After New Hampshire, Buttigieg Faces a Wall of Color

Pete Buttigieg made history this week, becoming the first openly gay candidate for president to win (we think) the Iowa caucuses, giving him a head of steam going into New Hampshire's primary on Tuesday.

But after next week, the former Mayor of South Bend, Indiana, will face a series of states — including California — packed with voters who look nothing like the ones in the first two contests.

"Someone polling at zero percent among African Americans is a fairly startling situation," said Steve Phillips, founder of Democracy in Color, who also helped start a political action committee aimed at supporting diverse presidential candidates like Sen. Cory Booker, D-New Jersey, and Sen. Kamala Harris, D-California, both of whom both dropped out before any votes were cast.

That zero percent is a reference to a recent poll in South Carolina, where Buttigieg has struggled to gain traction.

When Buttigieg first announced he was running for president last April, not many people took him seriously — not just because he was openly gay, but also because he was just 37 years old and mayor of a Midwestern town about the size of Daly City.

The campaign has since proven those doubters wrong. But winning over voters of color may represent the Buttigieg's biggest challenge to date.

It's not just South Carolina: Recent polls in states including California show Buttigieg with extremely low support from black, Latino and Asian voters.

Phillips said Buttigieg's record as mayor of South Bend may in part explain those low numbers.

Under his leadership, the city fell short on hiring diverse department heads and granted minority and women-owned businesses only a tiny percentage of contracts, according to an analysis conducted by Phillips' organization.

Phillips added that Buttigieg also "hand-picked a white man who had never held elective office before" to replace him as mayor.

"So he did not have a track record of working in the black community," Phillips said.

The Buttigieg campaign has pushed back hard against these claims, accusing Phillips' group of doing an incomplete and inaccurate analysis, and "cherry picking" data to make its point while ignoring other important information.

Sean Savett, a spokesman for the Buttigieg campaign, said that while South Bend enacted a minority contracting statute in 1986, "it was unenforced for 30 years," and that "the city had no idea how many minority-owned businesses were out there, or how many had been given contracts."

Savett also noted that Buttigieg created an Office of Diversity and Inclusion in 2015 and hired someone to run it the following year.

"He inherited a place not doing well and turned it around," Savett said. "But he didn’t solve every problem."

It didn't help that just as Buttigieg was gaining steam last summer, a white police officer in South Bend shot and killed a black man suspected of breaking into cars. For some African American voters, the aftermath of the shooting was their first close look at the mayor — and not a positive one.

Aiming to turn that around, the Buttigieg campaign last year released "The Douglass Plan," named after the famed abolitionist Frederick Douglass. It spells out how his administration would work to address decades of racism and economic disadvantages faced by African Americans and has become a major talking point for Buttigieg on the campaign trail.

But still, he struggles to connect with voters of color. And a recent New York Times article detailing the frustrations of some Buttigieg campaign staffers of color who described feeling disrespected and overlooked by their white colleagues only widened that gap.

Polls show former Vice President Joe Biden as the overwhelming choice of black voters, while Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders is preferred by Latinos, especially younger ones.

Sacramento-based political consultant Mike Madrid, who helps Republican and Democratic candidates make inroads with Latino voters, says Buttigieg’s problem is as much about age as it is about race or ethnicity.

"Latino voters under 35 have a very different political identity," Madrid said. "And it is one that is very strongly formulated against a political establishment that is not working for them."

Madrid says what while Sanders is calling for a "political revolution," Buttigieg has a message of moderation, one that pushes for building on the progress made under President Barack Obama.

"And the message that he is saying as a younger [candidate] is, 'Let's go more establishment route.' And that is something I think that in many ways is viewed as a betrayal of their generation ... and arguably even an insensitivity to the issues that they believe need to be championed on behalf of the Latino community," Madrid said.

Asked for a list of black, Asian and Latino endorsers from California, the Buttigieg campaign referred KQED to Christopher Cabaldon, the longtime mayor of West Sacramento.

But when pressed to name Buttigieg's most prominent supporters of color in California, Cabaldon, who is Filipino-American and openly gay, deflected.

"California has not been an endorsement battle, per se," Cabaldon said, adding that Buttigieg has spent time in places like the Central Valley, Sacramento and Los Angeles, where he's tried to reach diverse voters.

But Cabaldon said Buttigieg is beginning to pick up endorsements.

"There are quite a few Latino and Asian American leaders around the country, mayors included, that have been actively campaigning for Pete," he said.

On a recent Saturday afternoon in San Francisco, volunteers for the Sanders and Buttigieg campaigns stood on the corner of 18th and Castro streets, trying to woo voters.

Joe Rodriguez, who describes himself as Latinx, heads up the volunteer group for Buttigieg in House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's congressional district. Asked about Buttigeig's difficultly courting voters of color, Rodriguez talked about his own family, who came from Spain and New Mexico.

"The Latinx community is just getting to know him," Rodriguez said, adding that a quarter of his volunteers have Latinx, Hispanic and other related backgrounds. "They've been our most fervent volunteers. In my community they like the fact that he speaks Spanish."

Another volunteer, Jessie Cortez, whose grandparents came from Mexico, said he has convinced his family to support Buttigieg.

"He kind of reminds them of me," Cortez said. "We're both 37 or 38 years old, intelligent — nice boys," he added with a smile.

Cortez said his family also likes the fact that Buttigieg is a military veteran and religious.

"My mom is still very Catholic, and Pete talks about his Episcopalian faith," he said. "And how he talks about faith, bringing in the immigrant and the poor, that really spoke to her."

If Buttigieg does well in New Hampshire, it should enable him to get another look from voters who currently support other candidates, like Biden. But starting on Super Tuesday, voters will have another prominent moderate alternative to Biden: Former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg has not competed in the early states, but is on the ballot in California — and said he'll spend up to a billion dollars to help defeat Trump.

If Buttigeig did get the nomination, he could count on the enthusiastic support of former President Obama, for whom he volunteered in 2008. In the past, Obama has touted Buttigieg as one of the most promising leaders of his generation, and would lend his own credibility with the coalition of voters who helped him win two terms in the White House.

But for that to happen, the former South Bend mayor will need to break through with voters who up until now have resisted his candidacy and his message.