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Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and former New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg are slinging mud at one another in campaign speeches and political ads as the race to be the Democratic Party’s 2020 presidential candidate heats up in Nevada, where on Feb. 22 the nation’s next caucus will be held.
Sanders assailed Bloomberg as attempting to “buy the presidency,” adding that his campaign lacked the “energy we need to defeat Donald Trump.”
Bloomberg then replied to a Sanders tweet with a video presenting numerous examples of Sanders supporters’ aggression as not only divisive, but contradictory to what Sanders has advocated in political discourse.
The video includes examples of Sanders supporters advocating violence and posting threats against people who support Sanders’ foes, including tweets such as “Vote Bernie or bad things will happen Fred,” and vague text message warnings like “we know where you live … prepare for hell … calls won’t stop.”
The ad ends with a callout to the Sanders campaign for otherwise condoning and not explicitly condemning such behavior: “This type of ‘energy’ is not going to get us there.”
Bloomberg trailed Sanders by 12 percentage points in the latest NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll, yet his support from 19 percent of the 1,416 adults surveyed allowed him to to qualify for the debate, set to take place in Las Vegas on Wednesday. Rivals on the debate stage may unite — for once — around their scrutiny of Bloomberg’s policies as mayor of New York, especially the controversial stop-and-frisk program that disproportionately targeted black and latino residents.
Most of Bloomberg’s Democratic opponents have all but branded him a racist between scrutiny of that program, resurfaced audio from a 2015 Colorado speech in which he defended the historically racist housing policy known as redlining and framed its end as responsible for the 2008 financial market collapse and claims from the same speech alleging “95%” of “murders and murderers and murder victims” are male minorities between the ages of 16 to 25.
Bloomberg apologized for his support of stop-and-frisk shortly before he announced his presidential bid: “I regret that and I have apologized — and I have taken responsibility for taking too long to understand the impact it had on Black and Latino communities.”
