Bloomberg: Out of step

He has the money to advertise a product Democrats don't want: Michael Bloomberg for President.

His friends like him. There aren't enough people like his friends.

Michael Bloomberg's candidacy rests on the assumption that there is an audience for a business-friendly, culturally liberal, fiscal conservative candidate. 

The idea of such a candidate persists because there is a body of people who are highly successful and influential in business or other endeavors who want that kind of candidate. Business owners. Professional people. Civic leaders.

They want the government to work efficiently and fairly. They want the roads to get built, the subways to run on time, and the police and fire departments to do their work and the workers to be paid. They want civil order and low taxes. They live in a global world and are offended by racism. They operate in multinational organizations and they think insular nationalism is dangerous and bad for business.

They are people like Michael Bloomberg and his friends and less wealthy and famous people spread all across America. They didn't have a political party that represented them. 

They still don't.

The GOP coalition had pulled together businesses, with their interest in less progressive taxation and fewer regulations, and social conservatives, with their opposition to abortion and modern secular multiculturalism. It was a Party that sought social order, with trickle down economics from rich to poor, and employing the language of uplift and equality while supporting the informal traditional social, gender, and racial hierarchies. George W. Bush held this coalition together. 

Trump blew that up with a populist message. He criticized trickle down, he ignored the fiscal rectitude balanced budget message, and he made overt that traditional hierarchies were under attack and he opposed the attackers. The Party switched from a party of George W. Bush to a Party of Trump's big spending right-populism and ethno-nationalism.

Meanwhile, Democrats were reinforced as the party of social liberalism and corporate skeptics. Sanders and Warren are openly critical of corporate greed and power. The other Democrats are more moderate in tone, wanting reform and regulation. Still, the entire party has moved to the left, pulled there partly by the success of Bernie Sanders' message, partly in opposition to Trump who, upon election, became very business-friendly. crowding out that space.

The populist message of the stacked deck resonates with a generation, young people under 35 especially. The modern economy with gigs instead of jobs, with low wages and expensive rents, and with college being expensive and college debt common, has created a generation with political interests seeking a Party. Democrats of all varieties are moving to attract that cohort. The voter segments create a potential Democratic governing majority: people on the political left; plus frustrated members of disadvantaged communities of color, ethnicity, gender; plus frustrated young people. 

Bloomberg's problem: His interest is in social and economic order. However, the highly motivated voters consider the status quo to be fundamentally unfair. People from all sides respond to the message that the world is rigged against them. Social conservatives consider the  demographic and cultural trends to be an ongoing attack on the social order: too many people of color, too many new languages, new genders and pronouns and non-gendered bathrooms. They want to reverse the status quo.

Same, too, with the people who are pushing for change, the "social justice" advocates in the Democratic coalition, and the people all Democrats now speak to, those people, young and old, living paycheck to paycheck, unable to handle an unexpected $500 expense. 

Trump revealed the weakness of the fiscal conservative, trickle down, economic status quo coalition of the old GOP. As Rush Limbaugh admitted, after the 2017 tax act passed, Republicans never really cared about balancing the budget. Even the fiscal hawks of the years prior, including Paul Ryan, signed on for more deficits, higher debt, and voting to do so amid an economic recovery well underway.

Who are the fiscal conservatives? They exist. They are prominent men and women, practical people, non-ideological people, and often very wealthy people. These are people who consider success in business a qualification for high office, but they don't hold office in either the modern GOP nor in the Democratic Party. The ones who believe it are silent. The voters have been told they can have it all. Free stuff, low taxes, and debt the next generation will pay.

But there is no big constituency of voters for fiscal conservatism and the status quo. The wealthy 1% are, by definition, a small group. Democrats learned in 2016 that defending the economic status quo, especially Wall Street, was a losing proposition. Trump attacked Hillary for her ties to Goldman Sachs. Every Democratic candidate pledges support for organized labor, a higher minimum wage, and programs to return family wage jobs to the American heartland. 

Bloomberg has no credibility as a change agent on the economy, because he is not a change agent. He has credibility on gun regulation, but all the Democrats have credibility there. 

He has a fortune, but he doesn't have a constituency.