In the latest sign Michael Bloomberg is prepared to spend freely on a prospective presidential bid, the billionaire has begun booking a huge quantity of TV ad time in media markets across the country — including the one that’s home to President Donald Trump’s winter White House, Mar-a-Lago.

The ads will begin airing as soon as Monday. As of the close of business on Friday, Advertising Analytics tracked buys of around $34 million in reservations so far, touching parts of all but two of the lower 48 states.


“This buy is MASSIVE,” Ben Taber, an analyst for the television ad tracking firm Advertising Analytics, said in an email to POLITICO earlier Friday. "I think it‘s going to be the biggest buy of all time," he wrote. Then-President Barack Obama had a $30 million, one-week long buy in 2012, Taber said.

Asked early Friday about the ad buy as the first reports trickled in, Bloomberg aide Howard Wolfson texted back an animated GIF that read: “Stay Tuned.” A spokesperson said he had "nothing to share at the moment."

“Bloomberg could spend more in one day than other presidential candidates spend in an entire campaign’s lifespan," said Fernand Amandi, a Democratic consultant pollster who worked for President Obama’s campaigns. "What makes the Bloomberg campaign budget so amazing is that there is no budget. Everything is attainable....We haven’t seen a presidential campaign like one that Michael Bloomberg could run.”

A handful of television stations across the country have already filed reports with the Federal Communications Commission with more details on Bloomberg’s buy.


The buy is a minute-long spot, according numerous FCC filings, and will mention an opposing candidate. A filing from WFAA, a station based in Dallas, Texas, notes that the ad "mentions running against Trump 3x within creative," in a handwritten note. The Texas Tribune first spotted the Dallas filing. Assembly Media is Bloomberg’s media buyer.

The ad buy comes one day after Bloomberg filed a statement with the Federal Election Commission creating a presidential campaign committee. The former New York City mayor has plans to spend as much as $500 million this election.

Bloomberg is worth $52 billion according to Forbes, making him one of the wealthiest people on earth. Progressives like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have said Bloomberg should spend his money helping other Democrats down-ballot, rather than make a late presidential run.

“Call me radical, but maybe instead of setting ablaze hundreds of millions of dollars on multiple plutocratic, long-shot, very-late presidential bids, we instead invest hundreds of millions into winning majorities of state legislatures across the United States?,” she said on Twitter earlier this month. Ocasio-Cortez has endorsed Sen. Bernie Sanders.


To blunt that criticism, Bloomberg committed this past week to spending $100 million in digital ads aimed just at Trump and another $15 to $20 million to register half a million voters.

One of the first ad buys spotted Friday morning was in the West Palm Beach, Fla., media market, according to Advertising Analytics. Advertising in the West Palm Beach market hits an important demographic of one: President Donald Trump, whose Mar-a-Lago club is in Palm Beach. Trump, a newly minted Florida resident and voter, visits Palm Beach more than his other properties from the Thanksgiving season to Easter, when the season for Mar-a-Lago and the snowbird season of Palm Beach and South Florida are in full swing.

Bloomberg’s team calculates that, due to the size and instability of the Democratic field, no clear frontrunner may emerge after the run of the first four early states that ends with South Carolina voting Feb. 29. That could leave the billionaire in an ideal position to forcefully begin to compete on March 3 when 15 states plus American Samoa vote on Super Tuesday.

While some of Bloomberg’s opponents may be starved for cash at that time, he will have the unprecedented luxury of being able to advertise in all of the states, including mammoth Texas and California, the size and expense of which can easily bankrupt a campaign.

There’s already a billionaire in the race, Tom Steyer — whose consultant, Kevin Cate, cautioned on Twitter that ad money can only go so far.

“TV spending isn't everything,” Cate wrote. “Earned media is king in presidential campaigns. I ran a one week @criticalmention report on Elizabeth Warren's TV coverage — & it came out to about 3x the monetary value of this [Bloomberg] buy.”

Cate estimated that Warren’s earned media alone was the equivalent of about $80 million.