A white-collar hero (Win McNamee/Getty Images)
If America’s political circus ever offers a break from White House jostling, it’s during the first year of a President’s first term. Not so in 2021. On the Republican side, the great Trump will-he-won’t-he question has sensationalised what normally would have been a preliminary discussion about 2024. Meanwhile, Joe Biden’s age, mental fugues and dire approval ratings have Democrats — and perhaps the President himself — wondering whether he is up to a second term. Throw in the fact that Kamala Harris is underperforming the low bar set by her boss, and the question of who might be fit to run in his place is unusually open.
So it is that Pete Buttigieg — mayor of South Bend, Indiana, turned surprisingly competitive, first openly gay presidential candidate, turned transportation secretary — finds himself a popular answer to Washington’s favourite guessing game.
But is Buttigieg 2024 really the answer?
If you squint, you can just about see the outlines of a case for President Pete. Viewed from his most flattering angle, Buttigieg might look like the perfect candidate to save the hopelessly out-of-touch Democrats. Hailing from a rust-belt city in a red state, he can construct a better claim to broad appeal than Harris, for example, who has never won an election outside California. His 2020 presidential pitch was more sympathetic to Trump voters than his rivals’; to liberal astonishment, he is even capable of appearing on Fox News. Indeed, Buttigieg’s appeal to “heartland values” has caused some on the Left to accuse him of deploying racially coded language.
But far from providing an answer to the Democrats’ succession quandary, the chatter surrounding Buttigieg only reveals the seriousness of the party’s talent crisis: the Democrats’ line up of top-tier politicians looks hopelessly thin. Yet this personnel problem — and the promotion of Buttigieg as the solution — points to a more profound shortcoming: the Democratic Party’s increasing inability to appeal to blue-collar voters.
First, let’s be clear about the problem. Educational polarisation — the process by which Democrats have been losing non-college-educated voters and gaining college-educated ones — is starting to look like a very bad electoral trade for Democrats. For years, the party has been haemorrhaging support among working-class whites. According to Pew, white voters without a college degree accounted for a quarter of Joe Biden’s support in 2020. In 1992, nearly 60% of Bill Clinton’s supporters were whites without a college degree.
A coalition of college-educated whites and non-white working class voters was supposed to more than make up for those losses. As the political scientist Ruy Teixeira has noted, this was always a questionable bargain for Democrats, with losses among white working-class voters outpacing the racial diversification of the electorate that the party has been banking on. But it now threatens to be a truly disastrous deal.
Why? Because the long-promised rainbow coalition is proving elusive. And the firewall of non-white non-college-educated voters that Democrats have relied on is crumbling. Since 2012, the Democrats have lost 18 points off their margin among non-white working-class voters. A recent Wall Street Journal poll put the parties on level pegging among latino voters. This all adds up to a significant blue-collar problem for Democrats. And if they fail to solve it, they face electoral disaster.
In this context, Buttigieg, the son of an English professor and a linguist, is a strange candidate to be the man who can reconnect his party to their traditional voting bloc. A bookish meritocrat who calls South Bend home because that is where his father had tenure at Notre Dame, Buttigieg is best understood as an elite credentialist who did all the things an ambitious early millennial was supposed to do: Harvard, a Rhodes scholarship, a stint working on John Kerry’s presidential campaign, a lucrative job as a consultant at McKinsey. All of this before 29, at which point he was elected mayor of his hometown.
While Buttigieg certainly eschews the Squad-style radicalism that is electoral kryptonite outside the bluest neighborhoods, the self-styled moderate is nonetheless an enthusiastic apostle of woke capitalism. He may not be the activist on the street who wants to defund the police. But he’s the suit in the boardroom insisting that everyone sign up for their DEI training.
For all his stated empathy for the Trump voter, Buttigieg oozes technocracy. In truth, he is made by and for the elite. As should be obvious by now, the idea that, armed with the right policy programmes, politicians can respond to the populist challenge by addressing “economic anxiety” misreads the moment. His is a trade-off free politics, all managerialism, no clear communication of the simple but essential message: I am on your side.
No wonder his brief moment as a contender in the Democratic primary was built on support among college-educated whites. He struggled with non-white voters, but also white, non-college-educated voters. In other words, he is uniquely ill-equipped to solve the Democrats’ two biggest demographic headaches.
