“The way I read with he said is if I didn’t get the nomination, he might consider it”, Clinton said.
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If voters are turned off by the leading Republican candidates and still on the fence about Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders, Bloomberg could really tip the scales.
“And the second thing is, I don’t think the people of this country want to give more power to billionaires at this point”.
In other words, if you are Michael Bloomberg: If the GOP and Democrats are fielding weak candidates, a third party run becomes viable.
The source added that Bloomberg sees the Republican and Democratic presidential races as becoming increasingly polarized, and neither fits Bloomberg’s views. Bloomberg will take another poll after the New Hampshire primary on February 9, sources tell the New York Times.
The New York Times followed by the Associated Press said early Sunday that Bloomberg advisors were analyzing a scenario that he challenge Republic Donald Trump and Democrat center-left senator Bernie Sanders. Bloomberg had seemed to flirt with independent presidential candidacies before in 2008 and 2012, but elected not to run in both cases after determining he had little chance of winning.
The prospect of Bloomberg launching a third-party presidential campaign has been speculated about for years.
The real news is that these efforts have intensified, and that Bloomberg has set a deadline of early March for making a decision on whether to enter the race. His supporters say that he could be an attractive option in a race that has so far tended towards more non-traditional political options.
An adviser said that Bloomberg is upset over extremist rhetoric in the Republican field, as well as Clinton’s leftward turn as she attempts to counter an unexpected surge from Sanders, a self-described democratic socialist from Vermont, reported The Wall Street Journal. More recently, the most successful independent candidate was Ross Perot, a businessman in the Bloomberg mold, who received almost nineteen per cent of the vote in 1992.
Bloomberg is also rumored to have commissioned a poll over the month of December to gauge how well he stacks up against respective party front-runners Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.
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“His stands on the issues – where he is on individual liberties and the rights of Americans, whether it’s gun control or big taxation – I think he’s very much in line with the Democratic party”, she said.
