Democrat presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg “demonstrates the most consistent racial ignorance among his cohort,” the Washington Post reported this week, days before another article noted that the former Indiana mayor got caught exaggerating his black support once again.
The former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, is desperately trying to prove that he can attract support from minorities who make up a significant portion of the Democrat voting bloc.
A Democrat candidate would need substantial support from minorities to defeat President Donald Trump.
On Wednesday, ABC News reported that Buttigieg had once again exaggerated support from black voters, adding:
When Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg touted support from African American comedian and actor Keegan-Michael Key last week, his campaign was forced just hours later to clarify that the actor had not officially endorsed the former South Bend mayor, telling reporters he only sought to “encourage early voting and voter registration.”
Key appeared with Buttigieg on Saturday to drum up voter support at his Henderson, Nevada field office.
Echoing ABC News, the Blaze noted, “this isn’t the first time” Buttigieg oversold his support among black voters, adding:
Could this be an innocent misunderstanding? Possibly. But it’s not the first time the campaign has been caught overstating its level of support from influential black leaders
The Buttigieg campaign published a list of black supporters in South Carolina, which included three leaders and hundreds of other supporters. The problem is, those three leaders all said they had not endorsed Buttigieg. Even worse, many of the names on the list were shown multiple times — and about 40% of the names were white people.
An article by Tyler Parry, an assistant professor of African American and African Diaspora studies at the University of Nevada, blasted Buttigieg for what he described as the Democrat candidate’s ignorance on race.
The report, published by the Washington Post, noted that each of the Democrat “party’s white front-runners …. has been criticized for harboring a superficial understanding of American anti-blackness, if not manifesting outright racism.”
However, the Post added:
It is Pete Buttigieg, former mayor of South Bend, Ind., who arguably demonstrates the most consistent racial ignorance among his cohort. Not only does he hold a dismal record in representing the black residents of his municipality, but his past musings on race and the state of black America — from his 2011 discussion of young black kids failing due to the lack of role models, to his invocation of the “All Lives Matter” mantra just five years ago, to the recent accusations that his campaign uses black supporters as political props — expose shallow analysis of
According to the latest Quinnipiac University poll released on February 10, only four percent of Democrat and Democrat-leaning African-American voters support Buttigieg.
That is more than Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), who polls less than one percent with the same demographic of voters, but much less than candidates like former Vice-President Joe Biden (27 percent) and former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg (22 percent).
The upcoming votes for the Democrat presidential candidate nomination in Nevada and South Carolina, two states with a diverse blend of Latinos and African Americans, will test Buttigieg’s ability to win over minority voters.
COMMENTS
Please let us know if you're having issues with commenting.