To underscore just how bad an option Buttigieg would be, we need only contrast his Rhodes scholar slickness with a rising star in another midwestern state. Lucas Kunce isn’t a big beast; the 39-year-old former marine is running for the Democratic nomination in a US Senate race in Missouri, a red state. But he’s a curious species. He describes himself, first and foremost, as a populist.
Watch a recent TV ad for Kunce. It is strikingly different in tone to most Democratic politicians’ pitches, with the sort of soundtrack that makes you think you’re being sold a truck. He attacks Missouri Republicans for “stripping Missouri for parts, selling land to China and bowing down to Chinese state TV”; he promises to be a “warrior who will fight” for Missourians.
Or compare Buttigieg to Eric Adams, the Mayor-Elect of New York. The black working-class former cop won the keys to Gracie Mansion with an uncompromising pledge to crack down on law and order and resuscitate the New York economy after Covid. Adams is an ebullient, party-animal vegan. But in his own oddball way, he is authentic.
He stormed to victory in a crowded Democratic primary with huge margins among New York’s minority middle and working-class voters. On the pandemic, he sides with those for whom remote work isn’t an option, rather than a neurotic laptop class sheltering in place two years after the first lockdowns. And, unlike Buttigieg, Adams is unencumbered by the progressive speech manners — “faculty lounge bullshit,” as James Carville calls it — that have come to dominate the Democratic elite.
In their own ways, Kunce and Adams communicate something very simple: I am with you. On election night, Adams told New Yorkers: “I am you. The life I lived is the life many are living right now. We are the same.” Buttigieg cannot tell blue-collar Americans that — an unavoidable fact which will ultimately be his undoing.
The Democrats’ biggest problem isn’t a flyover-state problem, or a white-voter problem. It’s a class problem. Ordinary Americans look at the party in power and see politicians who talk a language they don’t recognise. If Democrats think Buttigieg is the answer, they don’t even understand the question.
Oliver Wiseman is the deputy editor of The Spectator World and author of the DC Diary, a daily email from Washington. He is a 2021-22 Robert Novak Journalism Fellow
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Subscribe“If Democrats think Buttigieg is the answer, they don’t even understand the question.”
This is my hope for the mid terms and for 2024. Latching onto BLM and the progressive agenda was a successful tactic for the Dems last year. Many of their senior leaders now seem to truly believe in progressive orthodoxies, CRT and all the rest of it.
But they don’t seem to understand how alienating the progressive agenda is for a huge section of the population (including moderate Democrats).
Long may the Dems remain blinkered. They might yet hand victory to the Republicans and we can only hope the GOP is up to the task of stabilizing the USA.
Let us all work to make the red wave in mid terms be the greatest blood bath democrats have ever seen. Once we take the House and Senate we hold real open hearings exposing the corruption of the Democrats and any RINO in office.
Arrest Cassidy Hutchinson as a perjurer and send her to jail for 5 years as the law allows, make this little girl the example as we pursue the arrest and imprisonment of Schiff for Brains, Pelosi and Waters.
Pete Buttegieg is the 2021 version of Sammy Glick, the hero of the classic 1940 novel “What Makes Sammy Run?” To quote the Urban Dictionary: “In the novel, Sammy Glick is a heartless go-getter who will stop at nothing to pursue his ambitions, regardless of the consequences to others.”
I first realized Buttegieg was a Glick when he manipulated the Iowa Caucuses in early 2020 to serve his own purposes. I was confirmed in my belief when he repeatedly advertised himself as the “first openly gay member of a Presidential Cabinet”, ignoring the openly gay Ric Grenell, the Director of National Intelligence who was one of the more competent members of the Trump administration.
The guy’s a creep. I’m an independent who votes for both Democrats and Republicans, but I cannot imagine voting for Pete.
The democrats obsession with homosexuality and pedophilia should be their downfall.
Being AWOL as the Secretary of Transportation while there is a major supply chain crisis going on is just the sort of advertisement he needs.
And then he accused anyone who questioned him of not supporting his paternity leave.
