The goal, as it’s been put at points in private meetings: “All the data.”

A group of about 10 political and tech consultants meets every Thursday, usually in the converted Upper East Side mansion that is the headquarters of Bloomberg’s foundation and private offices. Discussions are led by Bloomberg’s top political aides, Kevin Sheekey and Howard Wolfson, as well as Brynne Craig, Hillary Clinton’s 2016 deputy field director and, for the past two years, a senior adviser to Bloomberg’s Everytown for Gun Safety group. Patti Harris, who was Bloomberg’s No. 2 in City Hall and remains a trusted adviser, joins for some of the meetings.

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Bloomberg is briefed separately by Sheekey and Wolfson, without the outside consultants.

The meetings have been going on for months, and have been kept a closely guarded secret.

A Bloomberg spokesman, Jason Schechter, declined to comment. The plan was to go public only once Bloomberg makes a final decision on 2020, and once they’d settled on the shape of the new group. But some details appear set, according to people aware of what’s being discussed: The team wants to collect data about voters on an unprecedented scale, match those data with consumer data, and then hire a team of engineers to do high-level analyses, looking for new ways to identify potential voters, and new ways to appeal to them. They want to match voter data to consumer information and social-media profiles, and look for new ways to break through.

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Then they want to build a new “tech stack,” or system for processing and applying the data. The goal, they say internally, is to fundamentally change the core Democratic infrastructure.

All of this work would be done in service of a Bloomberg candidacy, but people involved have come away seeing this as laying the groundwork for an alternative. Presentations are made about how and where the data can be drawn from, and then where they can be housed. The group has looked at potential vendors to help fill gaps.

Throughout, Bloomberg aides have argued that they believe private corporations are much more advanced in data collection than anything that exists in politics, and they need to use that as their model.

Leaders of the discussions have talked about establishing the group as an independent expenditure, rather than a PAC, which would put it in place for one election cycle, with the sole goal of beating Trump. They haven’t decided whether they’d want anything to persist past 2020, or what would happen to all the data collected if the group were to disband.

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All these data would almost certainly feed a huge investment that could make Bloomberg the biggest political spender on television and online advertising.