Black Voters Turn to Mike Bloomberg

Hours after this story was first published (with this opening paragraph reading “There are signs that black support for Mike Bloomberg in 2020 could be a mirror image of white support for Trump in 2016, when voters who didn’t want to admit their decision to pollsters nonetheless pulled the lever for him”), Quinnipiac released a new poll showing that black voters are warming to his campaign. Bloomberg shot up 7 points to third overall in the new poll released Monday afternoon, just two points behind Biden, who dropped 7 points. And Bloomberg shot up to second among black voters at 22%, behind Biden at 27% and falling.

The headline here had asked, “Are Black Voters Quietly Turning to Mike Bloomberg?” The answer for many appears to be “yes,” and not so quietly.

Despite a mayoralty defined by the billionaire’s “luxury product” vision of the city that sanctioned stop-and-frisk dragnet policing of men of color, the evaporation of affordable housing, an explosion in the numbers of homeless people, and an exodus of working-class New Yorkers, I’m hearing daily from Democrats evaluating the current crop of candidates and concluding that Bloomberg is best situated to beat Trump and to run the country.