Billionaire Mike Bloomberg, the Democratic mega-donor and former presidential candidate, urged the party against picking a nominee “right away” as more senior figures coalesce around Kamala Harris.
Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York, insisted in a statement, which did not mention Harris, that Democrats have “more than enough time” to gauge views in key swing states.
Other high-profile backers of the party, including Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn, and Alexander Soros, son of financier and philanthropist George Soros, have been quick to endorse the vice-president.
But Bloomberg argued rushing the decision would be a mistake. “We don’t need to get a resolution right away, but we do need to get it right,” he wrote in a statement on X. “The decision is too important to rush, because the election is too important to lose.”
Democrats have an opportunity for a “fresh new start”, Bloomberg added, with four weeks before some 4,000 delegates gather in Chicago. “That is more than enough time for the party to take the pulse of voters, especially in battleground states, to determine who is best positioned to win in November and lead the country over the next four years.”
Bloomberg spent $1bn of his own money on his short-lived campaign for the presidency in 2020. He won a single contest in the Democratic primaries, in the territory of American Samoa, before suspending the campaign.
He later embarked upon a funding blitz for the 2020 election, spending more than $100m in states including Florida, Ohio and Texas, and he had already emerged as a key donor to Joe Biden’s re-election bid before he withdrew this weekend.
Paying tribute to Biden on Monday, Bloomberg said the president had performed “an act of selflessness that only a great patriot would do”.
Earlier in the day, the Harris campaign revealed it had received a surge of cash from smaller donors following Biden’s withdrawal. “Since the president endorsed Vice-President Harris yesterday afternoon, everyday Americans have given $49.6m in grassroots donations to her campaign,” Lauren Hitt, a campaign spokeswoman, said.
