Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has spent more than $147 million on television advertisements during his run for the Democratic presidential nomination — and that’s before he drops another $10 million on a single 60-second advertisement scheduled to run during the Super Bowl.
Bloomberg, the self-made billionaire investor and media titan, has spent more in just the six weeks he has been in the race than the rest of the Democratic field has spent combined over the course of the last year. His campaign team has already hired more than 800 staffers, an investment unprecedented in modern politics.
“You can’t watch a single cable channel across the whole spectrum without seeing his mug. There is no parallel unless you consider [Ross] Perot,” said Garry South, a longtime Democratic strategist in California.
While other leading Democrats duke it out in Iowa, Bloomberg has entirely bypassed the early-voting states. He will not appear as an option for voters in New Hampshire, Nevada or South Carolina.
Instead, Bloomberg has bet his candidacy on states that vote on Super Tuesday. His campaign has already paid for more than $20 million in television spots in California and nearly $16 million in Texas. The campaign has spent seven figures on ads in Alabama, Arkansas, Colorado, Maine, Minnesota, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Utah and Virginia, all states that allocate delegates on Super Tuesday.
The only two Super Tuesday states in which Bloomberg has not invested substantial sums are Massachusetts, home of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D), and Vermont, Sen. Bernie Sanders’s (I) home state.
Here’s a map of the states where Bloomberg has spent on television so far, according to the tracking firm Advertising Analytics: