Pete Buttigieg to Quit Democratic Presidential Race

SELMA, Ala. — Pete Buttigieg, the former small-city Indiana mayor and first openly gay major presidential candidate, has decided to quit the Democratic race, a person briefed on Mr. Buttigieg’s plans said on Sunday, following a crushing loss in the South Carolina primary where his poor performance with black Democrats signaled an inability to build a broad coalition of voters.

Mr. Buttigieg, 38, narrowly won the Iowa caucuses early last month and came in a strong second place in the New Hampshire primary, exciting liberal white Democrats with his cool, hyper-articulate manner. But he never broadened his breadth of support in a party with a nonwhite base, and one that has veered leftward since 2018.

He came in a distant third in the Nevada caucuses, which drew strong numbers of Latino voters, and then fourth place in South Carolina, where black voters made up a majority of the Democratic electorate. He won just 3 percent of them, according to exit polls.

After raising more than $76 million in 2019, an astonishing haul for a mayor with no national profile, Mr. Buttigieg spent nearly all his treasure in Iowa and New Hampshire. He faced campaigning across the coast-to-coast states of Super Tuesday with evaporating funds and little chance of clearing the threshold of 15 percent of votes needed to amass delegates.

In the last presidential debate, on Tuesday in South Carolina, Mr. Buttigieg forcefully warned that nominating Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, the front-runner, would lead to crushing defeat in the fall, not just “four more years of Donald Trump,’’ but the loss of the Democratic House majority secured by moderate candidates who won in suburban swing districts in 2018.

But Mr. Buttigieg’s own existential crisis was his inability to appeal to voters of color, both African Americans and Latinos.

Many establishment Democratic officials have openly worried about the party’s moderate candidates cannibalizing the center-left vote and making it impossible to coalesce and challenge Mr. Sanders.

Mr. Buttigieg on Monday said in a town hall on CNN that he and his fellow moderates had not had any talks about one or more of them dropping out. Asked the same question in a post-debate TV interview on Tuesday, Mr. Buttigieg argued that it was he, as the candidate with the second most delegates, whom other moderates should rally behind.

But except for a polling uptick after his strong Iowa finish, Mr. Buttigieg’s support in an average of national polls plateaued around 10 percent. That imperiled him as the race moved to the 14 Super Tuesday states, including California and Texas, where most delegates to the National Convention go only to candidates who win 15 percent in congressional districts and statewide.

As Mr. Sanders, in his second presidential run, built a devoted following of progressives with a call for political revolution, Mr. Buttigieg tried to offer an alternative: an upbeat message of unity and more ideological flexibility, aimed at attracting moderate Democrats, independents and crossover Republicans. But the pitch, which some found contained more platitudes than passion, was no match at a time of rising anger on the left that the political establishment has failed to address health care, income inequality and climate change.

Reid J. Epstein reported from Selma, Ala., and Trip Gabriel reported from Charlotte, N.C.

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