DownWithTyranny!

And what about Michael Cohen’s tell-all memoir, which was on constant rotation on MSNBC during the brief interim between Goldberg and Woodward? And whatever happened to The Times reporter Michael Schmidt’s book of a week earlier, with its revelation that Mike Pence was put on standby alert during that murky unscheduled Trump stopover at Walter Reed? The cavalcade passes by so quickly it’s hard to gauge what long-term impact any revelations have. We hardly got to know the Fontainebleau hotel pool boy who brought down the randy architect of Trump’s Evangelical base, Jerry Falwell Jr., before we moved on.

If the voluminous press coverage of the widely distributed advance copies are to be believed, Woodward’s Rage is adding details and Trump’s own blithe recorded confirmation to a horrific story that we already knew: The president deliberately falsified and downplayed the epic severity of the pandemic. As Jennifer Szalai writes in her Didion-worthy dissection of Rage in The Times, the book’s portrait of Trump would be “immediately recognizable to anyone paying even the minimal amount of attention.” In a blow-by-blow account in April, for instance, The Times reported that “throughout January, as Mr. Trump repeatedly played down the seriousness of the virus,” both “top White House advisers” and experts in Cabinet departments and intelligence agencies were telling him the lethal facts and sounding constant alarms.

That’s why by this late date Trump’s indifference to matters of life and death has long since been baked into most voters’ verdicts on this president, including his own voters. Even as the Woodward revelations started to pour out, Trump was brazenly showcasing his immutable callousness and narcissism in public view, violating local mandates (as well as White House guidelines) on mask wearing and social distancing at a rally in North Carolina and conspicuously ignoring the devastation, pain, and suffering as fire tore through America’s most highly populated state.





National and battleground-state polling on the presidential election has remained largely stable since before either party’s conventions. One wants to believe that Woodward and Goldberg will move the needle, transforming a Biden lead that still leaves Democrats anxious into an unambiguous rout. In the immediate aftermath of Goldberg’s Atlantic piece, the White House’s panicky, all-hands-on-deck pushback suggested that the Trump campaign was worried. Even Melania Trump’s Twitter account was immediately enlisted in an overnight effort to denounce the article as fake news. But again, you have to wonder if The Atlantic’s additional anecdotes can move voters who have long since absorbed Trump’s contempt for generals, for John McCain’s wartime heroism, and for the Gold Star parents of Humayun Khan, an Army captain killed by a car bomb in Iraq.

What gives one a bit of hope about the Woodward book’s ability to sway some of the few still-persuadable voters is the recordings. Trump just couldn’t stop himself from performing for the most bold-faced name among reporters. While we can’t rule out that he may yet claim, as he did about the Access Hollywood video, that the recordings are a hoax, the sheer volume of his verbal diarrhea makes it unlikely that anyone will fall for it except his QAnon faithful. To get voters to listen to them all, Sarah Cooper may have to bring out a box set.

Joshua Hicks, the progressive state House candidate running for a Nassau-Duval county seat told me he thinks "most candidates in Florida will welcome Bloomberg spending $100 million on GOTV efforts. It's sorely needed in an expensive state, and could be the difference between a Trump re-election or a Biden presidency. That said, it would be nice if Bloomberg or any major donor would invest in actual down-ballot candidates as well. The 140 Democratic candidates running throughout Florida are doing real work on the ground, contacting and turning out real voters-- even in tough districts-- but sadly, many are being ignored. Hopefully Bloomberg's investment will trickle down into the districts where it is needed and where moving even a couple thousand votes can make a big, big difference for the statewide results. We are all in this together and I am glad Bloomberg is finally arriving at the party."

Cindy Banyai won her primary in August and is contesting an open congressional seat in southwest Florida. (In the primary she got 28,749 votes and the Republican victor, Byron Donalds, won 23,480 votes. "We are going to need to get out the Democratic vote," she told me last night, "as well as win the hearts and minds of independent voters and non-Trump Republicans. Investments made across Florida will help us defeat Trump and flip down ballot districts from red to blue, ensuring the voice to the people is truly heard. Grassroots candidates like me can really make our dollars stretch. Television ads make a huge difference, but cost a lot up front. An influx of funds for television could really help us flip this district and defeat the latest aspiring Trump sycophant."

