Today’s report that former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg is considering a 2016 presidential run raises a few questions. What is he thinking? Does he really think he can win? And is it worth a billion dollars of his own money?
Here are the answers: He is thinking rationally. Yes, he may be able to win. And if he can win, it is worth a billion dollars.
[interstitial_link url=”https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/michael-bloomberg-considers-a-presidential-run/2016/01/23/1a0f4176-c1ee-11e5-bcda-62a36b394160_story.html?hpid=hp_hp-more-top-stories_bloomberg-1210pm:homepage/story”]Michael Bloomberg considers a presidential run[/interstitial_link]
Bloomberg has an opening as a centrist candidate between any extreme conservative and extreme liberal — for example, between Ted Cruz and Bernie Sanders. If the two nominees were different — say, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton — there would be less space in “the middle.” A Cruz-Sanders race is, of course, not necessarily the most likely outcome. But until we know who the nominees are for sure, it is not silly for Bloomberg to start thinking about running.
How would Bloomberg win? Given the rules he wins under one of two procedures.
First, he obviously wins if he wins a majority of electoral votes. This is hard, as we know from past cases. The strongest third party candidate in recent years was Ross Perot, who received about 19 percent of the popular vote in 1992. The problem for Perot was that he received about that percentage in every state and therefore received no electoral votes.
Bloomberg, however, would be able to see from his polling what states he could win and how many electoral votes that would amount to. I have no idea if he is doing any polling, but that is what any rational actor would do — and, as yet, there’s not much evidence that Bloomberg is irrational about these kinds of big decisions. If Bloomberg has a shot a majority of electoral votes and he very much wants to be president, he should run.
The second way Bloomberg could win is if no candidate gets a majority of votes. Then, according to the U.S. Constitution, the election goes to the House of Representatives, where each state’s delegation would get one vote. This is where things get intriguing.
Few, if any, House Democrats would vote for Bloomberg. Clinton would certainly get their support and so, I suspect, would Sanders.
[interstitial_link url=”https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/clinton-needs-an-iowa-victory-to-blunt-the-momentum-of-bernie-sanders/2016/01/23/b571255e-c1f2-11e5-9443-7074c3645405_story.html?hpid=hp_hp-more-top-stories_sundaytake-115pm:homepage/story”]Clinton needs an Iowa victory to blunt the momentum of Bernie Sanders[/interstitial_link]
On the Republican side, things are more interesting. It is not clear, at this moment, whether either Trump or Cruz would easily win over all House Republicans. Would some House Republicans rally around Bloomberg? This is what Bloomberg would have to hope for. It would also depend on the partisan composition of each state’s delegation in the new House of Representatives.
But it gets more interesting: to win the presidency, one of the top three finishers has to win the support of a majority of the House delegations. If the delegations are divided among the three candidates, then no victor might immediately emerge. Then some serious backroom politicking would begin.
Could Bloomberg win under that circumstance? It’s impossible to predict. If he could, then he would want to make sure the politicking is resolved soon. If it dragged out, the Constitution provides that the vice president, who would be elected by the Senate from the top two finishers in the electoral vote for vice president, could become interim president. The vote for vice president would be by members of the new Senate, and that majority could easily vote along party lines for either the Democratic or Republican candidate.
But even if Bloomberg couldn’t win in this scenario, he could still influence the negotiations and be in a position to demand concessions from the eventual victor.
Perhaps these more convoluted possibilities constitute too much of a risk for Bloomberg. In any case, this is what he should be thinking about.
Robert Y. Shapiro is the Wallace S. Sayre Professor of Government in the Department of Political Science at Columbia University.