Terry McAuliffe served as the 72nd Governor of Virginia from 2014 to 2018 and remains a powerful force in Democratic politics.
He threw his influence behind Vice President Joe Biden over the weekend.
On Monday, during an appearance on Yahoo Finance, he stopped short of directly asking moderate candidates to drop out to get behind the former Vice President but his message was clear.
“It is time to consolidate,” McAuliffe said. Candidates "have to look at the map and do they have a pathway to the nomination? If they don't, we need to get this down to a two-person race.”
And some consolidation is definitely happening. Hours after McAuliffe’s appearance, Sen. Amy Klobuchar announced she was suspending her presidential campaign and would endorse Joe Biden for president. Over the weekend both Tom Steyer and Pete Buttigieg announced they were suspending their presidential bids.
Biden has an uphill climb to wrest the nomination from Bernie Sanders, who is headed into Tuesday’s elections as the frontrunner. The Vermont senator is aiming to amass a sizable delegate lead during the ‘Super Tuesday’ voting.
As for Michael Bloomberg, McAuliffe calls the former Mayor of New York City a friend and says that the rival campaign might take a fresh look at his chances after the results come in Tuesday night. He predicted that Bloomberg, after the results come in, will “tomorrow or the next day, make a decision.”
McAuliffe considered his own run for president last year and has a long history in Democratic presidential politics. He chaired the Democratic National Committee from 2001 to 2005, was co-chair of President Bill Clinton's 1996 re-election campaign and was also the chair of Hillary Clinton's 2008 presidential campaign.
McAuliffe has also had a career as a top-flight Democratic fundraiser. He and his staff say they raised $275 million (a huge sum in 1990s dollars) for Bill Clinton's causes while president.
He thinks the money woes his current candidate has recently been suffered are easing: “I think there's going to be a huge influx of those that are going to help Joe Biden. I think he raised $10 million in the last 48 hours because they want a president who's going to focus on the economy, come up with practical results-oriented initiatives as it relates to the economy, not making pie-in-the-sky promises that will not happen.”
McAuliffe added later that whoever the nominee of the Democratic party, including Sanders, “it's not going to be an issue of resources. That is not our issue.”
But he did have criticisms of the current frontrunner for the nomination: “In those early events, you haven't seen Bernie expand his coalition at all,” adding that, “no one's been able to match the 2008 Obama.”
Ben Werschkul is a producer for Yahoo Finance in Washington, DC.
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