Bob Lynch, way down in Miami-Dade and also running for a state House seat held by a Republicans said that "The thing that gives me the most hope is that almost all of Bloomberg’s decisions are data driven. And I don’t mean Robby Mook and the guys who read Moneyball in college and thought political campaigns were as easy as playing fantasy baseball data driven. Bloomberg is the real deal. Mike built his empire on data. The Bloomberg service we use on Wall Street is incredible in its breadth, depth, and sophistication. There is no doubt that he crunched all the numbers and decided that Florida was a good investment. The fact that he is doing this so late in the cycle is great news as it will leave the GOP scrambling to assemble a counter strike. Spanish language television ads will make a huge difference and close the gap between Democratic outreach and the GOP’s advantage in tv ads. I’ve been watching almost all of the NBA Playoff games on TNT and it still amazes me to see how many personal injury lawyers advertise, in laughably bad Spanish, during the commercials. But they try. I’ve yet to see a Biden ad in Spanish, despite spending last month religiously watching European soccer on Telemundo. If the Bloomberg effort surgically targets Latino areas on channels and programming they watch, it will pay dividends. If they follow the same tired playbook that sunk Bill Nelson and Andrew Gillum, it will be a colossal waste of money."

Lynch continued that he's "hoping it will help my district, HD-116, which is 90% Hispanic, at the top of the ticket but it is still unclear how that will affect down ballot races. Ideally, Bloomberg would have plugged into the unprecedented slate of down ballot candidates 90 for 90 and The Florida Democratic Environmental caucus recruited to run in almost every race, but that doesn’t seem to be the plan. We know our communities far better than out of state consultants who were deployed to Florida. $100 million is a lot of money and Bloomberg’s operation has always been far more efficient than the DNC or state party. I remain both hopeful and skeptical. The ground work still needs to be done on the local level. Mailers, text, phone banking, targeted digital (Facebook and YouTube). Myself and my fellow candidates will continue this effort and do our best to draft in Bloomberg’s wake."





Fergie Reid and Janelle head, respectively, 90 For 90 and the Florida Environmental Caucus-- and they were responsible for recruiting dozens of Florida candidates in seats the Florida Democratic Party is always happy to cede to the GOP without a fight. Reid told me that it's great news that Bloomberg is spending $100 million in Florida to help assure a Biden/Harris Democratic victory there. "Much of this money," he said, "will be spent on T.V. ads and statewide GOTV efforts, possibly targeted at specific regional voter populations. An historic slate of 140 Florida Democratic 2020 state legislative candidates will appear on the ballot. 84 of these are challenging currently GOP held seats. Around $2 million of this planned $100 million dollar expenditure should be spread throughout these 84 districts. Dems need to flip 3 state Senate seats and 13 state House seats to 'share power.' Flips of 4 and 14 respectively would give Dems an outright majority in both chambers. The Florida Senate and House Dems are currently playing to flip 2 & 19 respectively; which means 63 challenger contests are being almost completely ignored by the party bodies with oversight of these races. 63 state legislative contests equates to roughly HALF of the STATE of FLORIDA! Mike Bloomberg would do well to invest in this half of the state, using these candidates contests as the vehicles."

Janelle Christensen couldn't agree more. She said that "If Bloomberg deigned to give $140,000, that would be $1000 per Democratic candidate running in the state legislature. Each one of those candidates could use that money to reach at minimum 2,000 NPA or new voters. 

Bloomberg made the decision to focus his final election spending on Florida last week, after news reports that Trump had considered spending as much as $100 million of his own money in the final weeks of the campaign, Bloomberg’s advisers said. Presented with several options on how to make good on an earlier promise to help elect Biden, Bloomberg decided that a narrow focus on Florida was the best use of his money.

The president’s campaign has long treated the state, which Trump now calls home, as a top priority, and his advisers remain confident in his chances given strong turnout in 2016 and 2018 that gave Republicans narrow winning margins in statewide contests.

“Voting starts on Sept. 24 in Florida so the need to inject real capital in that state quickly is an urgent need,” Bloomberg adviser Kevin Sheekey said. “Mike believes that by investing in Florida it will allow campaign resources and other Democratic resources to be used in other states, in particular the state of Pennsylvania.”

