The calls started early on a Thursday evening last month, moments after the New York Times reported Michael Bloomberg was expected to jump into the 2020 race. On one end were a handful of Joe Biden’s top campaign aides and allies; on the other were some of his highest-priority current and prospective donors. The former wanted to reassure the latter about Biden’s place in the race and to preempt any second thoughts about their loyalty to the former vice-president, according to Democrats familiar with the conversations.
It seemed clear, then, that the Biden team and, to a lesser extent, Pete Buttigieg’s had reason to be “very worried,” as one veteran Manhattan Democrat who is wired into Biden’s fundraising orbit said to me that week. Bloomberg had reversed his springtime decision not to run after concluding that Biden was no longer well positioned to win the Democratic nomination and that no one else was sufficiently moderate and popular enough to beat Donald Trump. The former mayor wouldn’t take his wealthy friends’ money, but his candidacy might be reason enough for some of them to hold off on funding others—a possibility that Biden, struggling for cash, could hardly afford. Bloomberg, worth more than $54 billion according to Forbes, had essentially unlimited funds. He’d considered spending $1 billion on an independent bid in 2016, before abandoning the idea and returning to his role as one of the Democrats’ biggest donors. And now he was surprising not just the Democratic Party Establishment— he didn’t even give Barack Obama a heads-up and called DNC chair Tom Perez after the fact, according to operatives in the know—but also the Wall Street Establishment. At first, some of the calls from Biden’s allies went to voicemail that Thursday night. Some donors told Biden World they needed time to think.
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