Pete Buttigieg ending ‘new era’ presidential campaign – By Emily Larsen (Washington Examiner) / March 1 2020
Pete Buttigieg is ending his Democratic presidential bid.
Buttigieg, the youngest candidate in the Democratic presidential field at 38, skyrocketed from the nationally unknown mayor of South Bend, Indiana, to a top-tier candidate in the Democratic presidential field with the help of an aggressive “go everywhere” media strategy. His unique biography — a gay, married, Midwestern millennial Harvard graduate and Rhodes scholar who served as an intelligence officer in Afghanistan with the Navy Reserve — piqued voters’ interest.
By mid-2019, Buttigieg was a fundraising force and beat the rest of the Democratic presidential field in donations from April through June. But, as he rose in national polls, he struggled to secure support from minority voters, who make up a majority of Democratic primary voters in some key primary states and are an important voting bloc for Democrats in general elections. The killing of a black man by a white South Bend police officer in the summer sparked protests and compounded his problems.
Rival candidates went on the attack by the end of the year, with Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar suggesting Buttigieg’s mayoral experience was not enough to be president and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren slamming him for hosting a high-dollar fundraiser in a ” wine cave.”
Buttigieg campaigned on leading “a generation of American leadership.” Early in his campaign, he presented bold proposals such as eliminating the Electoral College and expanding the number of Supreme Court justices to 15, but rarely mentioned those ideas later. He toed the line between liberal and centrist, declining to support far-left ideas rivals presented such as a wealth tax or eliminating private health insurance in favor of a single-payer “Medicare for all” plan.
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