And while the candidates trying to appeal to the country’s political middle — Mr. Biden, Ms. Klobuchar and Mr. Buttigieg — jockey for advantage in the early states, Mr. Bloomberg is betting that enough voters elsewhere in the country will come to see him as the consensus alternative to Mr. Sanders.
“I was not running, remember, in four states,” Mr. Bloomberg said on Wednesday in response to a question about his campaign strategy. “I’m a believer that if we’re going to unite this country, we should unite the whole country. So I’ve been going to small states as well as big states, states that are on Super Tuesday and states that don’t vote for a long time.”
Over the next several weeks, Mr. Bloomberg plans to campaign heavily, starting on Wednesday in Tennessee before going to North Carolina and Texas on Thursday, then Virginia on Saturday. All four states vote on Super Tuesday.
Speaking to reporters in Chattanooga, Mr. Bloomberg said he saw nothing productive about joining in the criticisms of Mr. Sanders. And in a speech to prospective voters, he made an appeal for unity. “The stakes couldn’t be higher,” he told the crowd, only 500 members of which made it into the main room to hear him speak while 500 more waited in an overflow room or stood outside in the rain. “The way to defeat Trump is by appealing to the broadest possible coalition — Americans of all backgrounds and parties — to stand shoulder to shoulder.”
Ms. Stevens says voters in her congressional district outside Detroit are looking for just such a candidate. She avoided talking about Mr. Sanders. But in explaining her support for Mr. Bloomberg, she made it clear that she did not believe Mr. Sanders had a profile that would appeal to her constituents.
“What I think is going to resonate in my district is somebody who is a world-class business leader or a government leader,” she said, “somebody who has led a city that is bigger than the populations of certain states.”
The concerns among many Wall Street executives about Mr. Sanders are straightforward: His worldview is at odds with the capitalist, free-market system on which the American finance industry thrives. Vin Ryan, founder of the venture-capital firm Schooner Capital and a supporter of Ms. Warren, said he viewed Mr. Sanders as “a lightning rod” whom Republicans would attack nonstop as a socialist.
“You’ve got enormous numbers of independent voters that don’t like Trump,” he added, “but when you come to the pocketbook issues — particularly that fact that in spite of Trump the economy’s doing well,” that redounds to the president’s benefit, he said.
Jeremy W. Peters reported from Chattanooga, Sheryl Gay Stolberg from Washington, and Kate Kelly from New York.