Billionaire presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg is raising hackles with a lot of Democrats. (Screen snip, YouTube, CBS News)
Billionaire presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg is in trouble, and it might be surprising with who.
He’s running as a Democrat, yet he’s got many Democrats furious and on top of that, his $11 million anti-gun-rights Super Bowl advertisement is being seriously challenged for accuracy.
The Democratic National Committee is also taking heat for changing the rules to qualify for the Feb. 19 debate in Nevada, opening the door for Bloomberg to participate. It is beginning to appear the DNC is so worried about Democrat/Socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders taking the nomination they’re scrambling to make it possible for Bloomberg to become a serious mainstream alternative.
Former Vice President Joe Biden has been slipping in the polls as Sanders climbs. Even filmmaker Michael Moore has gotten his dander up, according to The Nation, intimating the DNC rules kept Sen. Cory Booker and Julian Castro off the debate stage “but they are going to allow Mike Bloomberg on the stage? Because he has a billion f—ing dollars!”
And now comes this advertisement, discussed in this space a few days ago, featuring the mother of a shooting victim killed in an altercation back in 2013. According to Newsweek, the advertisement’s assertion that “2,900 children die from gun violence every year” is taking heat from fact checkers for being “misleading or outright false.”
The Washington Examiner published an opinion piece alleging Bloomberg’s advertisement was “fake news.” The story said Bloomberg got the number from “an anti-gun group’s misleading study that counted 18- and 19-year-olds as ‘children.’” Eliminate those older teens from the survey and the number of homicides involving “children” shrinks by half. That was the assessment by Stephen Gutowski with the Washington Free Beacon in a series of tweets about the advertisement.
The number comes from a study done by Bloomberg’s Everytown for Gun Safety, which tallied up the number of deaths among “children and teens.” But the Bloomberg ad only refers to children, the reporter observed.
Newsweek noted that teens aged 18 or 19 would be considered adults in most places.
Bloomberg has already spent an estimated $200 million on his presidential campaign, and Everytown’s Action Fund will reportedly be spending at least $60 million to support pro-gun-control candidates in 2020. His entry into the presidential race has stirred many in the firearms community to become more interested in the campaign. If he were to become president, there is little doubt among gun owners that the Second Amendment would be in trouble.
According to CNN, “In order to qualify for the February 19 debate, a candidate either needs: 10% in four qualifying national, Nevada or South Carolina polls; or 12% in two qualifying polls from Nevada or South Carolina.”
People supporting Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s campaign also don’t care for Bloomberg, considering him a Wall Street billionaire. Many believe he got into the race because Warren, at the time, was gathering momentum and her attacks on Wall Street needed a response.
Now Warren has slipped in the polls, but politics is a crazy business and the six months remaining until the Democrat National Convention amount to an eternity. Poll numbers have a habit of changing overnight, and a lot of nights remain between now and the convention.
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