
With Election Day happening early next week and the next President of the United States will either continue to be President Donald John Trump or be Democrat challenger Joe Biden, I think it's time to go back around nine months when a number of outlets were afraid (or maybe happy) that billionaire Michael Bloomberg would be the Democrat Party's presidential nominee and all of a sudden, it's time to take him seriously.
The gist would be that Mike Bloomberg, whom no one actually likes as a person, would flood the United States with hundreds of millions of dollars worth of advertisements for him, and in states that his opponents would be cash-strapped to actually compete in. Thus, voters would be hearing all Bloomberg, all the time. In the end, when he did drop out, half of the billion dollars in spending was done by just the Bloomberg campaign. He equaled all of the other campaigns combined. To this day, his campaign has still “out-raised” (by virtue of his own money) the presidential campaigns of the two people actually nominated by their party.
What did he get in return for that ridiculous amount of cash? He didn't get first or even second place in any state or territory besides American Samoa, which basically no one competed in. (KoopaTV darling Tulsi Gabbard got two out of its six delegates just because she was born there—those were the only delegates she got before dropping out. Mike Bloomberg got the other four.) In the end, it was a monumental waste of $500 million with perhaps the worst return on investment in history.
Why did this go so wrong? Perhaps it will be helpful to compare Bloomberg being the commander of his campaign with Colin, a commander of the Blue Moon nation in the Advance Wars series that is known for being one of the best commanding officers in the series. All of Colin's units have 10% weaker firepower compared to normal... but he more than makes up for it by being able to buy units at 80% of their regular price. It turns out that Colin Blue Moon and Mike Bloomberg have a lot in common, but also have very different strategies: