Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg appears to be backing off of some of his big talk about funding a giant effort to defeat Donald Trump in November—though it remains to be seen how far he’s backing off. Bloomberg’s campaign had said that if he was not the nominee he would fund a super PAC and continue paying his army of field staffers through the election. Instead, he is donating $18 million to the Democratic National Committee, along with the field offices he had already rented for the duration of the election.
The claim is that he realized that it’s better to have a unified field operation rather than multiple big efforts that can’t communicate with each other. But we knew that all along. However, in light of that, the campaign wrote in a memo about the contribution that “the best thing we can all do over the next eight months is to help the group that matters most in this fight: the Democratic National Committee.”
Michael Bloomberg the individual could not legally give $18 million to the DNC, but the Bloomberg campaign—even though all its money came from Michael—can do so. The DNC says it will use the money to hire field organizers, many of them from Bloomberg’s campaign (whatever “field organizing” looks like during a pandemic).
Bloomberg has also recently made large contributions to Swing Left, Collective Future, and Voto Latino, and may continue to fund his existing super PAC, which he used to help elect Democrats to the House in 2018. Super PACs are political action committees that can take unlimited contributions from wealthy donors, but they may not coordinate directly with the campaigns.
Overall, “We’re changing the mechanism, not our commitment,” to funding the effort to defeat Trump, one Bloomberg adviser told The New York Times.