NEW YORK (1010 WINS/AP) -- Former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg is not running for president in the 2020 election, he announced Tuesday afternoon.
"I'm not running for president, but I am launching a new campaign: Beyond Carbon," he wrote in an online posting.
He added, "Many people have urged me to run. Some have told me that to win the Democratic nomination, I would need to change my views to match the polls. But I've been hearing that my whole political career."
Bloomberg wrote that he will instead focus on his environmental initiative "Beyond Carbon."
"Now, I will take the next big steps," he wrote. "First, I will expand my support for the Beyond Coal campaign so that we can retire every single coal-fired power plant over the next 11 years. That's not a pipe dream. We can do it. And second, I will launch a new, even more ambitious phase of the campaign — Beyond Carbon: a grassroots effort to begin moving America as quickly as possible away from oil and gas and toward a 100 percent clean energy economy."
The billionnaire also writes that he will on gun control efforts as well, he wrote.
Bloomberg has flirted with a presidential run before, but as an independent. He registered as a Democrat last fall and spent recent months courting primary voters as a political centrist. But as an older white man with strong ties to Wall Street, he likely would have struggled to win over the Democratic Party's energized liberal base that's increasingly embracing diversity.
He encouraged Democrats to unify behind a nominee who could beat Trump, a not-so-subtle dig against candidates pushing the party to embrace liberal priorities such as "Medicare-for-all."
"It's essential that we nominate a Democrat who will be in the strongest position to defeat Donald Trump and bring our country back together," he wrote. "We cannot allow the primary process to drag the party to an extreme that would diminish our chances in the general election and translate into 'Four More Years.'"
Bloomberg invested more than $100 million to help Democrats in the 2018 midterm election; his team has quietly been preparing a data-driven effort to go much further in 2020. While the effort would have supported Bloomberg's presidential bid had he ran, it will now be used to help Democrats defeat Trump.
