Michael Bloomberg Quits Democratic Race, Ending a Brief and Costly Bid

He visited Orlando, where he opened a campaign office and commemorated the victims of the 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting. Then, in what would be his final campaign event, he rallied supporters on Tuesday night in West Palm Beach, promising to compete in upcoming battleground states.

“This is a campaign for change — a campaign for sanity, for honesty, a campaign for inclusion, compassion, for competence, and a campaign for human decency,” he said. “And this is a campaign to bring our country back together and put the ‘United’ back in the United States of America.”

Even as he took himself out of the running, Mr. Bloomberg is likely to remain influential in the 2020 presidential election, having pledged to continue to pour resources into the Democratic effort to unseat Mr. Trump and deploy his main field offices in support of the nominee.

He had pitched himself to voters as “the un-Trump,” often describing himself as “a sane, competent person,” while acknowledging what he called “the elephant in the room” — that a Bloomberg-Trump general election would feature “two New York billionaires” who have played golf together in the past.

Along the way, he became a favorite target of Mr. Trump’s on Twitter, with the president posting about Mr. Bloomberg more than 20 times since he entered the race. “Only his highly paid consultants, who are laughing all the way to the bank, still support him,” Mr. Trump wrote this week.

Mr. Bloomberg used his wealth to assemble an enormous campaign team of over 2,400 staff members spread across hundreds of offices. He concentrated more than 100 of those offices in Super Tuesday states, where his infrastructure quickly exceeded that of his opponents. For instance, in Ms. Warren’s home state of Massachusetts — where Mr. Bloomberg himself grew up — he established six field offices across the state, four more than Ms. Warren and five more than Mr. Biden, who ultimately won there.

But the very things Mr. Bloomberg called competitive advantages to his candidacy — his moderate politics and dual identity with both sides of the aisle — were also liabilities to his Democratic bid.