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Bloomberg’s debate strategy: Nuke Bernie

‘The debate…needs to be about one candidate and that’s Bernie Sanders,’ said a top aide to the former mayor.

By SALLY GOLDENBERG

Mike Bloomberg and a handful of staffers spent Monday at the so-called “happiest place on earth,” preparing for the bruising task ahead the next day.

Hunkered down at the Four Seasons hotel in Florida’s Disney World, the former New York mayor prepared for a mission to salvage his half-billion-dollar investment in the presidential race with a debate performance designed to quiet the critics and stall frontrunner Bernie Sanders’ momentum.

After a disastrous first outing — his net favorability rating dropped 20 points in the aftermath, according to Morning Consult — Bloomberg’s debate goals in the Charleston, S.C., debate are twofold: Persuade viewers that Sanders is too divisive to defeat President Donald Trump in November, while sidestepping landmines surrounding complaints from women at his private media company and his race-based policing practices as mayor.

“The debate tomorrow night and the campaign in general … needs to be about one candidate and that’s Bernie Sanders,” Dan Kanninen, a top strategist overseeing Bloomberg’s states operation, said in a conference call with reporters Monday morning. “We’ve been saying for some time that the nature of this contest means someone with even a small plurality of delegates can come away with an outsize and disproportionate delegate lead.”

When asked about the former mayor’s rusty debate performance last week in Las Vegas — when he was skewered by Elizabeth Warren over the particulars of legal complaints women filed about the workplace culture he fostered at his private media company — Kanninen said Bloomberg “left that debate so much stronger in the second half, as he got his feet underneath him.”

“We feel much more confident going to the second debate having now gone through it,” he said.

Since his entrance into the primary three months ago, Bloomberg has spent freely from his personal fortune, running a general election-style campaign against Trump and declining to engage in the Democratic turf war in favor of a plan that prioritizes Super Tuesday. Along the way, his hope for a muddled field has withered as Sanders has racked up a commanding lead in the early states.

That’s why his team is getting ready to launch a fusillade at Sanders before and during the debate, and why Bloomberg’s prep sessions were focused on aiming his fire at the liberal Vermont senator.

“We've trained our eyes on him. Something the rest of the field has failed to do eight debates prior and a year in a campaign,” a top aide said in an interview.

Bloomberg telegraphed the nuke-Bernie approach Monday when his campaign released a digital ad slamming Sanders for his history on gun control and drawing a contrast to the ex-mayor’s lengthy record of fighting the National Rifle Association.

The 90-second video and an accompanying tweet from Bloomberg states Sanders was elected to the House in 1990 with support from the NRA and highlights his opposition to a background checks bill in the 1990s.

Bloomberg’s campaign manager, Kevin Sheekey, has already indicated that Sanders will be the target of more negative stories from the Bloomberg camp. “Opposition Research on Bernie is Very Damaging, Perhaps Even Disqualifying,” he titled a blast email last week.

“We can't let Sanders take the Democratic nomination, for the simple reason that he can't beat Trump,” Sheekey wrote in another email Monday night. “America needs a candidate who can unite the country, not deepen our divides.”

But Bloomberg has yet to commit ad spending against Sanders, who is leading polls in delegate-rich Super Tuesday states like California and Texas.

While the rest of his Democratic rivals are also expected to turn the screws on Sanders Tuesday, Bloomberg’s task is complicated by Warren, who hit Bloomberg with the hardest and most sustained attacks in the first debate, and continues to zero in on him.

At a Denver rally Sunday, Warren again targeted the former mayor.

“We are not trading one arrogant billionaire for another. What do you say?” she said, later referring to Bloomberg as the “riskiest candidate” Democrats could nominate.

Further muddying Bloomberg’s strategy is his pledge to fund the eventual nominee, even if it ends up being Sanders, who presents the sharpest ideological contrast to the former New York mayor.

If he attempts to demolish Sanders on stage and spends money now to diminish the Vermont senator in a TV ad blitz heading into Super Tuesday, he could be playing into Trump’s hand in the general election by highlighting his weaknesses.

“Obviously it’s continuing to raise questions and concerns in the minds of Dem voters about Bernie’s ability to close the deal and beat Trump — that’s Bloomberg’s central task. But I don’t think it happens off of a couple of smart, well-prepared hits in the debate,” New York City-based political consultant Neal Kwatra, who is unaffiliated with any presidential campaign, said. “Everybody has waited way too long to coalesce around some anti-Bernie effort and he has built a very formidable, mature movement that’s going to be very hard to dislodge.”