Mike Bloomberg focuses presidential ad campaign on impeachment
As the impeachment trial gets underway in the Senate, Mike Bloomberg is running a new ad urging lawmakers to vote to remove President Trump from office. The 30-second ad will run in 27 states, including Colorado, Maine, Arizona, and North Carolina, where Republican senators are facing difficult re-election bids. In the ad, Bloomberg touts his work in the 2018 midterms to help elect Democrats to Congress.
"I am running to defeat Donald Trump. In 2016 I warned that Donald Trump was a dangerous demagogue, and when the Republican congress wouldn't hold him accountable, I went to work helping run winning campaigns in 21 House seats," he says in the ad. "It's time for the Senate to act and remove Trump from office. And if they won't do their jobs, this November, you and I will." News of the ad was first reported by The Washington Post and confirmed to CBS News.
The campaign did not disclose what it's spending to air the impeachment-focused spot.
The ad comes as several of Bloomberg's rivals are forced to take time away from the campaign trail in the precious final weeks before the Iowa caucuses to return to Washington and serve as jurors in the Senate trial. Senators Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Amy Klobuchar, and Michael Bennet have dispatched surrogates to Iowa and other early states in their absence and are adjusting their campaign schedules to accommodate the trial in the upper chamber.
Here's the ad:
Bloomberg has two advantages over these rivals when it comes to the impeachment trial. For one, he doesn't have to spend any time in Washington and can keep to his unique strategy of campaigning in Super Tuesday and other battleground states while the top contenders are temporarily sidelined. And most significantly, he is spending his own money on his campaign and can afford to run ads, which puts him on televisions in voters' homes at a time when impeachment is blotting out the sun on the airwaves.
Meanwhile, former Vice President Joe Biden and former South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg are also taking advantage of the impeachment trial by packing their campaign schedules across Iowa and other early states.