One of the strange aspects of this election is that if Trump and Sanders get the nomination, and Bloomberg makes a third party run, there will be three old New Yorkers battling it out for the White House.
To non-New Yorkers, Bloomberg is best known for his nanny state nonsense during his last years in office. New Yorkers mainly remember him as a boring billionaire who seemed like the least bad option. That is what any presidential run by him is still based on. Sure he's as appealing as a cold fish in a freezer, but if the alternatives seem crazy, then maybe he's got a chance.
Bloomberg has been trying to find a way into the White House for quite a while now. It always seemed like a deluded quest, but in a race where Trump and Sanders may be the nominees, things that once seemed impossible are becoming possible. Bloomberg is up to 13% with 42% of respondents not knowing who he even is. If there's anything that can make him spend a billion on the election, that would be it. And unlike Trump, Bloomberg really does have the money to self-finance a campaign on an epic scale. He's the 8th richest man in America. Soros is the 16th. Trump is 100 something. He's already given away billions. What he doesn't have is charisma or much of a platform.
On paper, Bloomberg is a socially liberal fiscally conservative big government technocrat. He's the kind of candidate that a certain breed of liberal Republican and fiscally conservative Democrat would love. The kind who will embrace David Brooks' programs to spend more money on social reform, while still cutting the national debt. Except that isn't really his record. New York City piled on quite a lot of debt under Bloomberg. And Bloomberg's obsessive efforts, especially in education, yielded fairly little.
Bloomberg was a pragmatist in some ways. He accepted the limitations of the city's economy and made the most of it, from tourism to film to a resort for the super-rich. Liberals hated him because of it, but he understood that there was no way to spend more money on social programs without having a way to pay for it. That hardly makes him a Republican, despite the fact that he ran on the party line for convenience's sake, but such elementary economic sanity is now alien to a Democratic Party rushing to embrace the most insane extremist proposals.
A Bloomberg run would attempt to seize some kind of middle ground, but if this race has shown anything, it's that the middle ground is unpopular. A more charismatic third party candidate might hijack the whole election, especially if most Americans hate the candidates of both parties, but Bloomberg would never be more than a spoiler candidate.
Bloomberg used his billions to dominate the political process in a big city. But even he doesn't have the money to dominate the political process nationally. Bloomberg could be quite dangerous if he were to finance someone else's political campaign. But he's also too egotistical to do it. And his political instincts are bad. He's wasted a whole lot of money on various gun control schemes without ever having an understanding of Americans.
And the appeal of a Bloomberg presidency is non-existent. The best that can be said of Bloomberg's time in New York is that he was a pest, rather than an extremist, a mediocre manager who couldn't accomplish policy goals, but kept some of the Giuliani legacy intact and aside from a few obsessions, such as controlling everyone's food, was a somewhat sensible politician.
The worst that can be said of him is that he was
1. Completely out of touch with people
2. Bought elections, not always with his own money, and had no problems consorting with some very ugly elements to do it, like Lenora Fulani
3. His nanny state obsessions with controlling how people ate and where they could drive, destroyed whatever legacy he might have had
4. Was and is an arrogant egomaniac with a cruel streak
Or to put it another way, Bloomberg is a lot like the candidates he would like to run as an alternative to. So what's the appeal?