The last Republican to win the White House without Florida was Calvin Coolidge in 1924, and a loss of the state’s 29 electoral votes would radically shrink Trump’s paths to reelection. With Florida in his column, Biden would be able to take the presidency by holding every state that Hillary Clinton won in 2016 and winning any one of the following states: Arizona, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania and North Carolina, all of which Biden leads in current public polling averages.

In recent weeks, polls in Florida have narrowed, with the Cook Political Report recently shifting the state from “lean Democrat” to “toss up.” A Washington Post average of public polls since August finds Biden up by one percentage point in the state, well within the margin of error. While he has been doing better than past Democratic candidates with Whites and seniors, Biden has struggled among the state’s Latino population, which Republicans have focused enormous resources on courting over several election cycles.

“If you have the ability to make sure that you are able to speak directly to all of these different communities and where they live then you are going a long way to securing the states for Biden in this election,” Rep. Ted Deutch (D-FL) said. “I’m glad that Mike Bloomberg recognized this and is prepared to make an investment to make sure that every one of those communities will be aware of the importance of this election.”

The spending will focus mostly on television and digital ads, in both English and Spanish.

Bloomberg’s aim is to prompt enough early voting that a pro-Biden result would be evident soon after the polls close. Florida, unlike other swing states, reports almost all early ballots shortly after voting ends.

Democrats and Republicans have worried that early results will dictate public perceptions of who will ultimately win the election. In many states, the first reported votes are more Republican, but the numbers turn more Democratic over time as more mail-in and early votes are added to the tally.

“It would give lie to what we expect to be Trump’s election night messaging that Democrats are stealing the election, because unlike other battleground states, Florida counts its absentee ballots on or by Election Day,” Bloomberg adviser Howard Wolfson said. “We think Florida is incredibly close but winnable.”

A recent report by Hawkfish, a voter data firm funded by Bloomberg, predicted that even in a scenario where Biden wins 54 percent of the final vote, partisan differences in mail voting preference could lead to an initial count that shows Trump winning with 55 percent of ballots tabulated nationally on Nov. 3. In public polling, Republican voters have reported far less interest in voting by mail or voting early than Democrats.

A prominent Democratic consultant in Florida, not aware of the Bloomberg decision, said Saturday that Democratic outside groups have mostly focused on Midwestern states because of the prohibitive cost of advertising in Florida. This person, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss strategy, estimated that it would take $15 million to $20 million to significantly move Biden’s numbers among Latinos, and $60 million to $70 million to get on television across the state over the next 51 days and have a real impact.

Between March 24 and Sept. 11, the Biden campaign and Democratic groups outspent Trump and Republican groups in the state on television by a margin of $42 million to $32 million, according to data from a Democratic tracking firm. But future reservations suggest that gap is set to narrow, in part because of increased investment by wealthy Trump backers operating independently of his campaign.

Preserve America, a new super PAC backed by Las Vegas casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, announced $30 million in spending in seven states this month, including Florida, with more spending expected to be announced soon.

Bloomberg’s advisers described the spending plan as “nine figures” and declined to say how much higher than $100 million Bloomberg might be willing to go, if at all. They said Bloomberg is hopeful that his commitment will push other wealthy Democratic donors to further open their pocketbooks for other states in the final months of the campaign. Bloomberg’s money will be spent through Independence USA, his own super PAC, and other Democratic groups.

Between November and March, Bloomberg spent more $1 billion on his own failed bid for the Democratic nomination, including about $275 million on ads that criticized Trump. When he endorsed Joe Biden, he announced that he would “work to make him the next President of the United States.” Bloomberg subsequently received a prime speaking slot on the final night of the Democratic convention this year.

But just what Bloomberg, who is estimated to be worth more than $50 billion, planned to do with his money has remained a significant source of suspense among Democratic strategists. After flooding local and state Democratic Party accounts with money during his campaign, Bloomberg transferred about $20 million in cash and prepaid office leases to the Democratic National Committee, taking advantage of a provision of campaign finance law that allows candidates to donate leftover money. He also spread his money to benefit state and local Democratic candidates.

