So it’s strange that there may be no one on this planet who is doing more to make a Sanders nomination more likely than Mike Bloomberg. Certainly no one is spending more money on making that more likely than this billionaire is.

This exercise is increasingly taking on the cast of a vanity campaign — an extraordinarily expensive one at that. The latest absurdity comes courtesy of Bloomberg’s top adviser, Kevin Sheekey, who is now saying that the result in South Carolina won’t “matter.”

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As Politico reports, Sheekey went on MSNBC and argued that the Super Tuesday contests — which come three days after the South Carolina primary on Saturday — will be what really decides the state of the race.

“South Carolina is not going to matter,” Sheekey said, because no one will get out of the race before Super Tuesday, and we won’t know anything before that: “We’re gonna have a really good idea about how it looks after Tuesday.”

The only sense in which South Carolina is significant, Sheekey argued, is that if Joe Biden doesn’t do extraordinarily well, it will be a huge blow to him. “It’d be an enormous blow to the [former] vice president if he lost or just won by a little,” Sheekey continued.

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Obviously Sheekey was not literally saying that South Carolina doesn’t matter. But this still unintentionally captures what has been a galling arrogance driving the Bloomberg campaign all along.

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This arrogance has manifested itself in all kinds of ways. Bloomberg and his team began plotting a strategy to snatch the nomination from Sanders at a contested convention — even if Sanders got far more votes — well in advance of competing in a single primary contest with actual voting.

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Bloomberg’s advisers also leaked a memo suggesting the other moderate candidates (who had been campaigning for over a year) should get out, because only Bloomberg has a clear shot at stopping Sanders. This was based only on what polls were saying, since it, too, came before Bloomberg competed in a single contest with voting.

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Bloomberg’s campaign also released a video deceptively edited to make the other candidates look flummoxed by his claim that only he has started a business. This contemptuously portrayed their experiences (as senators, a vice president, a Rust Belt mayor) as somehow inferior. This is staggeringly tone-deaf about what appeals to Democratic audiences.

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Bloomberg’s massive expenditures, which are designed to overwhelm the other candidates’ fundraising through sheer gargantuan size and scale and depth, are also on some level deeply disdainful of the process, particularly when contrasted with Sanders’s massive success in small-dollar grass-roots fundraising.

Indeed, the plain meaning of the idea that nothing will “matter” until Super Tuesday is that nothing will matter until there’s voting in the contests in states into which Bloomberg has been sinking truly enormous sums of his fortune.

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But the early contests have told us important things. They have shown that Sanders is driving a real movement, and that his coalition has proven broader than many experts predicted it would.

They have shown that former South Bend, Ind., mayor Pete Buttigieg and Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren are all formidable political competitors with passionate, committed followings.

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They have shown that Biden — who took it on the chin early on but rebounded with a strong debate performance in South Carolina — is willing to battle hard to right himself, which he very well may succeed in doing.

Nor is it even clear that Super Tuesday will show Bloomberg gaining much return for all his money when the voting starts. As Nate Silver detailed, Bloomberg has stalled or is backsliding in numerous national and Super Tuesday state polls.

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On top of all this, as Jennifer Rubin writes, Bloomberg may be making it more likely than anyone else that Sanders wins the nomination, because he’s vacuuming up moderate votes while also failing to take on Sanders at the debates, which have been middling to disastrous for him.

As Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg put it to me: “If Biden were to have even a third of Bloomberg’s current core, we’d have a very different race from here on out.”

By Bloomberg’s own lights, this makes one wonder why he’s doing this.