The end of the beginning for Buttigieg
The end of the beginning for Buttigieg
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By Adam Wren and design by Kris Davidson
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Days to Super Tuesday: 1
Days to Indiana’s primary: 64
BREAKING:
At 6 p.m. Sunday, I received a text to get to South Bend, rolled out of bed from a post-South Carolina nap, and sped north up U.S. 31 to the Century Center: Pete Buttigieg was ending his presidential campaign in the same place he launched his memoir last February.
Nearly 24 hours later, Buttigieg was on a plane to Dallas, where he is expected to endorse former Vice President Joe Biden alongside Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar.
It’s been a long, fun ride covering the Buttigieg campaign. I’ll have more thoughts later about campaign coverage in general. But first, sleep.
Also later this week, I’ll be back to our regularly scheduled programming covering all levels of Indiana politics. It’s looking very likely that Indiana’s Democratic primary will matter.
Here’s my final big swing on Buttigieg just published in POLITICO Magazine:
SOUTH BEND—The Jefferson Boulevard Bridge, built in 1906, arches over the St. Joseph River in the heart of downtown here. It took a city engineer a year to fashion from concrete. In 2015, to commemorate the city’s 150th birthday, as mayor, Pete Buttigieg installed river lights that reflect off the water—a sign of the city’s resurgence.
A week before his historic campaign launched last April, Mike Schmuhl, Buttigieg’s affable and even-keeled campaign manager and classmate at St. Joseph High School, walked me through the candidate’s new headquarters, pointing out the campaign’s logo: The bridge. It was a nod to Buttigieg’s record as mayor and the city that made him. It was also a metaphor: The candidate intended to build a broad coalition of voters, what he often called an “intergenerational alliance.” Buttigieg planned to launch his campaign at a plaza nearby the bridge.
But the outdoor launch never fully materialized. Cold weather and rain pushed the event inside Studebaker Building 84, the hulking former auto factory. That turned out to be another metaphor: The coalition that would bridge generations and ethnicities and income and education levels never came together, either.
Buttigieg, once a little-known former mayor of Indiana’s fourth-largest city, managed an impressive feat before dropping out of the presidential race on Sunday. He raised $100 million from a pool of 1 million donors and built an impressive network of staffers, supporters and volunteers that will be at the ready should he run again. (Buttigieg was on track for his best fundraising quarter ever when he dropped out, according to multiple aides.) He built broad coalitions in Iowa and New Hampshire—for example, he won in rural areas in Iowa, but performed well in the suburbs, too—and appealed to the white Rust Belt Obama-Trump voter. (His Super Tuesday Election eve rally was scheduled to be in perhaps the most famous of these pivot counties: Macomb County, Michigan.)
But, as he moved on to competing in more diverse states, he couldn’t complete the most fundamental task he set out to accomplish: bridge building. He tended to appeal to white voters, more than voters of color (despite spending more time than any other candidate in South Carolina), and older voters, more than young voters. Despite being a millennial candidate, he found himself rejected by pockets of his own generation, particularly on Twitter among the online left: They harangued him as an opportunist and careerist. His Midwestern earnestness—and outsized ambition—came across to them as smarm and hubris.
His stoic style also sometimes prevented him from connecting on an emotional level with voters. “I am sometimes asked to be more, I don’t know, have more of a flourish in displaying my emotions, and it is precisely because I feel very strongly about lots of things that I have learned to master how I might feel about anything and channel that into action,” he told the New York Times.
Read more.
AROUND IMPORTANTVILLE
Vice President Mike Pence will speak to senators about the coronavirus.
IMPORTANTVILLE READS
Daniel Politi, Slate: “Trump Says Buttigieg’s Exit Is Start of “Dems Taking Bernie out of Play.” Polls Tell a Different Story.”
While the idea that Buttigieg’s exit from the race will directly benefit Biden seems like conventional wisdom, polls tell a more complicated story. A recent Morning Consult poll showed that Buttigieg’s supporters are pretty divided and their top second choice is none other than Sen. Bernie Sanders. Twenty-one percent of Buttigieg’s supporters described the senator from Vermont as their second choice. Biden and Sen. Elizabeth Warren are tied for a close second place with 19 percent, and Michael Bloomberg isn’t far behind with 17 percent.
Elena Schneider, Politico: “Inside the sudden end of Pete Buttigieg’s campaign”
Soon after midnight on Sunday morning, Pete Buttigieg convened his senior advisers on a conference call. Sitting in a car after flying to Georgia from his last rally in Raleigh, N.C., Buttigieg told them the campaign was over.
Buttigieg’s staff had just briefed top donors two days earlier about his plans to push forward in the presidential race, looking deep into the March primary calendar for friendly Midwestern states. But in the hours between those two calls, Buttigieg’s disappointing fourth-place finish in South Carolina’s primary — and Joe Biden’s stronger-than-expected win there — squeezed the delegate math of the 2020 race.
Thomas Beaumont, Meg Kinnard and Steve Peoples, Associated Press: “Buttigieg ends historic presidential campaign, urges unity”
“He’s 38 years old,” Axelrod said. “He’s vaulted himself into the national conversation. He obviously has work to do on some things that -- some weaknesses we’ve seen in this election -- but whenever there is a conversation again about Democratic candidates, he’ll be in that conversation. And that’s a remarkable achievement, given where he started a year ago.”
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SPONSORED: The Mitch Daniels Leadership Foundation is looking for its next class of Fellows. Applications will be accepted from every part of the state. Details and the application are here.
