President Donald Trump is gearing up for what many polls measuring potential general election match-ups suggest is going to be a resounding defeat in November. Now, if a new Drudge Report scoop is to be believed, that defeat could be even more stinging for the Trump camp. The conservative but sometimes Trump-critical, long-running publication claims that former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg, who’s steadily gaining ground in the Democratic presidential primary field, might choose none other than Hillary Clinton as his running mate when the time comes. Drudge claims the possibility has been explored thanks to supposedly favorable internal polling for the duo.
EXCLUSIVE: BLOOMBERG CONSIDERS HILLARY RUNNING MATE
Sources close to Bloomberg campaign tell DRUDGE REPORT that candidate is considering Hillary as running mate, after their polling found the Bloomberg-Clinton combination would be a formidable force… https://t.co/XH3TJA9nas pic.twitter.com/wBwRh1hVJH
— MATT DRUDGE (@DRUDGE) February 15, 2020
Neither the Bloomberg campaign nor Hillary herself have apparently responded to the report, but in the meantime, the report states:
‘Sources close to Bloomberg campaign tell DRUDGE REPORT that candidate is considering Hillary Clinton as running mate, after their polling found the Bloomberg-Clinton combination would be formidable force. DRUDGE has learned that Bloomberg himself would go as far as to change his official residence from New York to homes he owns in Colorado or Florida, since the electoral college makes it hard for a POTUS and VPOTUS from the same state…’
It’s unclear what those actual poll numbers might be — after all, in 2016, Trump successfully turned anti-Hillary animosity into his barely eked out electoral victory. Currently, according to RealClearPolitics, Bloomberg leads Trump by an average of six percent in polling measuring responses to a hypothetical general election match-up between the two of them.
Bloomberg has already been running a huge operation across the U.S., routinely spending multiple times more than even the often financially extravagant Trump campaign. Just recently, Bloomberg’s spending on ads alone recently hit the nearly $386 million mark, and it’s quickly growing.
Among the broad Democratic presidential primary field, Bloomberg has soared to third placed in national polls, currently sitting at an average of 14.2 percent of the support according to RealClearPolitics. That puts him just five percent behind former Vice President Joe Biden, who many treated as a taken for granted frontrunner before his dismal showings in Iowa and New Hampshire around the same time that his poll numbers sharply plummeted by around ten percent. Previously, he’s polled as much as twenty percent higher than his current dismal position — and in some individual states like Florida, Bloomberg has already overtaken everyone in the race. A recent poll had him with 27.3 percent of the support compared to just 25.9 percent for Joe Biden.
Bloomberg has faced heat from progressives for his past as a supporter of racist policing programs like stop-and-frisk, which gave NYPD cops a green light to essentially harass people of color at will with little to no grounds other than “suspicion.”
After the Drudge story, even former Hillary Clinton aide Zerlina Maxwell joined the mix, insisting:
‘Right now he’s blanketing the airwaves with glossy advertisements and if millions of dollars behind advertisements didn’t work to sell products, even defective ones, they wouldn’t spend so much on advertising.’
There’s still a long way to go to an actual Democratic presidential nominee. Currently, Bernie Sanders leads in a whole lot of polls, including in Nevada, which is the next state to vote.