A group he helps to fund, Everytown for Gun Safety, has pledged to spend $60 million on elections this cycle, and he has committed another $60 million to help preserve or strengthen the Democratic House majority. Swing Left, a group focused on winning state legislative seats, and Fair Fight, a voter protection effort led by former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, have also received millions. Bloomberg has not yet announced any spending to help elect a Democratic Senate, after allotting $20 million to the effort in 2018.

• Status Quo Joe- 36% (+3)
• Bernie- 16% (+4)
• Steyer- 15% (+11)
• Elizabeth- 8% (-8)
• Mayo- 6 (+3)
• Klobuchar- 1% (flat)
• undecided- 15% (flat)

Buttigieg’s campaign said in a memo that its objective on March 3 is to “minimize” Sanders’ margins and maximize “delegate accumulation by [congressional] district, not states.” Anticipating a drawn-out primary process, Buttigieg is looking to survive deeper into the calendar, making it to mid-March contests in the Midwest that might provide more opportunities for him.

Buttigieg is focusing on selected districts in smaller media markets throughout the country to rack up delegates, from Austin, Texas and its suburbs to San Diego, northern Maine, and other locales where Democrats flipped House seats in 2018. But it’s a risky strategy to maintain momentum, and that risk is born out of necessity.

...“Pick a place and try for a win. Otherwise, if you’re playing just to pick off delegates, then that’s what you say if you’re in trouble,” the strategist said, granted anonymity to discuss the issue candidly. “If it’s a math game, then you’re just doing it to be at the convention, and you’re not playing to win.”

In its memo, Buttigieg’s campaign pledged to “limit Sanders’ delegate lead to no more than 350 pledged delegates.” States on Super Tuesday account for about a third of the total delegates handed out in the Democratic presidential race.

“How many districts are each candidate hitting threshold and by what margin? To me, that’s the most important question on Super Tuesday,” said Michael Halle, an adviser to the Buttigieg campaign. “You gain the most efficiency by becoming viable.”

But even among his supporters, there’s a fear that Buttigieg’s best days in the presidential race already happened.

“We’re definitely worried about him not making it to Maryland,” which votes in late April, said Raina Chambers, a 49-year-old from Beltsville, Maryland, who saw Buttigieg speak in Arlington, Va., on Sunday.

Her husband, Michael Chambers, added, “but if Pete doesn’t make it, I’d be fine with Michael Bloomberg, too.”

Dozens of interviews with Democratic establishment leaders this week show that they are not just worried about Mr. Sanders’s candidacy, but are also willing to risk intraparty damage to stop his nomination at the national convention in July if they get the chance. Since Mr. Sanders’s victory in Nevada’s caucuses on Saturday, The Times has interviewed 93 party officials-- all of them superdelegates, who could have a say on the nominee at the convention-- and found overwhelming opposition to handing the Vermont senator the nomination if he arrived with the most delegates but fell short of a majority.

Jay Jacobs, the New York State Democratic Party chairman and a superdelegate, echoing many others interviewed, said that superdelegates should choose a nominee they believed had the best chance of defeating Mr. Trump if no candidate wins a majority of delegates during the primaries. Mr. Sanders argued that he should become the nominee at the convention with a plurality of delegates, to reflect the will of voters, and that denying him the nomination would enrage his supporters and split the party for years to come.

“Bernie wants to redefine the rules and just say he just needs a plurality,” Mr. Jacobs said. “I don’t think we buy that. I don’t think the mainstream of the Democratic Party buys that. If he doesn’t have a majority, it stands to reason that he may not become the nominee.”

While there is no widespread public effort underway to undercut Mr. Sanders, arresting his rise has emerged as the dominant topic in many Democratic circles. Some are trying to act well before the convention: Since Mr. Sanders won Nevada’s caucuses on Saturday, four donors have approached former Representative Steve Israel of New York to ask if he can suggest someone to run a super PAC aimed at blocking Mr. Sanders. He declined their offer.

Others are urging former President Barack Obama to get involved to broker a truce-- either among the four moderate candidates or between the Sanders and establishment wings, according to three people familiar with those conversations.

