Pete Buttigieg’s 2020 presidential campaign

“The time has come for more of a religious left to emerge in our country that lets people know they are not alone when they look at faith,” former 2020 candidate Pete Buttigieg said nearly a year ago.

Buttigieg dropped out of the Democratic presidential race on Sunday, but he will go down in history for more than being the first openly gay man to mount a major presidential campaign. Another lasting impact he will have on American politics: his vocal embrace of his faith. This aspect of his campaign moved me as a gay progressive Christian. It was also an incredibly important moment of representation for people who are both religious and part of the LGBTQ community.

Vox writers are making the best case for the leading Democratic candidates. This article is the fourth in the series. Read them all here. Vox does not endorse individual candidates.

Former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg dropped out of the race for the Democratic nomination March 1 after a fourth-place finish in the South Carolina primary, saying he believed the best path forward was to “step aside and help bring our country and party together.”

Pete Buttigieg has dropped out of the 2020 Democratic primary, according to the New York Times. The former South Bend, Indiana, mayor, the winner of the Iowa caucuses and most successful openly gay candidate in primary history, didn’t perform well enough in Nevada and South Carolina — ultimately leading the candidate to conclude that the fight was over.

Buttigieg’s withdrawal came after a campaign that was, frankly, more successful than anyone first expected it to be. Mayor Pete, as he’s known, was little-known and unqualified by conventional standards — yet he managed to win Iowa and come in for a strong second place in New Hampshire before his ultimate withdrawal.

Shortly after conceding the Nevada caucuses to Sen. Bernie Sanders, former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg began questioning the results there.

Late Saturday night, a letter from Buttigieg’s campaign to the chairman of the Nevada State Democratic Party made clear that the campaign has questions about what it says are “irregularities” in the results, the Nevada Independent reported.

Swati Mylavarapu still remembers the $20 check she sent to Pete Buttigieg by snail-mail in 2010.

Now, a decade later, Mylavarapu is the national finance chair of Buttigieg’s presidential bid — and she’s spending 100,000 times as much on Democratic causes in 2020.

This piece was first published in April 2019 and has been lightly updated.

When I first wrote this piece in spring 2019, Pete Buttigieg was just catching fire as a presidential candidate.

Chasten Buttigieg, husband of presidential hopeful and former South Bend, Indiana, mayor Pete Buttigieg, was slated to host a fundraiser at an LGBTQ nightclub in Providence, Rhode Island, last week.

But the campaign moved the event, scheduled for Friday night, due to concerns over a “dancing pole” at the club, according to the venue’s manager.

The dustup over South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg’s high-dollar wine cave fundraiser is just one round in a long-running argument about the influence of donors and fundraising on American politics.

The view on the left is that the public is crying out for progressive change and is blocked by the influence of big donors — specifically, the influence donors have on the Democratic Party, which shies away from adopting a winning populist platform because of the insidious impact of money.

Pete Buttigieg released on Sunday an immigration plan that would reverse the Trump administration’s enforcement policies, push for a pathway to citizenship for unauthorized immigrants, and streamline the process of applying for asylum and other forms of legal immigration.

The South Bend, Indiana, mayor is one of the last in the Democratic field to release an immigration plan, and it largely mirrors those of other candidates. It’s now clear that the field has reached consensus on most issues, including ending President Donald Trump’s toughest anti-immigrant policies, creating a pathway to citizenship for the nearly 11 million unauthorized immigrants living in the US, strengthening protections for asylum seekers, and making it easier for immigrants to come to the US legally.

Pete Buttigieg’s rise in the polls has been accompanied by increased scrutiny on his work at consultancy McKinsey and his campaign’s high-dollar fundraisers. And he doesn’t have many good answers on either front.

Buttigieg has been a bit of a surprise breakout in the 2020 Democratic primary. He’s 37, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, and while his background is certainly interesting — he’s a veteran, went to some fancy educational institutions, is an openly gay presidential candidate, and, like Sen. Cory Booker, is a Rhodes scholar — he isn’t exactly brimming with political or policy experience on the national stage. But he’s polling in fourth place nationally and has gained ground in both Iowa and New Hampshire. Big donors appear to like him, and he’s shifted toward the center as the primary has gone on, apparently seeing an opening for his candidacy in a more moderate lane occupied by Vice President Joe Biden.

South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg wants women to know that he is an ally. That he gets their frustration over the gender pay gap. That he knows what consent means and what the “motherhood penalty” is all about.

On Thursday, he released a 26-page agenda focused entirely on women’s rights. It’s one of the most detailed plans focused on women so far in the Democratic primary.

At the Democratic presidential debate on Thursday, the 2020 presidential candidates argued over the nitty-gritty details of policy proposals on everything from health care to gun policy to immigration and criminal justice reform.

But when it came to what to do about the war in Afghanistan, the candidates were devoid of ideas about what to do beyond “get out, and get out fast.”

The youngest Democratic contender for president, South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, will be 68 years old in 2050. That’s younger than fellow hopefuls Sen. Bernie Sanders, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, and former Vice President Joe Biden are right now.

