Michael Bloomberg’s Secret Plans to Take Down Trump

Whether or not he runs for president, the former New York City mayor is building the most powerful political organization in America.

Michael Bloomberg has bigger plans for 2020 than running for president. The billionaire and former New York City mayor has been openly dreaming of the White House for 25 years, and spent huge amounts of time and money four times over the past 10 years trying to figure out a way to get himself there.

But he has hesitations about this race, too. He’s not sure there is a realistic space in the Democratic primaries for his centrist record. And he almost certainly won’t run if Joe Biden does, members of his team believe.

While no final decision has been made, his aides have been working on a fallback that only a man worth $40 billion can afford. Bloomberg is pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into a data-centric political operation designed to ensure one goal: crush Donald Trump.

This is potentially a very big deal. Everyone's joking about Bloomberg as a candidate and missing the more important thing from the article:

The team wants to collect data about voters on an unprecedented scale, match those data with consumer data, and then hire a team of engineers to do high-level analyses, looking for new ways to identify potential voters, and new ways to appeal to them. They want to match voter data to consumer information and social-media profiles, and look for new ways to break through.

Throughout, Bloomberg aides have argued that they believe private corporations are much more advanced in data collection than anything that exists in politics, and they need to use that as their model

Leaders of the discussions have talked about establishing the group as an independent expenditure, rather than a PAC, which would put it in place for one election cycle, with the sole goal of beating Trump. They haven’t decided whether they’d want anything to persist past 2020, or what would happen to all the data collected if the group were to disband.

The point is, the use of extremely sophisticated methods of identifying voters and getting them to the polls probably made the difference in Obama's win in 2012. The GOP didn't have a similar capability. Hopefully we won't see history repeat. Note that this is possibly going to be used on behalf of the Dem Presidential candidate and other Democrats, even if Bloomberg doesn't run, although I'm not sure how they could legally do that under the election laws.

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