Mike Bloomberg wants to be president, but he also has a fallback plan: Defeat Donald Trump [View all]

[Zorro]

By the time Mike Bloomberg sniffed the hydroponic basil growing in an old tire factory here, he had already traveled 1,700 miles in three hops on his chartered plane, met with the mayor of Chicago and climbed into a soybean tractor on the frozen plains of southern Minnesota.

It was a show of force — four states in less than 17 hours on Wednesday, each event meticulously produced for local press, with separate rented motorcades and a button-down advance staff that choreographed his movements like a ballet. No other presidential candidate in the Democratic field would have tried to pull this off in January.

As the cameras shuttered before the purple grow lights of an urban farm, he asked if anyone knew the difference between a good salesman and a great salesman. The good salesman, he explained, can face rejection at one door and move on to the next just as convinced he will make the sale. “The great salesman knocks on the same door,” he said with a sly smile.

The thing that makes Bloomberg different is he can knock on all doors at once. Bloomberg is running aggressively to win the Democratic nomination but he is simultaneously building out a general election machine to defeat President Trump, with a new structure — data, field organizing, advertising and policy — that aims to elect Democrats up and down the ballot even if the party’s voters reject the former New York mayor this spring.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/mike-bloomberg-wants-to-be-president-but-he-also-has-a-fallback-plan-defeat-donald-trump-and-remake-the-democratic-party/2020/01/12/8ebe580e-3346-11ea-9313-6cba89b1b9fb_story.html