The 77-year-old former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg is running for president, on a centrist-friendly platform that’s mainly premised on beating incumbent Donald Trump. What makes Bloomberg’s campaign stand out, however, isn’t his positions: it’s how much he’s spending to get his message out. Google “impeachment,” for example, and you’ll probably get an ad at the top of the page that promotes Bloomberg’s campaign. Same goes for “climate change” and “gun safety.” It’s all over the place, but it does guarantee the eyeballs of people who are searching for answers related to ongoing political conversations brought up in the race.
And those ads aren’t cheap. The Bloomberg ad for impeachment reads “Trump’s Broken Promises | Enough Is Enough | We Deserve Better,” and it’s very prominent. Prominence costs money. While Google’s political ad transparency report doesn’t say exactly how much the ad costs, a similar ad ran for nine days, earned between 1 and 10 million impressions, and cost more than $100,000. And impeachment isn’t the only term Bloomberg is targeting.
According to Google, Bloomberg’s campaign has spent a staggering $14,849,500 on political ads since the candidate announced his run at the end of November; overall, Bloomberg has spent nearly $200 million on his run for president of the United States. (At the time of this writing, The New York Times’ state of the race has Bloomberg polling at an average of 5 percent nationally, which puts him behind Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Pete Buttigieg.) What’s more: while Bloomberg’s competition is soliciting donors — and in the case of Warren and Sanders, a majority of grassroots donors — the former mayor has pledged to spend up to $1 billion of his own money funding his run. Perhaps he feels that’s a small price to pay, considering his estimated net worth is upward of $50 billion.
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