sole House seat, in 1990, Jane began working as an unpaid chief of staff for his congressional office. She left that office in 1996 to become the provost at Goddard College. But she stayed involved in her husband’s political life, and took home at least $30,000 in fees as a media buyer for his campaigns, paid for out of money he’d raised, though she had no prior experience in media buying. Two companies she’d registered, Progressive Media Strategies and Leadership Strategies, received more than $91,000 from Sanders’s 2002 and 2004 congressional campaigns. Neither company ever worked for any other federal candidate, but the Sanders campaign says she was working for other candidates in Vermont. “Dr. Sanders worked for four other campaigns during this time period and felt that it wasn’t right to charge the other candidates a fee and not charge then-Congressman Sanders,” Mike Casca, a campaign spokesman, says.
[Read: What killed Burlington College?]
In 2004, Burlington College hired Jane as its president. While she was in that role, the college entered into a $500,000 contract for student activities with Vermont Woodworking School, which was run by Jane’s daughter Carina Driscoll. The contract ended shortly after Jane left the college, in 2011. The college shut down the next year, drowned in financial troubles resulting from a multimillion-dollar loan that Jane had obtained to purchase land for its new campus. The FBI later investigated the deal for alleged fraud, but no charges were ever brought. Jane received a $200,000 severance package that Sanders’s Senate financial disclosure describes as having been for a “sabbatical.” Jeff Weaver, a top adviser to Sanders, has previously told the press that Jane did nothing wrong. Jane, through the campaign, declined to comment.
By 2000, Carina, then serving one term as a Vermont state representative, was also working for Sanders. During the time she was in office, from 2000 to 2004, Sanders’s congressional reelection campaigns paid her $51,032 in salary and expenses, though the payments were irregular—she would sometimes get multiple payments on a single day, and then not get paid for a month or more. (In 2018, Carina ran unsuccessfully for mayor of Burlington with the backing of Our Revolution, the progressive group that Sanders started after the 2016 election, although he is not formally associated with it.) Carina, through Sanders’s presidential campaign, declined to comment.
Starting in the late ’90s, Jane was an alternative commissioner on the Texas Low Level Radioactive Waste Disposal Compact Commission—a gubernatorial-appointed position on a commision that had been created after Sanders led efforts to dump nuclear waste in a small border town named Sierra Blanca. Jane, who didn’t have experience with nuclear-waste or land issues, was paid roughly $5,000 annually. Not listed on Sanders’s financial disclosures, the payments first came to light when he released several years of their joint federal tax returns in 2016. Sanders’s state tax returns might have more information—but so far, he hasn’t released them, even though he relented last spring and released federal returns that he’d been withholding.
Sanders has also benefited from his campaign account over the years, spending $8,000 in the late ’90s, and then $445,000 in 2015, on purchases of his own book. In his 2016 Senate personal financial disclosure, Sanders said he received only $6,700 in royalties from the 2015 purchase. Other politicians do this—but when, for example, the Republican National Committee bought Donald Trump Jr.’s book in bulk last year, the author didn’t also profit off money raised in his name, with his own authority to spend it.
The personal and professional converged once again after Sanders’s first presidential campaign ended. In 2017, Jane started the Sanders Institute, envisioned as part think tank, part advocacy group. She tapped her son David Driscoll, who had worked as an executive at two private companies, as executive director, and he was approved by the board. He hadn’t worked for a nonprofit before, but was paid a salary of $100,000. The institute raised about $1.2 million, according to tax returns and public statements it released. But neither its full donor list nor the number of donations it received is public. Bernie and Jane Sanders said that they made a $25,000 initial donation, and Our Revolution gave a $105,000 loan. The organization shut down after Sanders began his second race for president; most of its paperwork remains undisclosed. The most significant thing the institute did was host a December 2018 gathering for top supporters and press in Vermont that was essentially an informal kickoff to his anticipated campaign.
Beyond saying that Jane took her fee from the Sanders campaign to be fair to her other clients, Sanders’s campaign declined comment on any of these arrangements and declined to make Jane available for an interview.
