And it might be especially hard for Bloomberg to increase his support considering his lackluster favorability numbers. In that Morning Consult poll, his favorable rating was 31 percent and his unfavorable rating was 25 percent. That doesn’t sound bad at first, but that’s among Democrats, who normally love other Democratic politicians. (To take just one example, Sen. Cory Booker was at 43 percent favorable, 12 percent unfavorable in the same Morning Consult poll.) And two other polls don’t even have Bloomberg in positive territory with members of his own party. A YouGov/Economist poll this week gave him a 34 percent favorable rating and a 36 percent unfavorable rating among Democratic primary voters nationwide. And that Monmouth poll found that just 17 percent of Iowa Democrats viewed him favorably, while 48 percent viewed him unfavorably!

And while maybe some Iowa Democrats have a particularly unfavorable opinion of Bloomberg because his staff has said he would ignore early states if he runs, his national numbers aren’t all that different from when I looked at 2020 contenders’ favorability numbers back in February. According to an average of favorability polls from the first five weeks of the year, Bloomberg had a net favorability (favorable rating minus unfavorable rating) of just +11, which was the worst in the Democratic field once you accounted for name recognition.