NEW YORK (AP) — How badly does Michael Bloomberg want a third term as mayor of New York? The billionaire is spending $35,000 an hour out of his own pocket and could burn through more than $100 million on what is already the most expensive self-financed campaign in American history.
Even though he has always been ahead — now leading his opponent by 15 to 18 points in the polls — Bloomberg has spent money as if the race were a dead heat, buying nonstop ads, targeted robocalls and high-priced consultants' time.
"It's typical New York hubris," said Baruch College public affairs professor Doug Muzzio. "The Yankees spend more on their players than any team in the league. This mayor spends more on elections than anyone in history. The only difference is, he always wins."
For Bloomberg, a 67-year-old media tycoon with an estimated worth of $17.5 billion, his biggest challenge has been in overcoming the negative publicity of reversing his longtime support for term limits and persuading the City Council to change the law last year so he could run again.
His Democratic challenger, comptroller William Thompson Jr., has run ads hammering Bloomberg over the reversal, but his message has been drowned out by Bloomberg's barrage of advertising, which began in April and never let up. Recent polls show the percentage of voters less likely to choose Bloomberg because of term limits — about 43 percent —hasn't changed.
More than a week before Election Day, Bloomberg had already broken his own spending record of $85 million from 2005, dwarfing even the $63 million that Texas billionaire Ross Perot pumped into his presidential run in 1992.
In 2001, when Bloomberg was running as a politically untested former CEO, he said early on that he could not envision spending more than $30 million because "at some point, you start to look obscene." He went on to spend $74 million that year.
The longtime Democrat from Medford, Mass., became a Republican to avoid a crowded primary that year, narrowly winning with Rudy Giuliani's endorsement just weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks. Bloomberg has since left the GOP and is not registered with any party, but he is running again on the Republican and Independence Party lines.
Thompson, a 56-year-old Democrat born in Brooklyn, has been city comptroller since 2002, a job that gave him the power to audit agencies and investigate spending. Previously, he was president of the school board and an investment banker.
Thompson, whose campaign spending is less than a tenth of Bloomberg's, has struggled to raise money and has not had much help from the national party. President Barack Obama did not campaign for him. The best Thompson got was a shout-out when Obama gave a speech in town.
He has been thwarted at every turn by Bloomberg's huge campaign operation, which snatched up the best strategists early on.
Bloomberg had been barred from running in 2009 by a city law that limited officeholders to two consecutive four-year terms, a measure the voters upheld twice by referendum in the 1990s.
But Bloomberg decided last year that he could not win the White House as a third-party candidate, and then the economy took a dive. So he persuaded the City Council to change the law, arguing that his financial expertise was crucial to steering the city through the recession.
Bloomberg has gotten praise from independent budget analysts on his financial management. When the city's economy deteriorated after the World Trade Center attack, he raised taxes and fees while trimming the budget and looking for ways to diversify the economy beyond Wall Street.
Even Thompson has praised the mayor's financial decisions over the years, calling his 2008 budget "fiscal integrity at its best" and noting last year that Bloomberg "is to be commended for balancing immediate needs with preparation for the downturn."
Once they become political opponents, Thompson changed course. He sought to portray Bloomberg as an out-of-touch elitist who favors the rich while hurting the middle class with policies such as raising the sales tax this year instead of increasing the income tax on the wealthy.
Some economic indicators in the city have worsened under Bloomberg, though many are reflections of the decline in the national economy, such as unemployment, which rose to 10.3 percent in September, the highest since 1993.
Homelessness has also surged. The number of people sleeping in shelters each night reached an all-time high of more than 39,000 in October, some 3,000 more than when Bloomberg took office, despite his 2004 promise to reduce homelessness by two-thirds by 2009.
And spending has ballooned by more than 20 percent under Bloomberg, compared with 9 percent during Giuliani's eight-year administration.
"It's clear that our city cannot afford another four years of Mike Bloomberg," Thompson said recently.
Bloomberg, who got his start on Wall Street in the 1960s at Salomon Brothers and later founded the Bloomberg news service, gives away hundreds of millions of his own money annually and draws a token salary of $1 a year. He argues his money prevents him from being beholden to anyone, but some say it serves to quiet criticism because so many nonprofit groups rely on his donations.
The accomplishments for which he is best known came in his first term, when he outlawed smoking in bars and restaurants and persuaded the state Legislature to dissolve the Board of Education and give him control of the city school system. In his second term, he banned trans fats in restaurants and tried without success to impose tolls on cars entering Manhattan's congested neighborhoods.
He has been vague on the campaign trail about what he wants to accomplish in a third term.
"I think it's more of the same," he said during the final mayoral debate Tuesday. "Making sure that we continue the things, making sure that we expand the universe of people that benefit from those things."
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