To the frustration of some of his aides, Biden has long been eager to keep his family close as advisers and supporters, seemingly unable to realize the appearance of impropriety that can arise. His family members started working for him during his first campaign, a 1970 run for New Castle County council. His sister, Valerie Biden Owens, managed that council race and his first Senate run two years later. His brother Jimmy handled fundraising for that Senate run. His other brother, Frank, was the volunteer coordinator. The Biden campaign says they worked for free, but there’s no way to check: the Federal Election Commission, which handles federal campaign-finance records, wasn’t established until 1975.
[Read: Hunter Biden’s perfectly legal, socially acceptable corruption]
Speaking about that first Senate campaign in Des Moines the day before the Iowa caucus, Valerie self-deprecatingly joked about how party leaders had been urging the upstart candidate to put better-known operatives around him. They “thought Joe needed someone who was really experienced, someone who really had a ‘strategic mind.’ And so he turned to me and said, ‘Will you do it?’”
Hunter Biden (far left), Joe Biden, and Valerie Biden Owens attend a road-naming ceremony honoring Beau Biden in Sojevo, Kosovo (Visar Kryeziu / AP)
As has been assiduously documented by Politico, Jimmy went on to a business career in which he often leveraged his last name—including for a number of real-estate and investment deals that involved Hunter Biden, Joe’s son, in which they’d reportedly talk up access to their famous relative. But Valerie stayed close, managing Biden’s subsequent Senate runs and then his 2008 presidential campaign. She also worked in the private sector along the way. In 2007, the media firm where she is an executive vice president, Joe Slade White and Company, received $1.9 million from the presidential campaign for advertising placement, fundraising help, and media strategy (much of which went into buying ads). Although White himself worked for George McGovern in 1972, most of the firm’s clients have been low-profile House races. According to Federal Election Commission records, it had only worked for one presidential campaign before Biden’s 2008 run—former General Wesley Clark’s in 2004—and hasn’t worked for one since. But White, in a statement, said that Valerie only ever received her normal salary no matter the client: “Val’s experience and skill made her an incredible asset to us. And she literally never took a commission on any campaign.”
The 2008 campaign featured other family connections. A law firm run by a onetime top aide briefly employed Hunter as a named partner, and it charged the campaign nearly $200,000 for what was described in campaign-finance reports as “legal services” and “travel expense reimbursement.” The only other campaigns that reported using the firm, which no longer exists, were a few Senate races over the years, for a few thousand dollars each. “Hunter Biden did work at that firm, but he did not work on nor receive money from this account,” a current Biden campaign official told me.
Referring to his family, Biden was quoted in a 2007 news story as saying, “We like to campaign, and I think people know we like being with them.” What this preference meant in practice was that about a fifth of the $11.1 million raised by Biden’s last presidential campaign went to his family members or companies that employed them. Unlike Sanders, however, Biden did not receive any of that money himself, and the money came exclusively from campaign contributions rather than taxpayer dollars.
Valerie’s daughter, Missy Owens, was also paid by Biden’s 2008 presidential campaign, and ran Biden’s Senate campaign after he dropped out of the presidential race. Once he became vice president, Missy went to work in the Obama administration—first for the Energy Department, and later for the Commerce Department. She wasn’t the first Biden to work at Commerce: so had Hunter, during the Clinton administration, when his father was already a powerful senator. In 2006, his tenure at Commerce, along with his father’s famous history of commuting to Washington, D.C., by train, was cited in his nomination by George W. Bush to Amtrak’s board. According to an Amtrak report prepared the following year, board members received approximately $100,000 annually in compensation and expenses. During the years that his father was vice president, Hunter pursued a variety of lobbying and business opportunities—including, as is now well known, a position at a Ukrainian gas company that would ultimately catch Trump’s attention.
Beyond clarifying that Hunter wasn’t paid for the work his firm did for the Biden campaign in 2007, his campaign declined comment on any of these arrangements.
