Biden's implosion is obviously a key factor in Bloomberg suddenly looking good to Dem leadership eager to stop Bernie. It tells you a lot about what Dem power brokers think is really happening in those next few curiously under-polled primaries.
Dems think Bloomberg will have some kind of crossover appeal, and could blunt Trump's enormous advantage on the economy simply by virtue of being a billionaire. It will be fun watching Dem class warriors spin on a dime and praise Bloomberg as a genius solely because he's rich.
They're in the process of finding out that last-minute unvetted "savior" candidates tend to parachute into primaries with a LOT of baggage. Bloomberg has a good deal of left-wing populist energy, but also a long history of saying problematic things.
Dems will sell Bloomberg as the billionaire who validates left-wing policies because he's seemingly acting against his own selfish interest by proposing ideas that would hurt "the rich." No one who understands how he makes his money, or just how rich he really is, will buy it.
The hard Left will be uneasy with this sales pitch, and of course Bernie Bros will feel enormously betrayed by a plutocrat jumping in and buying the nomination away from their guy. In theory, it's hard to imagine anything that would make them angrier.
It will be an interesting test of Dem party discipline if most of the Bernie Bros fall in line behind Bloomberg anyway. He'll offer policy concessions - they tend to be very cheap dates if you talk about taxing the rich and climate change - and exploit their desire to beat Trump.
Also, there's nothing really new about Democrats becoming the Party of Plutocrats. They've been that for DECADES. They trust their media not to report on how much support they get from the ultra-rich. THEIR political money is always "clean and pure." Bloomberg's will be too.
The big obstacle for Bloomberg at this point is that Biden and maybe Buttigieg can prevent him from getting enough delegates. Bloomberg is gambling a LOT of money on them imploding in South Carolina and on Super Tuesday. It's not a crazy bet, but not a sure thing either.
If Bloomberg pulls it off, the Dem message will be that he can keep delivering the great Trump economy - he's a billionaire, he CLEARLY knows what he's doing, duh! - but with social justice and environmentalism and whatnot. It would be the best shot they could take in 2020.
Expect a lot of nostalgia to be drummed up for Clinton-style "enlightened technocracy" and a great deal of signaling to the Left that Bloomberg will give them what they really want. Normal working Americans will, of course, have no seat at the table whatsoever.
My advice to the electorate if Bloomberg is the nominee would be to remember the hard Left will be very much in the driver's seat. He's as much of a control freak statist as any of them. He loves social engineering. He thinks very little of normal people and their liberties.
Bloomberg will have to make HUGE concessions to the left-wing kook fringe to get them on board and keep them from making trouble. He'll be expected to pay off those political debts, and frankly he wouldn't resist very much.
Bloomberg as the nominee would bring Dem politics full circle, right back around to a weird variation on their old "run to the center, govern from the left" playbook - the play Biden is too old and clumsy to run, the play a lot of left-wing Dems are sick of running. /end
