Is Mr. Trump's position atop the polls convince business executives that there is a path to the Presidency for Mr. Bloomberg?
The conventional wisdom before Mr. Trump's campaign was that a billionaire was unelectable.
Given Mr. Trump's success, Mr. Bloomberg's friends say he should revisit his stance.
Bill Ackman, the billionaire hedge fund investor who has historically supported Democratic candidates, buttonholed Mr. Bloomberg at a dinner party several weeks ago at Mr. Bloomberg’s Upper East Side townhouse and urged him to run.
The drumbeat grew louder in late September, when Ian Bremmer, President of the Eurasia Group, a prominent political consultancy, wrote this tweet: “Word from those that know: Mike Bloomberg now seriously considering Independent run.”
According to friends, Mr. Bloomberg has long said he can’t run as a Republican, given his views on gun control and global warming. And he is convinced that he can’t run as a Democrat, given his strong connections to Wall Street, his wealth and his “stop and frisk” policies as Mayor, which rankled civil liberties groups.
That would leave him as an independent. He could easily afford to self-fund his campaign. He also could easily get on the ballot in all 50 states, and private polling he conducted years ago suggested he might be able to win a plurality of the popular vote, according to people close to him. But if he did not receive a majority of the Electoral College votes, he would then be at the mercy of the House to vote on the Presidency. That’s when he would lose, he has told friends, because the lawmakers would vote along party lines.
Bloomberg has told friends that if in March, the deadline for when an independent candidate would need to declare a run, the leading candidates were in his view problematic, he would reconsider.
But only if he could win.
NYC Wins When Everyone Can Vote! Michael H. Drucker
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