Here’s how Bloomberg could win the White House

News that former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg is again considering a run for the White House as an independent generated the usual fare from pundits about the unlikelihood that a third-party candidate will ever capture the presidency.

In this wild election season many political analysts have entertained the possibility of an event we haven’t seen in six decades – a wide-open, brokered convention (on the Republican side).

Yet, a Bloomberg candidacy in the fall could generate an election phenomenon not witnessed in the past 192 years – the lack of an Electoral College majority by any candidate in a three-way race, forcing the House of Representatives to determine the presidency.

Those who would certainly dismiss this outcome as fantasy were among the same prognosticators who assured us Donald Trump’s candidacy would implode and that Bernie Sanders quixotic bid would quickly go down in flames in Iowa and New Hampshire.

If Bloomberg chose to run an aggressive, high-profile candidacy, his centrist approach to politics could certainly score a lot points with Democrats opposed to Bernie Sanders (if he emerged as the party’s nominee) and Republicans uncomfortable with Donald Trump or Ted Cruz as the GOP standardbearer. (Those close to the former NYC mayor say that he sees no path to winning if Hillary Clinton secures the Democratic nomination.)

Getting to 270 Electoral votes, however, would be a daunting task. At the same time, if the election were thrown to the House it’s not terribly difficult to imagine that many mainstream representatives in both parties would side with a President Bloomberg rather than the chaotic polarization that would come with Sanders, Trump or Cruz.

The prospect of Bloomberg as a tantalizing player in a House vote was raised the other day by Robert Shapiro, a political science professor at Columbia University, in a guest column for The Washington Post. The professor reminded politicos that the presidential deadlock would be broken on Capitol Hill by 50 separate votes – each state’s House delegation, by majority rule, would cast a vote for the presidency.

“To win the presidency, one of the top three finishers has to win the support of a majority of the House delegations. If the delegations are divided among the three candidates, then no victor might immediately emerge.  Then some serious backroom politicking would begin,” Shapiro wrote.

“Could Bloomberg win under that circumstance? It’s impossible to predict. If he could, then he would want to make sure the politicking is resolved soon. If it dragged out, the Constitution provides that the vice president, who would be elected by the Senate from the top two finishers in the electoral vote for vice president, could become interim president. The vote for vice president would be by members of the new Senate, and that majority could easily vote along party lines for either the Democratic or Republican candidate.

“But even if Bloomberg couldn’t win in this scenario, he could still influence the negotiations and be in a position to demand concessions from the eventual victor.”

Bloomberg’s strength as a potential independent presidential candidate was probably greater in 2008, the previous time when he considered such a run.

This time around, he will face intense opposition from some Republican voters due to two issues – guns and (Big) Gulps. The ex-mayor has emerged as a hardliner on gun control and his restrictions on the size of soft drinks sold in the Big Apple pasted Bloomberg as a “nanny state” politician.

His support for immigration reform, his tough-on-crime policing tactics in NYC, and his defense of Wall Street machinations make the 73-year-old Bloomberg a mixed bag.

But he would have little difficulty emerging as a rational, commonsense moderate if the general election for the presidency degenerates into a hyper-partisan food fight between Sanders and either Trump or Cruz.