Bloomberg Has Years of Experience Trying to Buy Elections. This Time He Isn’t Succeeding.
Mike Bloomberg has spent nearly half a billion dollars to try to buy the presidency. But after yesterday—Super Tuesday, when fourteen states voted—it doesn’t look as though he’s going to be able to realize his investment by becoming the candidate of the Democratic Party.
I have really just begun to think seriously about the meaning of Bloomberg’s candidacy. After all, I live in Ohio—not a Super Tuesday state. Because our primary election isn’t until March 17, we have only this month begun to see the flood of Bloomberg’s ads.
I had started thinking back about what I know about Bloomberg’s takeover of the New York City Public Schools from 2002-2013. (See here and here.) But I had sort of forgotten that one of Bloomberg’s pet causes over the years has been contributing gobs of money to candidates all over the country who are strong supporters of charter schools. In a recent blog post, Diane Ravitch refreshed my memory that trying to buy elections isn’t a new practice for Michael Bloomberg,
Bloomberg didn’t invest exclusively in New York, where he lives and where he was mayor. Bloomberg has made large political donations, for example, to candidates for the local school boards in Oakland and Los Angeles, and to candidates in Louisiana competing to join the Louisiana Board of Elementary and Secondary Education.
Ravitch directs readers to a new report in Time Magazine, where Alana Semuels describes Bloomberg’s political investment habits when it comes to candidates running for positions that control public education policy: “Bloomberg’s money has gone especially far in California, where two ethnically and economically diverse school districts, Los Angeles and Oakland, have embraced charter schools. He gave $500,000 to the California Charter Schools Associations Advocates Independent Expenditure Committee in February of 2017, which in turn spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on two pro-charter candidates running for the Los Angeles Unified School District school board. After that race—at the time, the most CONTINUE READING: Bloomberg Has Years of Experience Trying to Buy Elections. This Time He Isn’t Succeeding. | janresseger