First of all, any man or woman going on parental leave needs to announce they will be away, explain for how long they will be away, and then appoint a competent substitute. (I did this for my own parental leave.) Pete didn’t.
Second of all, this was clearly a planned pregnancy, since Pete is married to a man and needed to arrange for a female surrogate. If he wanted to be a hands-on parent, how about not taking a Cabinet-level job? He could have been a White House advisor or something, which would have been much more flexible.
He gave the wrong answer to JFK’s famous question. I could understand it if his “Other Half” had actually given birth and was feeling washed-out, having the baby-blues, etc but what he did took privilege too far.
If the US needs that Democrat female president doesn’t Tulsi Gabbard look a lot more attractive than Harris? Just asking as I haven’t a dog in the race.
Yes, but she’s alienated too many people for the moment, in particular too many party officials and big donors.
She also has an extremely aggravating practice of dragging her military service into absolutely every interview and TV conversation she takes part in, regardless of the subject under discussion. “Hey, Tulsi, what time is it?”. “Well, according to this watch, which I wore in combat, shoulder to shoulder with my military brothers and sisters in Iraq…” It can be absolutely cringe inducing.
This is an excellent observation and let me point out something to non-US UnHerd readers: TG was in the Hawaii National Guard. This is not a professional force, not really a fighting force, but was misused because of the demands of fighting two completely stupid and counterproductive wars. The appropriate use of the Hawaii National Guard is more along the lines of traffic control if a volcano erupts, helping with supplies if there is a huge storm and the power is out. For TG to portray herself as a “warrior,” really the first female Navy SEAL is wrong, disingenuous, and borders on disgusting.
That being said, I like her policies more than most, and PB is similarly a military fraud who just got his ticket punched–he’s no hero!
She looks more attractive to the country at large than Harris – a great many people do – but that doesn’t mean she’s as popular in the Democratic Party.
Kunce and Adams will have the same problem as Tulsi Gabbard. They don’t toe the party line on Far Left, Progressive policies. They can run and win local elections, but their nomination for national elections would imply the Party modifies its current, radical platform based on identity politics.
Democrat leadership is too obsessed with deviancy.
Excellent analysis! Some of the old Democrats were Tammany Hall rather corrupt politicians and of course other were out and out racists. However they could always understand and communicate with their constituents, who didn’t need to have undergone a ‘critical theory’ course to understand their politicians!
Support among non-whites is crumbling too. Trump earned the highest support among blacks by a Republican since Nixon’s 1960 run. Hispanics are swinging toward Republicans too. For decades, Florida and Ohio were considered swing states, now both are solidly red.
Biden relied heavily on fraudulent voting in a few populous districts to take the presidency. Without that Trump would still be president and we would have avoided the catastrophes of the past year.
Although one is generally banned online for saying so, I think history may prove this to be correct.
I noticed the other day that Tom Barrett, the mayor of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, has been nominated for a plum ambassador job in Luxembourg. (Sounds tiny, but it’s rich, peaceful and allows for fancy parties with mandarins from the many international organizations headquartered there.)
I presume this was a reward for “delivering” Wisconsin, where many Democratic votes suddenly appeared in the middle of the night.
I get ridiculed by everyone when I say that there actually may have been serious fraud – but I do think there might have been. Like many people I found the way vote counting just stopped around midnight when Trump was leading to be bizarre – followed by a huge jump overnight in Biden votes. I don’t know why everyone acts like it was impossible during an election where all mainstream media and social media intentionally buried the Hunter Biden story that directly implicated the Presidential candidate in corruption with the public assistance of 50 (!) ex intelligence agency people. However I agree that the true story probably won’t come out for many years. It would be an interesting investigative journalism book to read regardless of the conclusions if the author was a straight shooter.
Until Americans can walk the streets of DC and see liberals democrats and their loved ones hanging from every lamppost America remains at risk.
Good article but it should be highlighted that Pete also has military experience, which is rare amongst democrats and important to win votes.
True, yet anyone with a dedicated interest in the military – including those who served and their families – knows that Pete was mostly a driver for the people with a lot of stripes on their shoulders and used his limited time in uniform to make spiffy connections. He was hardly a grunt, and certainly not Special Forces.
