Former billionaire Democratic candidate Mike Bloomberg is injecting a hefty sum of $18 million from his failed presidential campaign into the Democratic National Committee in the biggest such donation to date, the DNC announced.
The record transfer is seen as a sign of Bloomberg’s eager involvement in the anti-Trump campaign at large after quitting the presidential race in the wake of his poor showing on Super Tuesday, which this year fell on 3 March. Back then, he won only one US territory, while former Vice President Joe Biden became a frontrunner.
Throughout his campaign, the media mogul, boasting a net worth of well over $50 billion, reiterated a number of times that whatever his own results in the race were, he would help the Democrats try to defeat Donald Trump.
In a memo to DNC chief Tom Perez, the Bloomberg campaign pointed out that “we should also not assume that Trump’s incompetence will be enough to make him a one-term president”, accusing the POTUS of mismanaging the coronavirus crisis.
The Bloomberg campaign, which hired 2,400 staffers in as many as 43 states, is also set to hand over its offices in six key states - namely in Arizona, Florida, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin - to the local Democratic Party branches.
The former Bloomberg campaign staffers in those offices will continue to be paid by his campaign through the first week of April and have full-fledged benefits through the end of April, despite the billionaire having earlier promised to pay salaries to campaign staffers up until the November vote. After April, the employees could reportedly offer the state party divisions a trained pool of already experienced hires.
The hefty donation to reinforce the Democratic war chest is possible only because Bloomberg was previously a presidential candidate that set up his own campaign, because under federal legislation there are caps on the amount an individual can inject into a national party, whereas there are no such limits placed on entities.
Since dropping out of the race, Bloomberg has contributed $500,000 to Voto Latino to facilitate the registration of Latino voters, $2 million to a group called Collective Future, catering to the interests of African American voters, and $2 million to Swing Left - a group targeting swing districts and lobbying for the Democratic agenda there.
