720: The Moment After This Moment
This episode appears to contain dynamically inserted ads. Transcript timestamps may be approximate.
Florida is crucial to this election. Florida, Florida, Florida. One of the people who thinks about that a lot is Kevin Sheehy. He's the guy whose job it is to spend $100 million that billionaire Mike Bloomberg is devoted to winning Florida for Joe Biden. Sheehy is not intimidated by that task at all. He spent lots of Bloomberg's money in the past. He ran Bloomberg's three successful runs for New York mayor and his campaign for president this year. And Mike likes to say he gave me an unlimited budget and I exceeded every each and every time. I actually don't intend to do that in state of Florida. So why Florida? Of all the battleground states, why $100 million there? Kevin explained that a big part of it has to do with what's going to happen in other states. He pointed to all the times from tweets and in speeches that the president has said that mail-in ballots cannot be trusted. Donald Trump has sought to delegitimatize all mail-in ballots full stop. And his clearly will have a plan to contest those ballots after election day as they are counted in important swing states such as Michigan and Pennsylvania, which Joe Biden is currently leading in. Michigan will take at least three days to count their ballots. Pennsylvania is not much different. Trump has said, "Listen, I'm going to take every lawyer and every judge I have. I'm going to question every single ballot and try to toss them out." And just throwing out ballots by random could really move those states from Biden to Trump. That's because more Democrats are doing mail-in ballots than Republicans are this year. Bloomberg's people have actually run the numbers and calculated their states. We're throwing out seven percent of the ballots at random for not being filled out correctly, which will put Biden victory in that state to a Trump victory. And that's a very dangerous proposition. And that's what we're trying to avoid by getting into Florida. Florida is a state that Donald Trump pretty much has to win. If he loses Florida, it would be enormously difficult for him to gather enough electoral votes to have reelection. And this is key. Florida is a state that counts mail-in ballots as they arrive. They're counting them right now already, which means we very well could know the results in Florida on election night. And if Florida goes to Biden, it might settle the race that night. And our ultimate goal is to win the state of Florida so that we quite frankly don't have to have that fight in a state like Pennsylvania. So how did you pick a hundred million? What was that discussion like? You know, I listen, I think it was ultimately what we determined we would need. It was the number that we thought we would make a difference. I called a guy who I know who was probably the smartest strategist on the Democratic side. And I asked him, "How much would you need to spend if you wanted to be able to have an impact on a race, statewide race, and a presidential in Florida? And how much would you need to really put your thumb on the scale?" And he said at the time, "Well, you know, Florida is an extraordinarily expensive state. It has a lot of large expensive media markets. And to have any sort of impact, you really need to spend $20 million. And if you really want to put your thumb on the scale, you're going to need to spend $70 million." And so this being Bloomberg, we rounded up. Most of that Bloomberg money is going into TV ads and digital ads, dropped into cities all across the state like a vast air war conducted from 30,000 feet. Kevin Chiki says Bloomberg's doing daily polling to see what effect this is having, which is actually kind of hard to figure out how kinds of things push voter opinion around. But Kevin says the numbers in Florida have moved from a tie between Trump and Biden to a small Biden lead that's still within the margin of error, but it's a lead two to four points that the Bloomberg people find encouraging. So that's the view from 30,000 feet down on the ground that all looks a little different because of something so basic. And that's the coronavirus and how the two campaigns have responded to the coronavirus. As you may know, over the summer, the Democratic Party policy was do not go door to door, do not hold events in person, do not hold rallies. Republicans did all that stuff. And in Florida, even before
Transcription truncated.