Fifteen months before Michael Bloomberg filed to enter the Democratic presidential primaries on Friday, the formidability of a candidacy by the former New York mayor was forseen and spelled out by a longtime Trump strategist: Corey Lewandowski.
Speaking at a press breakfast hosted by the Christian Science Monitor August 15, 2018, Lewandowski — Trump’s first of three campaign managers in the 2016 presidential race —was asked which Democratic presidential hopefuls would be strongest against Trump in 2020.
“If I were a Democratic strategist — just to put on my Democratic strategist’s hat on for a second — and someone said to me who do you want to be the Democratic nominee for president of the United States,” Lewandowski replied, “there’s only one name I would choose and I think the person could have a very competitive race. His name is Michael Bloomberg.”
Bloomberg, in Lewandowski’s view, “checks many, many boxes in the progressive movement. He’s exceptionally wealthy, has 100 percent name I.D., he’s willing to self-fund a race because he put $100 million in his own race for mayor of New York City.”
He also noted that Bloomberg “has a history of running the nation’s largest city and he doesn’t have the same problems that senators have, which is the schedule of being in the U.S. Senate, the obligation to go out and raise money at $2,700 a piece. He doesn’t have to do that.”
Lewandowski said “with all due respect to the mayor of South Bend, Indiana and all the senators and congressmen and governors and all these people who think they’re going to be the presidential nominee, Michael Bloomberg . . . could literally write a check for $250 million tomorrow….”
The veteran GOP operative went on to hail Bloomberg as “an American success story. He didn’t inherit it. He built it all on his own. Everybody knows him. From the progressive side, he’s good enough on their issues and he can make it through the primaries.”
Lewandowski stopped short of saying Bloomberg could unseat Republican Trump, but did say “you win New York and California almost instantly as a Democrat, but Michael Bloomberg would have to do what Donald Trump did, which is parlay his business acumen and the success he built as a businessman into the places that want to make sure the economy continues to grow. Ohio Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin — Michael Bloomberg created tens of thousands of jobs there during the course of his lifetime.”
He called a Bloomberg versus Trump race “a very competitive race that wouldn’t require an enormous amount of time fund-raising. They would literally be on the campaign trail the entire time.”
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