Buttigieg exits race after big SC loss
SOUTH BEND, Ind. — Pete Buttigieg, a former small-city Indiana mayor and first openly gay major presidential candidate, said Sunday night he was dropping out of the Democratic race, following a crushing loss in the
South Carolina primary where his poor performance with black Democrats signaled an inability to build a broad coalition of voters.
The decision comes just 48 hours before the biggest voting day of the primary, Super Tuesday, when 15 states and territories will allot a third of the delegates overall. The results were widely expected to show him finishing far behind Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders.
Buttigieg canceled plans for a Sunday night rally in Dallas and a Monday morning fundraiser in Austin, Texas, to return to South Bend to address supporters. “Sometimes the longest way around really is the shortest way home,” he said.
“The truth is that the path has narrowed to a close, for our candidacy if not for our cause,” he said, adding, “Tonight I am making the difficult decision to suspend my campaign for the presidency.”
Invoking his experience as a two-term mayor of South Bend, he said his candidacy caught on not despite that experience but because of it. America, he said, was “eager to get Washington to start running like our best run communities.”
On a conference call with campaign donors Sunday evening, Buttigieg said he had reached the decision with regret but concluded it was “the right thing to do, when we looked at the math,” according to one person on the call. Without mentioning opponents by name, Buttigieg said he was concerned about the effect he would have on the race by staying in, saying Democrats needed to field “the right kind of nominee” against Donald Trump.
It is unclear if Buttigieg will endorse another candidate. He and Biden have exchanged voice messages, a Biden campaign official said.
Buttigieg’s departure was
another step in the narrowing of a Democratic field that once featured two dozen candidates, and now has six. His move comes one day after Tom Steyer, a billionaire former hedge fund executive, dropped out after a disappointing finish in South Carolina where he invested millions of dollars.
Buttigieg, 38, skyrocketed from obscurity into the top tier of a field of more than two dozen Democratic presidential candidates largely on the strength of his robust fundraising totals early last year. He collected more than $24 million in the three-month period ending June 30, more than any other candidate in the field.
The campaign spent nearly all of its funds to deliver its virtual tie for first place in Iowa and a narrow second-place finish behind Sanders in New Hampshire. But the rush of contributions the campaign expected after Iowa and New Hampshire never materialized. The Iowa Democratic Party’s vote-counting fiasco robbed Buttigieg of some of the expected momentum and media attention after the state’s caucuses, and Sen. Amy Klobuchar was the big story after her surprise thirdplace showing in New Hampshire.
And Buttigieg never broadened his breadth of support in a party with a large component of nonwhite voters, and one that has veered leftward since 2018.
He came in a distant third in the Nevada caucuses, which drew strong numbers of Latino voters, and then fourth place in South Carolina, where black voters made up a majority of the Democratic electorate. He won just 3% of them, according to exit polls.
After raising more than $76 million in 2019, an astonishing haul for a mayor with no national profile, Buttigieg spent nearly all his treasure in Iowa and New Hampshire. He faced campaigning coast-to-coast for Super Tuesday with evaporating funds and little chance of clearing the threshold of 15% of votes needed to amass delegates.