Tom Steyer has made a multimillion-dollar Super Tuesday ad buy accusing his fellow billionaire competitor for the 2020 Democratic White House nomination, Mike Bloomberg, of adopting “racist” policies during his time as mayor of New York, including Bloomberg’s championing of stop and frisk.
The 60-second spot also features a clip of Bloomberg’s 2008 comments blaming the financial downturn on the end of redlining, or mapping out areas, typically on the basis of race, to determine who would be declared ineligible for credit.
“Congress and other elected officials intervened, saying, ’Oh that’s not fair, people should be able to get credit,’” Bloomberg says in the clip.
It also features Bloomberg’s comments at the 2015 Aspen Institute, which first were resurfaced earlier this month by progressive podcaster Benjamin Dixon. In the remarks, the former mayor defends the targeting of young minorities in stop-and-frisk police searches.
“Those policies were racist, and Mike Bloomberg was wrong to support them,” the spot’s narrator goes on to say before touting Steyer as “a president for all of America.”
Bloomberg, who entered the race late, is not competing in early voting states, focusing his attention on the massive block of delegates up for grabs on Super Tuesday. The states voting on March 3 include the two largest in the country, California and Texas, among others.
Steyer, like Bloomberg, has used his personal wealth to blanket the airwaves, but Bloomberg’s TV spending has dwarfed that of all the other White House hopefuls.