Barrett is a communications consultant and advisor to Square One Politics, a Democratic campaign consulting firm. He's also on the advisory board of DoSomething, which promotes civic engagement by young people.

Chaos. That is Mike Bloomberg's strategy for 2020. And after Iowa he has what he wants.

Smart billionaires don't keep airing national commercials of their bus driving through America — unless they know the path. That path doesn't seem clear to everyone right now, but it is. And every domino is falling in the right direction for it.

How we got to this path is decades in the making, involves a lot of money and should make you want to punch through a wall like the Kool-Aid Man. Because at the core of Bloomberg's apparent strategy is something antithetical to a functioning democracy. He doesn't actually need your vote. He doesn't need to win a single state in the primary. He has enough money to circumvent the entire process, to sustain a losing campaign until it becomes viable or hang around long enough to do something even worse for democracy.