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Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg is skipping the Democratic presidential primaries and caucuses in early states. Instead, he is concentrating his efforts on Texas and the other 13 Super Tuesday states, throwing money around like the billionaire that he is, advertising his name and trying to build an organization to wrest the presidential nomination away from the contenders in those earlier contests in Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina.
Those other Democrats are focused mainly on those four states. That’s the standard operating procedure in presidential campaigns, and it has been since Georgia’s Jimmy Carter surprised other Democrats in 1976, focusing on Iowa while they were focused on the standard operating procedure of the time — campaigning in big states with more electoral juice.
. . . Texas election history is littered with names of wealthy folks who burned wads of their own money on their way to defeat: Clayton Williams Jr., Tony Sanchez Jr. and Ross Perot, to name a Republican, a Democrat and an independent.
Nearly everyone in politics puts his or her own twist on things, but most candidates stick with conventional strategies. Perot, who had to file boxes of petitions to get on the ballot and who advertised his campaign with half-hour infomercials, was an exception. He influenced the outcome of the 1992 presidential race, winning almost 19% of the popular vote. But nobody has turned to his race in the search for best practices, the way they did after Carter won Iowa, the nomination and then a general election against incumbent President Gerald Ford.
Bloomberg is the latest well-financed candidate to really mess with the formula.