William Owen, a D.N.C. member from Tennessee, suggested that if Mr. Obama was unwilling, his wife, Michelle, could be nominated as vice president, giving the party a figure they could rally behind.

People close to Mr. Obama say he has no intention of getting involved in the primary contest, seeing his role as less of a kingmaker than as a unifying figure to help heal party divisions once Democrats settle on a nominee. He also believed that the Democratic Party shouldn’t engage in smoke-filled-room politics, arguing that those kinds of deals would have prevented him from capturing the nomination when he ran against Hillary Clinton in 2008.

“If Bernie gets a plurality and nobody else is even close and the superdelegates weigh in and say, ‘We know better than the voters,’ I think that will be a big problem,” said Representative Pramila Jayapal of Washington state, a Sanders supporter who is co-chairwoman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus.

Others in the party view Mr. Sanders as such an existential threat that they see stopping him from winning the nomination as less risky than a public convention fight. Many feared that putting Mr. Sanders on the top of the ticket could cost Democrats the political gains of the Trump era, a period when the party won control of the House, took governor’s mansions in deep red states and flipped statehouses across the country.

a- humility
b- connection to reality

After weeks of confusion, Joe Biden’s campaign have finally admitted that he was not arrested while visiting Nelson Mandela. Biden has made some false claims in the past but this was particularly bizarre. No one had any record of such a historic arrest in South Africa. While Biden did not take responsibility personally for the exaggeration, his deputy campaign manager admitted today that Biden was not arrested but merely “separated from his party at the airport.” That is a bit of a nose bleed of a step down from an arrest with Mandela to an airport separation. Hard to imagine how you confuse the two since one ordinarily involves custody, cuffs, and confinement.

The claim of the arrest was viewed as a pitch to help Biden’s campaign in South Carolina but was widely ridiculed. The problem is that Biden identified his own witness in his account by noting that “I had the great honor of being arrested with our U.N. ambassador on the streets of Soweto trying to get to see [Mandela] on Robben Island.”

However, Andrew Young, who was the U.N. Ambassador at the time, stated “No, I was never arrested and I don’t think he was, either.”

The campaign then tried to explain but only made the claim more offensive that Biden would suggest that he was arrested in South Africa during apartheid: “It was a separation. They, he was not allowed to go through the same door that the-- the rest of the party he was with. Obviously, it was apartheid South Africa. There was a white door, there was a black door. He did not want to go through the white door and have the rest of the party go through the black door. He was separated. This was during a trip while they were there in Johannesburg.”

So Biden remembers separation in going through an airport door as an arrest in the cause of freeing Mandela in South Africa?

Biden has been challenged about past statements like his claiming that he Biden had traveled to Konar province in Afghanistan to give a Silver Star on a Navy captain who refused the medal, because his friend didn’t survive. The Washington Post reported that it “never happened” and said “as he campaigns for president, Joe Biden tells a moving but false war story.”

Biden was also recently challenged for saying that Biden he worked on the Paris Climate Accord with former Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping, who died 19 years before the agreement was signed.

This story however is even more insulting to those who honor the memory of Mandela. It is akin to claiming to have marched with Dr. King because you walked through an airport with him on one occasion. There is a big difference between being separated at an airport and being arrested in South Africa in the same cause as Nelson Mandela.

Yet, it is notable that CNN spent exclusive coverage on “how important is the endorsement of Rep. James Clyburn” to Biden in South Carolina rather than this astonishing claim and belated admission about Nelson Mandela.

According to data compiled by Advertising Analytics, an ad tracking firm, Biden is spending by far the least on Super Tuesday TV ads out of all the candidates who participated in Tuesday night’s debate in South Carolina.

Bernie Sanders, the current frontrunner for the Democratic nomination who has blown by Biden in both national polling and the hunt for national convention delegates, has aired or reserved roughly $13.5 million worth of airtime across all 14 of the Super Tuesday states. He’s dropped at least seven figures in three states-- Texas, North Carolina and Colorado-- and mid-six figures in three additional states.

Amy Klobuchar’s campaign has booked about $3.5 million worth of television time, and her campaign says it has invested more in digital spending. Pete Buttigieg, another campaign that went up late in Super Tuesday states, hits about $1.6 million in TV spending, and Elizabeth Warren comes in at a bit over $916,000.

