He phoned her about running for mayor of New York. His own adviser shot down talk of a seat in her cabinet. His campaign was reported to be weighing her for the ticket. None of it came off.
Michael Bloomberg and Hillary Clinton spent seven years running New York from opposite ends, he as mayor of the city, she as one of the state’s two senators in Washington. Politico, writing in January 2016, described what they had as a highly functional working relationship. ABC News, reporting six months later, said the two were not particularly close.
Both hold up. Across two decades, three separate jobs came up between Hillary Clinton and Michael Bloomberg: the mayoralty of New York, a place in a Clinton cabinet, and the number two slot on his own presidential ticket. Not one of them happened.
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How Clinton and Bloomberg overlapped in office
Clinton was sworn in as a US senator for New York in January 2001. Bloomberg took office as mayor of New York City on 1 January 2002, having spent his adult life as a Democrat and switched his registration to Republican in order to run. He left that party for independent status in 2007 and registered as a Democrat again in 2018, which is how a man elected twice on a Republican line ended up speaking at a Democratic convention.
Their years in office ran together until Clinton resigned her Senate seat in January 2009 to become secretary of state. Twice in that period they were in the same room on public business. On 21 March 2007, Bloomberg gave evidence to the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions about the long term health effects of the September 11 attacks, appearing with a group of medical experts. Clinton, by then in her second Senate term, sat on that committee, and healthcare for the workers who had been at Ground Zero was among the causes she had pushed hardest since the attacks.
Two years later, on 8 September 2009, she was secretary of state and he was still mayor when the pair welcomed Prince Willem Alexander and Princess Mรกxima of the Netherlands aboard the USS Intrepid, opening a week of events marking 400 years since Henry Hudson sailed into the harbour.
Timeline
- January 2001: Clinton becomes a US senator for New York
- January 2002: Bloomberg becomes mayor of New York City
- March 2007: Bloomberg gives evidence to a Senate committee Clinton sits on
- July 2012: Clinton launches Data2X as secretary of state
- January 2013: The New York Times reports Bloomberg asked Clinton to run for mayor
- December 2014: The two share a platform at Bloomberg Philanthropies
- June 2015: A Clinton ally sounds out Bloomberg’s adviser about a cabinet post
- July 2016: Bloomberg endorses Clinton at the Democratic National Convention
- February 2020: Reports claim his campaign is weighing Clinton as a running mate
The mayor’s job Bloomberg offered Clinton
His private preference for a successor, the New York Times reported, had been Christine Quinn, the City Council Speaker who had worked closely with his administration.
Then, in January 2013, the paper reported that Bloomberg had telephoned Clinton to encourage her to enter that year’s mayoral race. Three people confirmed the call to the Times, which described it as shrouded in mystery. Clinton, who was preparing to leave the State Department, told him she was not interested and would not be running.
Quinn lost the Democratic primary that September to Bill de Blasio, who had spent the campaign attacking Bloomberg’s record and who went on to win City Hall.
Data2X, the one project they built together
Bloomberg told an audience in December 2014 about his foundation’s work on maternal deaths in Tanzania, a country where it had found roughly one doctor for every 50,000 people. He was speaking at his own offices in New York, next to Clinton, at an event neither of them had any campaign reason to attend.
Clinton had launched Data2X in July 2012 while she was still secretary of state, as an effort to find and fill the gaps in global data about women and girls. Bloomberg Philanthropies signed on as a partner alongside the United Nations Foundation and the Clinton Foundation. On 15 December 2014 the two announced new partnerships for the programme, joined by Chelsea Clinton and UN Foundation chief executive Kathy Calvin. The fresh work covered six fields where information on women and girls was thin, including employment, financial services and civil registration.
The cabinet job Bloomberg’s own adviser ruled out
In June 2015, two months after Clinton declared her presidential campaign, an ally of hers named Neera Tanden emailed Howard Wolfson, a longtime Bloomberg adviser and former deputy mayor, asking what the former mayor might want to do in an administration. Was ambassador to China, she wondered, “way too small?”
Wolfson’s reply ran to seven words.
“Secty of state. Which ain’t gonna happen.”
Tanden forwarded the exchange to Clinton’s campaign chairman John Podesta with a note calling it something to know for down the road. None of it was public at the time. The emails only surfaced in October 2016, when Podesta’s inbox was published by WikiLeaks, three months after Bloomberg had already endorsed her.
Did Michael Bloomberg endorse Hillary Clinton?
Yes. He endorsed her on 27 July 2016, speaking in prime time on the third night of the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia.
He had spent the early part of that year weighing an independent presidential run of his own, dropping the idea in March on the grounds that his candidacy might help elect Donald Trump or Ted Cruz. He called that “not a risk I can take in good conscience.”
In Philadelphia he called Trump a “dangerous demagogue” and appealed directly to independent voters. He told the hall it was imperative that Clinton be elected, and in the same speech said there were times he disagreed with her. The Washington Post described it that week as an enemy of my enemy endorsement.
Was Clinton nearly Bloomberg’s running mate?
No offer was ever made. Bloomberg entered the Democratic primary in November 2019 and spent more than a billion dollars of his own money over roughly three months, a sum no self funded candidate had come close to before. Forbes valued his fortune at $109.4 billion as of 31 July 2026, seventeenth largest in the world. Clinton, who has filed no financial disclosure since leaving government in 2013, was last assessed by OpenSecrets at around $32 million.
On 15 February 2020, reports appeared claiming his team was considering her for the ticket. His communications chief, Jason Schechter, played the story down, saying the campaign was focused on the primary rather than speculation about a running mate.
There was a constitutional snag as well. Both are New York residents, and the 12th Amendment bars a state’s electors from voting for a president and a vice president who both come from that state. It is not an absolute bar, since a candidate can change residency to get around it, but somebody would have had to move. Bloomberg left the race in March.
Clinton and Bloomberg in 2026
Clinton posts almost daily to nearly 30 million followers on X, most of it aimed at the Trump administration, teaches at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs, and this week welcomed the launch of a new Clinton Foundation policy institute. Bloomberg makes arguments against the same administration in signed Bloomberg Opinion columns, lately on federal education data and on proposals to hand government ownership stakes in artificial intelligence firms. In the 2025 mayoral race he endorsed Andrew Cuomo, whose father was governor of New York before Clinton had even moved to the state. Cuomo lost to Zohran Mamdani, who took office in January.
The last photograph of the two of them together was taken on 11 September 2021, at the twentieth anniversary of the attacks, standing at the memorial in Lower Manhattan alongside Joe Biden, Barack Obama and Bill Clinton. It was the same subject that had put them in a Senate hearing room fourteen years earlier.
