From: The Intercept
Sent: Wednesday, November 20, 2019 1:18 PM
To: miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Pete Buttigieg is surging. It’s past time to scrutinize his record.
Buttigieg is surging. It’s past time to scrutinize his record.
Out on the 2020 trail, the Pete Buttigieg campaign has repeatedly attributed
Pete’s low polling among African Americans to a simple lack of awareness of the
South Bend, Indiana, mayor and his priorities. Going into tonight's Democratic
presidential primary debate, Buttigieg is polling well in Iowa and New
Hampshire, but is on less solid ground in South Carolina, where polls show Joe
Biden is taking the lion's share of the black vote.
“We know our biggest barrier to Black support is that Pete is new face to Black
America,” Nina Smith, his traveling press secretary, has said.
Last week,
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at a private fundraiser in California, Buttigieg made a similar point,
suggesting that black voters in South Carolina currently favor former vice
president Biden because they have “familiarity” with him, even though Biden
isn’t “the candidate with the best answers on the subject of race,” according
to a recording of the event we obtained.
“There’s one candidate who’s got a far and away lead in South Carolina,”
Buttigieg said, referring to Biden. “I actually don’t think it’s because it’s
the candidate with the best answers on the subject of race. I think it’s
because it’s the candidate who’s got the most familiarity.”
But awareness of Pete doesn’t seem to be the only hurdle for the campaign in
winning over black voters. First, there’s the fact that Buttigieg’s track
record in South Bend doesn’t match his plan for Black America. A central focus
of his Douglass Plan for Black America is to give 25 percent of federal
contracting dollars to small businesses from “underserved communities,”
including women- or minority-owned small businesses. But in South Bend, only
about 3 percent of the money spent by the city went to contracts with women- or
minority-owned businesses.
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Read Akela Lacy’s story, up this morning.
And last week, Ryan Grim
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reported on a list, compiled by Buttigieg’s campaign and published by the HBCU
Times, of over 400 South Carolinians who supported his Douglass Plan for Black
America. The strong implication was that these South Carolinians were black,
and that they supported his plan. Neither of those turned out to be true.
While many national outlets picked up
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a tangential story about the campaign using a stock photo image of a woman
from Kenya on the website for its Douglass Plan, the real story is much worse:
In an email, the Buttigieg campaign asked people to opt out of being included
on the list, and used the names of prominent South Carolinians who had neither
explicitly endorsed Buttigieg nor agreed to support the plan. At least one had
endorsed Sen. Bernie Sanders.
One of the names, present in the initial email rollout, was later removed from
the list. Johnnie Cordero, chair of the state party’s Black Caucus, told The
Intercept: “The long and the short of it was they never sufficiently answered
my questions, so I never actually endorsed the plan. They went ahead and used
my name.”
The Intercept also found that, according to voter rolls, at least 40 percent of
the list of supporters were white. The campaign had described the list in its
email as “over 400 Black South Carolinians.”
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Read the full story here.
Buttigieg's greatest offense, though, may be the case of earworm pandemic that
he has unleashed on the American public. Trigger warning:
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You will never be able to unsee this song and dance.
Nausicaa Renner
Senior Politics Editor
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