All of them are dwarfed by the two self-financing billionaires in the race. According to Advertising Analytics, Mike Bloomberg has spent over $183 million on blanketing the airwaves in Super Tuesday states-- en route to spending over half a billion dollars in total on advertising for his campaign so far-- while Tom Steyer has spent over $35 million, more than double what Sanders dropped.

To compare, the only candidate who's in the same ballpark is fellow billionaire candidate Tom Steyer, who has spent $27.2 million on television ads in California, or less than half of what Bloomberg is spending, the research firm finds. Meanwhile, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders has spent just $6.3 million in TV ads in the state so far.

“Bloomberg, Sanders, and Steyer are the only three candidates on air in California," notes Rachel Haskins, marketing manager at Advertising Analytics. "We can’t say if the campaigns have adjusted their spending because of Bloomberg’s totals, but Steyer has been spending in California since December 8, and Sanders went up on January 26, even before the Iowa caucuses."

Haskins added, "In 2016, Sanders didn’t hit the airwaves until May 1-- a month before the June 3 CA primary. Sanders has also spent $6.3 million on TV in California since January; in 2016, he spent $1.8 million in the state.” Others who've spent relatively negligible amounts on TV ads in California include Rep. Tulsi Gabbard ($73,704 last July) and former candidate Sen. Cory Booker ($1,500 on cable in December), per Advertising Analytics.

While Bloomberg is dominating linear airwaves, political spending on Facebook in California is less lopsided. The Bloomberg campaign has spent $5.8 million on Facebook ads in the state, ahead of Steyer ($4.6 million), Sanders ($1.5 million), Mayor Pete Buttigieg ($668,889), Senator Elizabeth Warren ($623,769), former Vice President Joe Biden ($420,183) and Senator Amy Klobuchar ($202,348), according to Advertising Analytics' tally through Feb. 20.

Despite his advertising blitz, Bloomberg is trailing in California support. Senator Sanders leads the field with 27.9 percent, while Bloomberg garners 14.7 percent, ahead of Biden (12.9 percent), Warren (12.4 percent), Buttigieg (11 percent), Klobuchar (5.6 percent) and Steyer (3.2 percent), per Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight state poll average.

As of Monday, Bloomberg had spent more than $191 million on advertising in Super Tuesday states, according to Advertising Analytics. That compares with $36 million for the next-highest spender, billionaire Tom Steyer, $12 million for Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and minimal amounts for other Democrats.

In Alabama, he has poured more than $8 million into TV and radio ads in the last two months while Sanders has spent just $142,000 and two of his main competitors, former Vice President Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend, Ind.-- have not advertised. Bloomberg has visited Montgomery twice, opened up four campaign offices and hired 30 people while most of his rivals have two paid staffers or fewer.

Part of Bloomberg’s pitch is that national Democrats have long neglected the South, essentially ceding states like Alabama to Republicans, and he'll change that.

“I believe it’s time for the national Democratic Party to stop ignoring Alabama,” he said earlier this month to the Alabama Democratic Conference.

“I’ve devoted a lot of my resources to those swing states from Michigan and Wisconsin to Florida and Arizona, but I’m also working to create what we call a new generation of swing states-- states like Alabama and Texas, which could very well turn blue if more people voted.”

...Some of the other candidates are organizing here. Sanders has more than 1,000 volunteers contacting voters through phone banks and knocking on doors across the state. The Buttigieg campaign plans 100 events Saturday. Still, Bloomberg has likely amassed the largest Democratic presidential staff in Alabama history, Democrats say.

“His presence is overwhelming,” said Montgomery Mayor Steven Reed, who was elected last fall as the first African American in the office.

“It matters,” Reed added. “It helps him gain some traction in communities that may not have been touched by a campaign."

...“The fact is the people in Alabama really don't know Bloomberg — unlike Joe Biden, who has been into Alabama for a long time,” said Sen. Doug Jones, a Biden supporter. In 2017, Biden came to Birmingham to campaign for Jones.

But while Biden has won the endorsement of Jones and some other party leaders, including Rep. Terri A. Sewell and Birmingham Mayor Randall Woodfin, his poor showings in Iowa and New Hampshire, and his distant second-place finish behind Sanders in Nevada on Saturday, did not help his case with undecided officials.

