Bloomberg spending big on Facebook
There’s a reason you’re seeing his face everywhere.
Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg is taking a page out of President Trump’s playbook and spending massively on Facebook advertising, hugely outstripping all other candidates — including the president — over the past month.
Bloomberg’s 2020 presidential campaign has dumped a total of $41.7 million into Facebook ads through Friday, the most recent day for which data is available. That includes $1.8 million in a single day on Feb. 11, his biggestspending day to date. He’s been over $700,000 a day every day since Jan. 27, and over $1 million for many of those days.
Trump made Facebook ads a key part of his strategy in the run-up to 2016, and he’s still feeding the social-media giant a lot of cash — $25 million since the start of 2019. But his highest-spending day tops out at just over $400,000, per the data.
Bloomberg, a billionaire media mogul and former Republicanturned-independent mayor, has become the focus of many of his Democratic opponents’ fire as he’s risen in the polls and is on the cusp of qualifying for Wednesday’s Democratic debate in Las Vegas. Bloomberg has bypassed the traditional early voting states including Nevada, focusing instead on the 14 states that vote in the Super Tuesday primary on March 3, including Massachusetts, where his TV ads also are ubiquitous. He has spent more than $417 million of his own multibilliondollar fortune on advertising nationwide, an unprecedented sum for any candidate in a primary.
“To me it’s a scandal that one person has been able to spend all that money on this,” former Massachusetts Democratic Party chairman and Warren supporter Phil Johnston groused to the Herald. “He’s trying to buy everybody.”
On Facebook, the Democratic field’s other billionaire, Tom Steyer, has spent $22.3 million. The next highest Facebook spender is U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, the Democratic polling leader, at just $8,769,78.
The focus on Bloomberg comes with many establishment-aligned Democrats anxious about the early strength of Sanders, who won last week’s New Hampshire primary and essentially tied for first place in Iowa with Pete Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend, Ind. Sanders is hoping to notch a victory in Nevada on Saturday as moderates struggle to unite behind a candidate who could serve as a counter to the Vermont senator, who has long identified as a democratic socialist.