Mayor Pete has a Diversity Problem and No One is Talking About it!
Over the past month, every since his CNN town hall, South Bend, Indiana Mayor, Pete Buttigieg has seen his polling numbers rise steadily. It’s not hard to see why: he is young, highly intelligent, well-spoken, and charismatic. Where once he was polling at less than 1%, he is now in the high single digits in several polls. While Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders remain in the top tier, significantly ahead of the rest of pack at around 25 to 35%, Mayor Pete has reached up to the clear second tier, joining Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, and Beto O’Rourke in the 7 to 10% range. All the other candidates have stalled in the low single digits.
Buttigieg has also shown some very impressive fundraising in recent weeks. There are some signs that many of the party elite see him as the best potential option to defeat the progressive candidate and current frontrunner, Senator Sanders. The mainstream media has also taking a liking to Mayor Pete, showering him with puff pieces and avoiding any critical examination of his record or positions.
A recent Emerson poll that showed Mayor Pete’s new-found success also pointed out a key weakness in his support: a lack of diversity. Among the top tier candidates, his support base is the whitest by a wide margin, making up 72% of his supporters. The next highest candidate, Senator Warren, had 61% of her support coming from white voters. The rest of the pack fell into the mid to low-50% range. Senator Sanders, who has often been smeared for having lack of diversity of support, actually had the most diverse support in the poll, with only 44% of his supporters classifying as white.
There are a lot of reasons that Buttigieg might be struggling to win over voters of color. He is very new on the national political scene, he is from a overwhelming white and rural state, and he is competing against other candidates that are far more well known, many of whom have long standing connections with or are members of communities of color. In fact, those are some of the same reasons Bernie Sanders struggled to win over voters of color in 2016. Sanders was new to national politics and Hillary Clinton, after a long career in politics, had developed a great deal of trust and support among voters of color. However, that did not stop the media from attacking Bernie Sanders. Rather, they engaged in a lengthy smear campaign, constantly implying (or stating it outright) that voters of color did not like Bernie Sanders, despite polling that showed the opposite. The reality, is that voters of color had very high approval rating for Sanders, they simply preferred Clinton in 2016. It may be that voters of color feel the same way about Buttigieg; perhaps future polling will examine this.
But all of this begs the question: why isn’t the media calling attention to Buttigieg’s lack of diversity of support? They are certainly spending a lot of time writing about him and based on their 2016 coverage of Sanders, they are deeply concerned about the diversity of a each candidate’s base of support. Or perhaps this is only a concern they have when dealing with a candidate that threatens to shake up the status quo? Perhaps, they are not truly concerned about diversity, but rather are willing to cynically weaponized identity politics to attack candidates that do not their mold.
