Former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg qualified for Wednesday’s Democratic debate despite a slew of resurfaced videos and comments he made about women and people of color.
Bloomberg qualified for the debate after meeting the 10% polling threshold in four polls. He officially qualified after a new PBS News Hour/Marist poll found him at 19%, trailing only Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, who is at 31%.
A number of recent polls have shown that Bloomberg’s strategy to blanket the airwaves with more than $400 million in ads is paying off.
A Monmouth poll shows him tied for first place with Sanders in Virginia at 22%.
A WSB-TV poll shows him tied with Sanders for second place in Georgia with 14%.
A St. Pete Polls survey shows Bloomberg leading Joe Biden by one point in Florida, with Sanders trailing at 10%.
Bloomberg hit with past comments about women:
The surge comes as Bloomberg’s past comments about women have resurfaced.
The Washington Post published a decades-old booklet listing Bloomberg’s vile comments about women at his company, noting that he has “for years battled women’s allegations of profane, sexist comments.”
In one instance, Bloomberg reportedly told a pregnant woman in his company to “kill [her baby].”
The article detailed a number of lawsuits against the company.
“A number of the cases,” the Post reported, “have either been settled, dismissed in Bloomberg’s favor or closed because of a failure of the plaintiff to meet filing deadlines. The cases do not involve accusations of inappropriate sexual conduct; the allegations have centered around what Bloomberg has said and about the workplace culture he fostered.”
“In any large organization there are going to be complaints – but Mike has never tolerated any kind of discrimination or harassment, and he’s created cultures that are all about equality and inclusion,” a spokesperson told The Post.
Bloomberg made comments about people of color too:
Bloomberg has also come under fire for arguing that banks deciding to lend black people money led to the 2008 economic crisis.
"It all started back when there was a lot of pressure on banks to make loans to everyone," he said in 2008. "Redlining, if you remember, was the term where banks took whole neighborhoods and said, 'People in these neighborhoods are poor, they're not going to be able to pay off their mortgages, tell your salesmen don't go into those areas.'"
They "said, 'Oh that's not fair, these people should be able to get credit.' And once you started pushing in that direction, banks started making more and more loans where the credit of the person buying the house wasn't as good as you would like,” he added.
In another resurfaced clip, Bloomberg argued that there was an “enormous cohort of black and Latino males” that “don’t have jobs, don’t have any prospects, don’t know how to find jobs, don’t know that the — what their skill sets are, don’t know how to behave in the workplace, where they have to work collaboratively and collectively.”
“Blacks and Latinos score terribly in school testing compared to whites and Asians. If you look at our jails, it’s predominantly minorities. If you look at where crime takes place, it’s in minority neighborhoods. If you look at who the victims and the perpetrators are, it’s virtually all minorities,” he said.
He previously came under fire for defending the racist stop and frisk policy that was struck down as unconstitutional by a federal judge.