Today, Jane Sanders remains her husband’s closest adviser, and he jokes about how she’s starting to draw big crowds on her own campaign stops, but neither she nor Progressive Media Strategies is being paid by the campaign. This is the first Biden campaign that Valerie Biden Owens isn’t managing; and although her company didn’t secure any contracts for this race, she remains an essential adviser on and off the road. None of Sanders’s or Biden’s children are being paid, though the candidates’ children and grandchildren often join the candidates on the campaign trail.
Trump likes to bring his children along to rallies too. But then they go back to their day jobs: Ivanka Trump as an (unpaid) senior adviser in the West Wing, and Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump as heads of the family company that owns the hotels, golf courses, and resorts that rake in taxpayer dollars every time the president visits.


The Bloomberg Whisperer

Then came Bloomberg ’ s first debate .
And his second debate .
And a stall in state polls and the crashing reality that , in person , Bloomberg ’ s persona can run the gamut from quirky and awkward to peevish and tone-deaf , in ways that not even his $ 60 billion fortune may be able to fix .
If Bloomberg ’ s limitless money has made his entire campaign possible , it ’ s the former mayor ’ s painful lack of political mojo that might well doom it .
So Sheekey , a puckish blend of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ was working for the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York ) and tech-savvy strategist , is facing the challenge of his career : making the idiosyncratic , imperious Democrat turned Republican turned Democrat again into the nominee of a Democratic Party whose liberal base scorns him as an avatar of rich , white , male privilege .
I ’ ve known Sheekey for more than 25 years , since he was the deputy campaign manager of Moynihan ’ s last race , in 1994 , which I covered for The New @ @ @ @ @ @ @ with him the other day to ask how the Master Plan is going .
His first answer was a long , slow chuckle .
“ Well , so far it ’ s exceeding expectations , ” he told me .
“ You know , obviously no one gave us much hope at the beginning .
Now we ’ re running that test as we speak.
” But he soon dismissed my suggestion that Bloomberg is far out of step with the segment of Democratic voters that has made Bernie Sanders the front-runner .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ Party cares about ” —including climate change and gun control , Sheekey said— “ Mike is head and shoulders above not only everyone else in the race , but quite frankly anyone else who has led on these issues .
“ So when you sort of cut through it , ” Sheekey added , “ in terms of who Mike Bloomberg is ” beyond his business success , “ the truth is , he ’ s a three-term mayor of the largest and most progressive city in the country.
” It was vintage @ @ @ @ @ @ @ test as we speak , acknowledging with a blarney-coated candor the obvious obstacles but pressing ahead nonetheless .
His default mode is a blithe upbeatness , but with a wink that suggests he ’ s in on the joke .
Another case in point : Sheekey ’ s gloss on Bloomberg ’ s much-criticized performance in his first debate two weeks ago , when the candidate often seemed frozen by his rivals ’ sharp attacks on his stop-and-frisk policing policies and on his and his company ’ s use of nondisclosure agreements following @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ It took him just 45 minutes in his first debate in 10 years to get his legs on the stage , ” Sheekey said .
( One former colleague told me that Sheekey should have said sea legs , since referring to plain old legs seemed all too apt . )
“ You ’ ll never see him acknowledge or be disrupted by any kind of short-term barrier , ” says Mitchell Moss , an urban-policy professor at New York University who worked with Sheekey on Bloomberg ’ s first mayoral campaign @ @ @ @ @ @ @ well .
“ If there ’ s pain , he isn ’ t going to show it .
He ’ s going to minimize whatever happened and find a way around it .
”

Kevin Sheekey has been planning the former mayor’s campaign for years. But it’s not quite going as planned.
Michael Bloomberg has been running for president for barely three months. But his campaign manager, Kevin Sheekey, has been running for president for him for the better part of 15 years.
After Bloomberg won reelection as New York City’s mayor in 2005, a group of his senior aides went out to dinner to celebrate; “Kevin just started talking about the next campaign, and it was a presidential campaign,” Bill Cunningham, one of those present, told me. Three years later, Bloomberg himself seriously considered a presidential race, but when a reporter asked him about that flirtation after he decided to seek a third term as mayor instead, his answer was a sly deflection. “Kevin ran for president,” a smiling Bloomberg insisted, as Sheekey looked on with the barest hint of a smirk in the ceremonial Blue Room of city hall. “I didn’t run for president.”
Now Bloomberg is running for the White House in earnest, pushing the limits of what Sheekey himself once wryly called the “Sheekey Master Plan” for a Bloomberg presidency. Perhaps even more, Bloomberg is pushing the limits of what even the most talented staffer can do with a principal who is anything but a natural star.
The verdict is mixed. The campaign’s start burnished Sheekey’s reputation as one of the sharpest political minds of his generation: The unorthodox decision to skip the early-voting states gave way to a multimillion-dollar barrage of national television ads, hundreds of paid on-the-ground field workers, a ream of data analytics, a flood of digital media, and a striking rise in the polls.
Then came Bloomberg’s first debate. And his second debate. And a stall in state polls and the crashing reality that, in person, Bloomberg’s persona can run the gamut from quirky and awkward to peevish and tone-deaf, in ways that not even his $60 billion fortune may be able to fix.
If Bloomberg’s limitless money has made his entire campaign possible, it’s the former mayor’s painful lack of political mojo that might well doom it.
So Sheekey, a puckish blend of old-school Irish pol (his formative experience was working for the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York) and tech-savvy strategist, is facing the challenge of his career: making the idiosyncratic, imperious Democrat turned Republican turned Democrat again into the nominee of a Democratic Party whose liberal base scorns him as an avatar of rich, white, male privilege.
Read: Bloomberg’s beating
I’ve known Sheekey for more than 25 years, since he was the deputy campaign manager of Moynihan’s last race, in 1994, which I covered for The New York Times, and I caught up with him the other day to ask how the Master Plan is going. His first answer was a long, slow chuckle. “Well, so far it’s exceeding expectations,” he told me. “You know, obviously no one gave us much hope at the beginning. Now we’re running that test as we speak.”
But he soon dismissed my suggestion that Bloomberg is far out of step with the segment of Democratic voters that has made Bernie Sanders the front-runner. “On the issues that the Democratic Party cares about”—including climate change and gun control, Sheekey said—“Mike is head and shoulders above not only everyone else in the race, but quite frankly anyone else who has led on these issues.
“So when you sort of cut through it,” Sheekey added, “in terms of who Mike Bloomberg is” beyond his business success, “the truth is, he’s a three-term mayor of the largest and most progressive city in the country.”
It was vintage Sheekey: We’re running that test as we speak, acknowledging with a blarney-coated candor the obvious obstacles but pressing ahead nonetheless. His default mode is a blithe upbeatness, but with a wink that suggests he’s in on the joke. Another case in point: Sheekey’s gloss on Bloomberg’s much-criticized performance in his first debate two weeks ago, when the candidate often seemed frozen by his rivals’ sharp attacks on his stop-and-frisk policing policies and on his and his company’s use of nondisclosure agreements following allegations of sexism in the workplace. “It took him just 45 minutes in his first debate in 10 years to get his legs on the stage,” Sheekey said. (One former colleague told me that Sheekey should have said sea legs, since referring to plain old legs seemed all too apt.)
“You’ll never see him acknowledge or be disrupted by any kind of short-term barrier,” says Mitchell Moss, an urban-policy professor at New York University who worked with Sheekey on Bloomberg’s first mayoral campaign, in 2001, and knows him well. “If there’s pain, he isn’t going to show it. He’s going to minimize whatever happened and find a way around it.”
That skill has long kept Sheekey in Bloomberg’s inner circle. He was the sole top aide in the businesslike city hall who was allowed to go tieless (to the lasting irritation of Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, a spit-and-polish former marine). Friends and colleagues say he’s the aide who can come up with a big, splashy idea when the boss wants one, or push Bloomberg to support an idea that Bloomberg himself doesn’t yet know he likes. Sheekey’s voice is prominent in the campaign—on cable TV and social media, and in selective press interviews.
“This is a guy who could sell ice to the Eskimos—not just once, but twice,” says the longtime Bloomberg adviser Howard Wolfson. Sheekey doesn’t write the ads or take the polls, but he watches over those who do, hires the key staff, and leads a weekly strategy meeting at the campaign’s Times Square headquarters.
