Back in late November of 2019, gun control impresario Michael Bloomberg decided to get into the Democrat race for the presidential nomination. That was awfully late in the process, less than three months before the first primary, and months after the other candidates had jumped in and gotten their campaigns rolling.
But Mayor Mike had devised a super galaxy brain election strategy for winning the nomination and had billions of dollars to spend. Anything seemed possible.
Toward that end, he went out and hired staff nationwide. In order to entice them to jump from other campaigns and work for him, he paid top dollar and offered unusual perks, feeding them well and buying them iPhones and MacBooks. He also committed to paying them — no matter how long his candidacy lasted — until the November, 2020 election.
But Bloomberg’s presidential aspirations came to a crashing halt in March after a disastrous Super Tuesday showing. He’d spent $620 million on his quixotic campaign — a pittance for him, really — and only managed to win a handful of delegates in American Samoa. Five of them. You don’t amass $55 billion in net worth if you can’t recognize a losing proposition when it’s staring you in the face.
As for those extravagant promises to continue paying all of the campaign staffers he’d hired for the duration…he broke them. It was all a lie to get them to sign on.
He fired each and every one of them a few days after announcing he was out. On the plus side, they got to keep those iPhones and MacBooks (less taxes).
So given that track record, maybe today’s news shouldn’t really surprise anyone. Back in January, Everytown for Gun Safety, Bloomberg’s wholly owned and operated gun control advocacy operation, made a big announcement, promising to spend $60 million during the election cycle backing “gunsense” candidates.
As Bloomberg’s handsomely-paid sock puppet, Shannon Watts, crowed at the time . . .
BREAKING: @Everytown will spend at least $60 million in 2020: double what we spent in 2018, and more than the @NRA spent in the 2016.
We’ll play at every level and we’ll win thanks to this unprecedented financial spend combined with our volunteer army. https://t.co/rHNf197P6Y
But as the Washington Free Beacon’s Stephen Gutowski reports this afternoon, that $60 million commitment was just another splashy, buffoonish Bloombergian lie.
Despite promising to spend $60 million in 2020, Everytown for Gun Safety—founded by billionaire Michael Bloomberg and backed primarily by wealthy donors—has spent less than $26 million, according to Federal Election Commission records. Even with the cash on hand reported by the group in its latest filing, it will only be able to spend less than half of its goal without a massive cash injection before the election.
The latest filing for Everytown’s super PAC, which has done nearly all of the group’s political spending in 2020, shows the group had just over $4.6 million remaining in the bank on Oct. 15. It brought in just over $1 million—with over 85 percent coming from large donors—in September. However, even if the group repeated its best 2020 performance when it brought in a $7 million donation from former Microsoft CEO and Clippers owner Steve Ballmer in April, it would still be tens of millions of dollars short of its pledge.
Oops. As Gutowski notes, even the financially hobbled National Rifle Association has brought in more cash than Everytown lately.
…Everytown is being outspent by the NRA. The NRA’s PAC—which raised two-thirds of its haul from small donors—brought in more cash than Everytown in September. When combined with the NRA’s super PAC, the gun-rights group had a roughly $3 million cash-on-hand advantage over Everytown as of October.
That’s a shame.
Who knows…maybe spending less than half of what he’d promised will still be enough to elect a lot of the anti-gun candidates Everytown has been backing this election cycle. That tale is still to be told.
But this is just another example of why it’s a really bad idea to rely on any promises made by Michael Bloomberg.