One billionaire attacks another in primary ads
Suddenly, it’s billionaire vs. billionaire in the Democratic presidential primary in Texas.
California billionaire Tom Steyer is launching a new television ad airing in Houston and other big media markets that attacks New York billionaire Michael Bloomberg over what Steyer calls racist policies in
Bloomberg’s past.
“Michael Bloomberg has been telling his story in TV ads all across Super Tuesday states, but there is another side of that story that voters need to know,” Steyer said of the ads that are scheduled to begin airing Monday in Houston.
Steyer has not won the same attention as Bloomberg in his bid for the White House but has spent more than $200 million of his own money running for the seat, according to the most recent campaign finance reports.
The attack ad focuses on stopand-frisk, the policy for which Bloomberg issued another apology just a week ago while in Houston. While he was mayor of New York
City, Bloomberg supported the tactic that allowed police to randomly frisk young black and Latino residents to look for weapons.
Since he got into the race, Bloomberg has acknowledged that policy was a mistake and that he should not have supported it.
“I should have acted sooner and faster to stop it, and for that, I apologized,” Bloomberg said during a rally at the Buffalo Soldiers National Museum in Houston. “I’ve spent a lot of time speaking with black leaders and community members and listening to their stories. I heard their pain, their confusion and their anger, and I’ve learned from them, and I’ve grown from them.”
But Steyer’s ad doesn’t make that distinction and instead plays a recording of Bloomberg defending the tactic while he was mayor from 2002 to 2013.
“Those policies were racist and Mike Bloomberg was wrong to support them,” a narrator in Steyer’s ad declares.
Bloomberg’s campaign declined to comment on the ad on Thursday.
Steyer’s campaign called the ad an “initial seven-figure TV buy” that will air in Super Tuesday states, most of which are already voting early. In Texas, early voting runs through Feb. 28. Election day is March 3.
Steyer, a retired hedge-fund billionaire, has focused his campaign on South Carolina and Nevada, where he is doing far better in public polls than in other states. A Las Vegas Review-Journal poll had Steyer in fourth place in that state with support from about 11 percent of likely Nevada caucus participants. In South Carolina, the latest Winthrop University poll had Steyer in third place with about 15 percent of the potential voters there.
Steyer has been ramping up his campaign in Texas, after he opened a campaign office in Houston this month and another in Dallas last week.
Bloomberg jumped into the race for the White House in November and has spent big on television in Super Tuesday voting states such as Texas to raise his poll numbers. In a University of Texas/ Texas Tribune poll of self-identified Democratic primary voters released last week, Bloomberg was favored by 10 percent. Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont led that poll at 24 percent to former Vice President Joe Biden’s 22 percent.