So the urgency embedded in his new plan to combat climate change released Wednesday is fitting. “We’re running out of time. Experts tell us that we have 10 years to get on the right path, or global warming will reach catastrophic levels by 2050,” he wrote. “But the timeline that compels us to act isn’t set by Congress — it’s being dictated by science.”

Mary Kay Henry, the head of the 2 million-member Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and one of the most powerful and influential labor leaders in the United States, called on Wednesday for the union movement, and 2020 Democratic presidential contenders, to abandon their reliance on the model of labor organizing that’s persisted in the US for more than 80 years.

She called for a new approach to save unions from extinction: sectoral bargaining.

South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg said during Tuesday’s Democratic debate that, if elected president, he’s committed to withdrawing all troops from Afghanistan by the end of his first year in office.

The 2020 Democratic candidate, who did a seven-month tour in Afghanistan as a naval officer, made the promise during the first night of this week’s Democratic primary debates in response to a question from CNN’s Jake Tapper.

South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg gave the single most important answer at Tuesday’s Democratic debate.

It came after a lengthy section in which the assembled candidates debated different health care plans that have no chance of passing given the composition of the US Senate and then debated decriminalizing unauthorized border crossings, which they also don’t have the votes to do, and then debated a series of gun control ideas that would swiftly fall to a filibuster and, even if they didn’t, would plausibly be overturned by the Supreme Court’s conservative majority.

South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg is a popular 2020 candidate among Silicon Valley’s wealthy donors, but taking their money won’t deter him from regulating Big Tech, he said on the latest episode of Recode Decode With Kara Swisher.

“The internet started out as this delicate flower that had to be cultivated and we had to let it see where it was going to go,” Buttigieg said. “Now we know where it’s going to go, and it’s time to put in the guardrails.”

Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg introduced an ambitious new platform targeted at black voters on Thursday, calling for a broad series of political and policy reforms that would lead to a “comprehensive and intentional dismantling of racist structures and systems” in the United States.

The announcement of the plan comes as Buttigieg works to convince black voters that he deserves their support. The South Bend, Indiana, mayor has polled at zero percent among black voters in some recent national polls (through other polls in states like South Carolina show his support increasing slightly), and has also faced continued criticism of his handling of a recent police shooting in South Bend.

Pete Buttigieg wants Americans to serve their country — and not just through war. So he’s rolling out a national service plan that encourages community work.

The South Bend, Indiana, mayor’s plan, shared on his website under “A New Call to Service,” calls for providing up to a million service opportunities to high school graduates by 2026, which marks the 250th anniversary of America’s independence.

Mayor Pete Buttigieg was put in the hot seat during the second Democratic presidential debate Thursday when, in the aftermath of an officer-involved shooting in South Bend, Indiana, he was asked: Why is the city’s police force so white?

“The police force is 6 percent black in a city that is 26 percent black,” moderator Chuck Todd asked. “Why has that not improved over your two terms as mayor?”

President Donald Trump moved America’s embassy in Israel to Jerusalem last year, a controversial decision that has fueled Democrats’ skepticism of the Trump administration’s close bond with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his far-right policies.

Poll after poll has shown that liberal Democratic primary voters are less sympathetic to Israel than they were in previous years. Likely as a result, most Democratic presidential campaigns for 2020 have bucked tradition and openly expressed their criticisms of the tiny Middle Eastern nation.

Pete Buttigieg is the first Democratic presidential candidate to actually articulate foreign policy proposals beyond general themes and ideas.

In a high-profile address on Tuesday at Indiana University, the South Bend mayor used the opportunity to lay out his worldview, hewing closely to progressive tentpoles like combating climate change, challenging authoritarianism, and renewing America’s economy. That put him in the same company as Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Bernie Sanders (I-VT), who have released likeminded visions.

Pete Buttigieg is running a conflict-averse presidential campaign. But conflict makes news.

And so the biggest moment of his MSNBC town hall Monday night in Fresno, California, was his halfhearted defense of former Sen. Al Franken (D-MN), who resigned in 2017 after several women accused him of groping them.

For some Democratic voters, South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg ticks all the boxes for the kind of progressive who could unite our divided nation: He’s young, educated, gay, and a former member of the military, and has experience in both the private and public sector.

He also speaks openly about his Christian faith. While noting his commitment to the separation of church and state, Buttigieg has said progressives and Democrats “need to not be afraid to invoke arguments that are convincing on why Christian faith is going to point you in a progressive direction.”

During a Fox News town hall on Sunday, Mayor Pete Buttigieg was confronted with a common conservative talking point on abortion rights — and he didn’t take the bait.

While discussing the recent laws passed in Alabama, Georgia, and Ohio — which severely restrict access to abortions — Fox News anchor Chris Wallace sought to press Buttigieg on just when the cutoff point should be for when a woman can access an abortion. “Do you believe, at any point in pregnancy, that there should be any limit on a woman’s right to an abortion?” Wallace wanted to know.