What the biggest presidential campaign ever looks like at the state level

This is our weekly newsletter, Hard Reset. Sign up here.

Power plants paid $18 billion to comply with an Obama-era rule aimed to reduce toxic emissions like mercury. By 2016, those emissions had declined 85 percent. Now, the Environmental Protection Agency wants to scale back air quality regulations, with or without the support of the power industry.
Billionaire and presidential hopeful Michael Bloomberg has spent more than $500 million on the largest advertising campaign in the history of presidential elections. That’s just one aspect of his behemoth, self-funded campaign.
Three years ago, the Trump administration killed net neutrality rules. A White House report hails consumer benefits from this and other tech policies, but experts in the field say the research is misleading.

Sure, Michael Bloomberg’s campaign is huge, but what does that look like at the state level? In Mississippi, Bloomberg hired 24 full-time staffers and spent millions of dollars in a campaign that one Democratic operative simply described as “f—ing massive.” Mississippi Today reported that Bloomberg has the largest full-time staff for any presidential campaign in state history. To compare, Sen. Elizabeth Warren is the only other Democratic candidate with paid staffers in the state, and she has just two.
The Virginian-Pilot spoke to more than 20 people for this deeply reported story on racial conflict in Portsmouth’s city government. The city hired Virginia’s first black, female police chief, then forced her to resign without explanation three years later. Reporter Ana Ley conveys the tense dynamic between the city’s leadership, council and community – and all without the aid of quotes from anonymous sources.
From The Frontier: Despite not being authorized to practice law, five interns prosecuted more than 150 cases in Oklahoma’s Tulsa County.

I did a deep-dive fact check into the White House’s misleading comments on former financier Michael Milken’s pardon. Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham misrepresented Milken’s crimes, his contributions to multiple industries and the role he played in “democratizing” access to capital, which remains dominated by inequality.
In a resurfaced clip from 2016, Bloomberg suggested farming is simple and the information age requires workers “to have a lot more gray matter.” We have some context on his comment here, along with details on other things he said during the speaking event – including that colleges should raise tuition “as high as (they) can.”
On our podcast, Hard Reset: The Equal Rights Amendment gets a second life, how jury selection works and an update on white nationalist Nick Fuentes, who YouTube banned this month for hate speech violations.

Thank you for reading Hard Reset. If you like what we do, consider supporting Big If True.

Send me feedback, questions and tips: bryant@bigiftrue.org and 405-990-0988. You can also tell us what you think in our reader survey here.

– Mollie Bryant