Bloomberg storms to the center of the 2020 presidential fray – By Jonathan Allen (NBC News) / Feb 12 2020
Analysis: The former New York mayor’s stealth campaign has him in third place and on the minds of rival candidates, Democratic insiders and voters.
MANCHESTER, N.H. — Mike Bloomberg is starting to dominate the national political debate like no one in the past five years other than President Donald Trump.
He rocketed into third place nationally this week in a series of recent Democratic presidential primary polls, even though he hasn’t participated in the first contests or any of the party’s debates.
His name is constantly on the lips of rival candidates, political insiders and pundits — somehow omni-present by virtue of his absence from the primary here.
And he even found himself at the center of his first full-on controversy Tuesday, with the surfacing of audio recordings of him defending his stop-and-frisk policing policy in terms that the Trump campaign and fellow Democrats described as “racist.”
But while the fight had been joined even before poll-closing time here Tuesday, there was a growing sense in Democratic and Republican political circles that Bloomberg is only on the verge of exploding onto the scene with his campaign to take the Democratic Party nomination by storm and drive Trump from power. On Wednesday, three members of the Congressional Black Caucus backed Bloomberg, including Rep. Lucy McBath, D-Ga., Del. Stacey Plaskett, D-V.I., and Rep. Gregory Meeks, D-N.Y.
If nothing else, Bloomberg is making all the other candidates nervous because, after more than a year of watching the primary unfold, a growing number of Democratic insiders and voters think he’s their best shot at beating Trump — and Trump appears to be at least open to that view.
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