Bloomberg's Latest Threat

The Little Oligarch just won't go away:

“Michael Bloomberg’s $40 million spending splurge on politics for this year’s election taught him a lesson for 2016: You get a much better bang for your buck by trying to tip state and local elections than high-profile federal ones,” Politico reports.

“So as the former New York mayor turned activist for gun control, healthier food choices, education reform, and other issues makes his spending plans for the next two years, he plans to weight his contributions more toward ballot measures, governor and school-board candidates, and away from House and Senate races, which have become glutted with outside money.”

Charter school backers are already throwing a lot of money into local races to sway them their way.

 

If Bloomberg takes the money he threw into the national races and adds that to the cash he's already been throwing into local races, he quite literally can buy democracy at the municipal or state levels.

 

An analysis of the 2014 election shows that the candidates who spent the most money almost always won:

Morning Line: “We already know that the $4 billion spent on this midterm election was more than any other midterm in history. It was the most on congressional elections ever, including during a presidential year. What do the numbers really tell us? These two stats jumped out at us from a post-analysis done by the Center for Responsive Politics:

• 94 percent of biggest spenders in House races won, up slightly from 2012
• 82 percent of biggest spenders in Senate races won, up from 76 percent in 2012

What that means is, as one of us noted on NewsHour Monday night money, more specifically who spends the most, is about as good a predictor that there is of who will win a race. Those numbers, by the way, are pretty close to the incumbent reelection rates.”

 

American Democracy in the 21st Century - owned by the oligarchs and the political whores they purchase with their money.