Bloomberg’s Florida Spending Spree Has Trump Campaign Seeing Red

When it comes to presidential politics, there are no shortage of dirty tricks that have been tried over the years.  Everything from muckraking to attempted murder, and vitriolic feuding to voter fraud.  Now that we’re trapped in this hellish and bitter 2020 contest, it should come as no surprise that these dirty tricks are becoming the new normal.

Now, thanks to the number of wealthy folks who just can’t stand President Trump, the filthy rich are getting their hands dirty as well.

Billionaire Michael Bloomberg’s $100 million investment in Florida to defeat Donald Trump is recasting the presidential contest in the president’s must-win state, forcing his campaign to spend big to shore up his position and freeing up Democratic cash to expand the electoral map elsewhere.

Bloomberg’s massive advertising and ground-game spending, which began roughly a month ago, has thrown Trump into a defensive crouch across the arc of Sunbelt states. As a result, the president‘s campaign has scaled back its TV ad buys in crucial Northern swing states like Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan — a vacuum being filled by a constellation of outside political groups backing Joe Biden.

The left has been gloating about the success of this tactic.

“It’s forced the Trump campaign to retrench in Florida. You can see it in the spending habits, in television and digital. They’re investing more at the expense of places they need to win,” said Steve Schale, who leads the pro-Biden Unite the Country super PAC.

“Basically, Trump has now been committed to the equivalent of land war in Asia by having to spend so much of his money in Florida, a state he has to win to get to 270 Electoral College votes,” Schale said. “And as a result, he doesn’t have the resources to compete everywhere he would like.”

Of course, this is an election in which a very small minority of voters are actually undecided, meaning that this sort of spending is unprecedented when broken down to the per-person level.