With no clear front-runner nationally, and little competition here yet, Bloomberg has seized the opening to spread the message that he is experienced, well-funded and the candidate who can beat President Trump.

“His strategy of skipping the first four states is incredibly risky,” said Andra Gillespie, associate professor of political science at Emory University. “But with Joe Biden's campaign having faltered, and perhaps having stumbled irrevocably, his strategy doesn't seem to be as far-fetched or quixotic as it once did.”

A former Republican, Bloomberg faces challenges in courting black voters after strong criticism of his support as New York mayor of stop-and-frisk policing and his suggestion that the end of redlining contributed to the 2008 economic collapse. Yet locals say his wealth allows him to get noticed, especially among older, more moderate black Democrats uncertain whom to support.

“Bloomberg has had a free hand in places like Alabama to be nothing but positive,” said Glen Browder, a professor at Jacksonville State University and a former Democratic congressman. “When Bloomberg comes to town flush with cash, not asking for contributions and just saying, 'I’d like to have your support,' that’s a pretty powerful introduction.

• Minnesota: Bloomberg’s support has decreased from 9% to 3% in the span of a few days after his first debate. Sen. Amy Klobuchar is in the lead in Minnesota, her home state, with 29%, according to the latest poll conducted between Feb. 17 and Feb. 20.
• Texas: Bloomberg in the most recent poll is in third place with 17%, down from the 18% that he garnered in a poll conducted from Feb. 12 to Feb. 18. Former Vice President Joe Biden and Sanders are tied for first place, with 24% each, according to the latest poll from Public Policy Polling conducted between Feb. 24 and Feb. 25.
• North Carolina: Bloomberg remains in third place with 17%, up slightly from 16% in a poll conducted between Feb. 12 and Feb. 18. He trails Biden, who has 23%, and Sanders, who has 20%, according to the most recent poll conducted from Feb. 23 to Feb. 24.
• Oklahoma: Bloomberg remained at 20%, but fell from first place to second behind Biden, who has 21%, according to the most recent poll conducted between Feb. 17 and Feb. 21.

• Bernie- 30%
• Status Quo Joe- 20%
• Elizabeth- 16%
• Bloomberg- 11%
• Mayo Pete- 9%
• Klobuchar- 4%
• Tulsi- 4%
• Steyer- 1%

• Katie Hill (New Dem-CA)- $5,096,135 -- F
• Harley Rouda (New Dem-CA)- $4,459,937 -- F
• Kim Schrier (New Dem-WA)- $2,910,081 -- F
• Steve Horsford (New Dem-NV)- $2,834,051 -- F
• Elissa Slotkin (New Dem-MN)- $2,433,181 -- F
• Haley Stevens- (New Dem-MI)- $2,220,429 -- F
• Mikie Sherrill (Blue Dog-NJ)- $2,219,630 -- F
• Lauren Underwood (D-IL)- $2,159,925 -- F
• Jennifer Wexton (New Dem-VA)- $1,711,024 -- F
• Lucy McBath (New Dem-GA)- $130,000 (+ $1,256,262 from Bloomberg's anti-gun PAC) -- F
• Colin Allred (New Dem-TX)- $1,453,541 -- F
• Dean Phillips (New Dem-MN)- $1,335,517 -- F
• Lizzie Fletcher (New Dem-TX)- $1,320,323 -- F
• Mike Levin (D-CA)- $1,061,877 -- C
• Sharice Davids (New Dem-KS)- $999,171 -- F
• Kendra Horn- (Blue Dog-OK)- $430,481 -- F
• Jason Crow (New Dem-CO)- $244,583 -- F
• Angie Craig (New Dem-MN)- $130,879 -- F
• Chrissy Houlahan (Blue Dog-PA)- $212,766 -- F
• Elaine Luria (New Dem-VA)- $646,755 -- F
• Donna Shalala (New Dem-FL)- $162,289 -- C

• Nancy Soderberg (FL)- $1,624,107-- Lost
• Carolyn Long (WA)- $1,260,858-- Lost
• Carolyn Bourdeaux- $1,050,921-- Lost