Sheekey’s former colleague Cunningham calls him “the greatest conjurer since Keyser Söze,” the mysterious criminal mastermind in The Usual Suspects. “I guess the easiest way to put it is, he has moves,” Cunningham added. “He has moves like Muhammad Ali and Fred Astaire combined. You think he’s going to circle to the left, and pow, you get a jab in your face and he’s moving to the right.”
The former New York Times columnist Joyce Purnick, in her biography of Bloomberg, wrote that “Sheekey can sit for an hourlong interview without answering one question directly, then deny he did any such thing and convince his questioner—momentarily at least—that he is right.”
Sheekey’s profile is such that he considered his own run for mayor of New York in 2013, having accumulated enough IOUs, phone numbers, and apparent goodwill over the past two decades to make such an ambition at least plausible. (Some of his famous friends—Bono, Joe Biden, Sheryl Sandberg, and Bryan Cranston, among others—spoofed his imagined bid in a surprise video when he turned 50, almost four years ago.) Bloomberg may have been Sheekey’s entrée into this world, but he has managed to stay. He’s the past master of the small gesture; the personal touch; the ink-on-paper, bread-and-butter note; and he was even as a 20-something, when I first met him.
Sheekey was exposed to politics early, growing up in Washington, D.C. (He met his wife, Robin Caiola, when they were students at Georgetown Day School.) His mother was a Washington lobbyist for Common Cause, the civic watchdog group, and his father helped start the federal Department of Education in the 1970s. After graduating from Washington University in St. Louis, he worked for James Scheuer, a longtime Democratic representative from Queens.
Sheekey (far right) in 2011 (Kevin Mazur / Getty)
But his crucible experience was working for Moynihan, the Senate’s long-reigning sage, who had written (it was often said) more books than most politicians had read. Sheekey started out as a scheduler, then a campaign aide, and then press secretary, before finally rising to be the senator’s chief of staff in the mid-’90s. Moynihan, an inimitable blend of public intellectual and pork-delivering politician for his New York constituents, was in many ways “the greatest teacher I ever had,” Sheekey told me. “I think he instilled a kind of passion and belief in both public service and the honesty of what it means to address issues of policy or even issues of politics … You could read every book on Hamilton and you would never learn in months … what you could learn from Pat Moynihan for a day on the trail in upstate New York.”
Bloomberg has taught him some very different lessons, Sheekey said. “The thing I’ve learned from Mike is, just think big.” If Moynihan was a punctilious academic, Bloomberg is more instinctual. If Moynihan often struggled to win political support for his grand theories for fixing daunting social problems, Bloomberg has the wherewithal to, for example, write a $50 million check to support the Sierra Club’s efforts to curb coal-fired power plants. What Moynihan’s and Bloomberg’s approaches share is a rigorous belief in the importance of data as a tool for policy action, and a willingness to sail against prevailing winds, whether by proposing seat belts for cars long before the idea was accepted (in Moynihan’s case) or banning trans fats and Big Gulps (in Bloomberg’s). Bloomberg’s unofficial credo is: “In God we trust; all others, bring data.”
“What Kevin must find attractive about Bloomberg, given his experience with Moynihan, is that there’s intellectual bearing on the subject matter,” Sheekey’s fellow Moynihan staffer Dan French, now the general counsel for Syracuse University, told me. “And that’s sometimes not a simple sell, either, because that comes across as clinical.”
Bloomberg was a businessman looking to expand his company’s profile in Washington when he hired Sheekey as its lobbyist there in 1997. (He entered a world with much higher compensation: Even 15 years ago, Sheekey made $700,000 on Bloomberg’s 2005 reelection.)
French described Sheekey as “violently loyal,” and he quickly became the brains of the nascent Bloomberg political operation, which grew to include other Moynihan veterans such as Cunningham and the pollster Doug Schoen.
