Tom Steyer may have been excluded from Wednesday night’s fiery presidential debate, when the other candidates slammed former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg in the most pugnacious face-off so far.
But Steyer is spending more than $1 million to land a few of his own punches — the former San Francisco hedge fund chief is taking shots at his fellow billionaire with a TV ad that goes live Monday in Super Tuesday states like California.
The new minute-long ad, which Steyer’s campaign says will be backed by an initial “seven-figure” buy, targets Bloomberg over his past remarks on New York City’s stop-and-frisk policy and redlining.
In several audio clips cut together from a 2015 speech, Bloomberg is heard saying that most of New York’s murder suspects are “male minorities, 16 to 25,” and suggesting police can “take the description, Xerox it and pass it out to all the cops.” The way police should take guns away from young people in minority neighborhoods is to “throw them against the wall and frisk them,” Bloomberg argued in the speech.
And in a video from 2008, he’s seen talking about redlining, the policy that blocked banks from approving mortgages in minority neighborhoods. It’s from a speech in which Bloomberg suggested that ending the practice helped lead to the 2008 housing collapse.
“Those policies were racist, and Mike Bloomberg was wrong to support them,” a narrator declares in the ad.
Bloomberg has apologized repeatedly for his support of stop-and-frisk and said at last night’s debate that he had always opposed redlining. But his rivals have still homed in on his record, with candidates like Elizabeth Warren flaming him on the debate stage for policies that “targeted black and brown men from the beginning,” as the Massachusetts senator put it.
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Steyer’s ad contrasts Bloomberg’s record with his own, promoting his activism for environmental issues and his record starting a nonprofit bank that has supported minority-owned small businesses. The ad, however, doesn’t mention that the bank has sued more than 1,800 defaulted auto loan borrowers, most in California’s poorest counties, a story first reported by this news organization.
Bloomberg’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
Steyer’s ad is the latest example of how the Democratic primary has turned increasingly negative. Polls have suggested that only Bloomberg and Sen. Bernie Sanders have the broad national support and financial resources necessary to stay in the race after Super Tuesday states like California vote on March 3 — which creates incentives for the other candidates to target them.
In a statement following the debate, Steyer said that Bloomberg — a former Republican and independent who’s now a Democrat — was “probably running in the wrong primary.”
So far, anyone turning on a television in California has mostly seen positive ads from the two billionaires promoting their own candidacies. Bloomberg, Steyer and Sanders, who has a strong lead in the most recent California polls, are the only contenders so far who’ve been able to afford TV buys in the Golden State’s pricey media markets.
So far, Steyer has spent almost $200 million of his own money on advertising — more than any candidate other than Bloomberg, who’s spent about double that, according to ad tracking services. In January alone, Steyer’s campaign spent $52.9 million, according to new Federal Election Commission reports released Thursday night.
Steyer, the only Californian left in the presidential race, has trailed far behind in national polls and in his home state, winning the support of just 3 percent of likely Democratic primary voters here in a poll from the Public Policy Institute of California released this week.
But he’s received better numbers in Nevada, which caucuses on Saturday, and South Carolina, which votes one week later. Steyer has concentrated on building support among black and Latino voters, which explains his focus on stop-and-frisk and redlining in the ad.
Steyer’s fans are hoping that better-than-expected showings in both states can keep his long-shot presidential ambitions alive through Super Tuesday.
And as long as he wins at least one delegate in Nevada — which seems likely based on the most recent polls — Steyer will be guaranteed an invitation to the next presidential debate in Charleston, S.C., on Tuesday. That will give him the chance for a billionaire-vs-billionaire showdown in person, not just on the airwaves.