Bloomberg’s first campaign for mayor enlisted a raft of experienced New York operatives, but the Sheekey touch was much in evidence even then. In the bitter Democratic primary, Bronx Borough President Fernando Ferrer, who is Latino, lost a runoff to the city’s public advocate, Mark Green, who is white. Sheekey tried to exploit that rift by mailing flyers to Latino households in the form of a mock Time cover with the headline “Freddie Ferrer Made History.” The inside copy featured glowing encomiums to Bloomberg, who was running as the Republican nominee in the general election. The result? Ferrer’s wife liked the flyer so much that she asked for copies, and Bloomberg ultimately split the Latino vote evenly with Green, a rare achievement for a Republican in an overwhelmingly Democratic city.
Once Bloomberg was in office, Sheekey “was impatient with the rules and processes of government,” one of Bloomberg’s commissioners who managed two city departments told me, on the condition of anonymity so as not to offend Sheekey. He “much, much preferred the political troubleshooting and soup-stirring role he has always played.” Helping lead Bloomberg to two more mayoral victories, Sheekey also began laying the groundwork for his larger ambitions.
When Bloomberg considered a presidential campaign in 2016, Sheekey led the extensive polling and data efforts to assess his chances as a third-party candidate—surveys that, four years later, formed the germ of the current campaign, Sheekey’s friends told me. Bloomberg’s team has since hired top experts from Barack Obama’s and Hillary Clinton’s organizations, and dispatched them all over the country.
Given the Bloomberg team’s extensive research, not much about their candidate’s political vulnerabilities should surprise them, but even they made it clear that they’d been taken aback by Bloomberg’s underperformance in his first debate. Since then, Bloomberg’s poll numbers in the delegate-rich Super Tuesday states have plateaued. He badly trails Sanders in California, which is the biggest prize of all, and also a place where he has invested more than $60 million in advertising and hoped to do well.
Read: Just how rich is Mike Bloomberg?
But looking beyond this week, Sheekey told me that the campaign is building a voter database and outreach effort that he argues will rival Donald Trump’s state-of-the-art operation. And the team is committed to deploying it in six key swing states where it has campaign offices—Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Florida, and Arizona—regardless of whether Bloomberg ultimately wins the nomination.
“Mike’s pledge to the staff there, and obviously having signed the leases, is, ‘Whether I’m the nominee or not, all of the people that we hire … are going to be there,” Sheekey said. “Because we as a party can’t wait to put those resources in place until after the convention in Milwaukee.” (The Sanders camp has said it won’t take Bloomberg’s help, and Bloomberg responded by telling the Houston Chronicle last week that he’d withdraw it in that case. But that may just be jockeying—any eventual nominee would be hard-pressed to scorn an anti-Trump effort from anyone.)
Sheekey’s best hope is that Bloomberg and Sanders will be the last two candidates standing when the July convention opens. Whether Bloomberg could actually wrest the nomination from Sanders, if the senator from Vermont has only a plurality of delegates, is a tougher question. On the stump, Bloomberg has attacked Sanders, arguing that nominating him is the best way to ensure Trump’s reelection, but so far has not invested in negative television advertising against him. Sheekey won’t reject that idea: “I don’t rule anything out in the context of the campaign.” But, he argued, “Mike really does have a larger goal and … a Plan B, in terms of how he hopes to contribute—in places figuratively, and in other places quite literally—to help remove Trump from office.”
As it has been from the very beginning, the biggest obstacle to the success of the Sheekey Master Plan is Bloomberg himself. To put it mildly, he will never be a natural campaigner, a traditional politician, or the kind of Democratic candidate with whom the party’s base can fall in love. The hope is that he can do just well enough to get in a head-to-head with Trump, whose political career has been just as implausible.
In a CNN town hall with Anderson Cooper on Wednesday, Bloomberg seemed to perform much better than he had in the two debates, mocking his own poor performance, engaging earnestly with audience questioners, and even managing to show flashes of self-deprecating charm. But he still can’t tell a joke for the life of him. A crack about hunters not needing assault weapons (“The last time I saw a deer with a flak jacket was a long time ago”) drew not so much as a snicker from the live audience in Charleston, South Carolina. I asked Sheekey whether this is a skill Bloomberg can ever learn, adding I suspected that his boss might well be funny in real life.
“He is,” Sheekey answered. “Let’s just say we’re still running that test as well.”