He drove a jeep
I’m sure he’d sweep the polls with 90% of the vote, just like when he became mayor of South Bend. Well, assuming the US is a Democratic Party barony, the way South Bend is, where only the Democratic primaries count and the actual election doesn’t. Oh, and also assuming that only 11% of the electorate actually turn out to vote, just like they did in South Bend.
In addition, the Democrats are deeply dependent on the Black American voting block, and Pete did not appear to have a good reputation among Black residents of South Bend.
Furthermore, gay men taking maternity leave does not poll well with older black voters.
Wouldn’t think it’d be huge with younger ones either. Or white voters. Or Hispanic. Or Asian…
That was my delicate way of saying blacks in general and older blacks in particular do not think real highly of gay rights. They are much more conservative in that regard than people realize.
Actually, I suspect most people are much more conservative about gay rights than is generally imagined. It’s just that blacks have a certain leeway to speak out about it that the rest of us don’t.
I think you’re probably right. But blacks, in spite of being one of the most reliable Democrat voting blocks, are more closely aligned with White evangelical Christians (the most reliable *Republican* voting block) than Democrats on the issue of homosexuality.
11%! I live in Mishawaka, which is conjoined with South Bend. Most people who are here don’t want to be reminded that they are, hence my surprise that the turnout was as high as it was.
Get used to being depressed. It’s coming to Britain more every year.
Eric Adams did not “storm to victory”; he only won by 1% over his closest competitor, Kathryn Garcia.
So, basically, the author is saying that a first-class education and an upper middle-class background are non-starters if one aspires to high office? Isn’t that what Communists thought when they required that intellectual elites go through “re-education”?
When “a first-class education” and aspiring to secure a place in the upper middle-class means having a snobbish — at best — attitude toward non-college-educated white people — those formerly known as “the common man” — then Yes.
Those are non-starters for high office in America
FDR, JFK, LBJ and MLK all knew better, without “re-education.”
So did Reagan. Even Bill Clinton.
A pain I’ve had since 1968 is that Robert Kennedy didn’t evade Sirhan Sirhan that evening in Los Angeles. He would have made George Wallace a non – factor, and whacked Nixon good and hard that November.
His late brother, the President, was a great politician, if, ironically, a rawther English one. JFK had not just an experiential remoteness from economic want, but a temperamental one. RFK could imagine himself in the place of the needy, the left behind. He had a great Irish politician’s unashamedness about righteous outrage.
If he’d become President, Lewis Powell would have remained in obscurity, and it’s likely the United States would have avoided the libertarians’ economic nocturnal emissions, and the new Age of the Oligarchs.
And 30,000 more men wouldn’t have died in youth, in Vietnam.
No, he wouldn’t have won the Democratic nomination, as Humphrey – who was in no primaries – already had it sewn up. Unless, of course, you think he might have mounted a 3rd party campaign. I doubt that he could secure a victory that way, though, especially since he and Humphrey would be cutting into each other’s voters.
Tom, he had the momentum. Do you think the big bosses hadn’t noticed that? He shouldn’t have won the Indiana primary, because of Indiana’s imposingly large white population, yet he did. I don’t know your nationality or age, so how could I know whether it’s likely you’ve seen the moving photos taken from the train carrying his casket from NYC to DC? I go melancholic every time I look at them. They show God’s plain people, most of them white, many with their right palms on their chests, many others saluting, the uncoolest of the uncool, patriots, stricken. Bosses, and most of them were Irish and tough and didn’t much respect Humphrey but did respect Kennedy, couldn’t have expected to remain bosses if they had ignored such people: is it historical or pseudohistorical that one of the old mastodons once said in a speech, “Sure I stole, but I stole for you!”? If only a yarn, it italicized a fact.
Momentum. I remember that 85 day campaign. I was 16. I’m American. Here is the difference in the nation’s responses to the assassinations of the Kennedy brothers: For JFK, there was shock, grief, resignation, but hope. The dark pageantry of those four days until the flame was lit at Arlington was an archetype for the ages. Few doubted that the United States would continue to thrive.
When RFK died, there wasn’t much shock. I think his assassination was preceded by an expectation of it in the nation’s mass unconscious mind. I remember not grief, only despair.
That was his summer, his year.
Unfortunately the first class education and upper middle class background isn’t the problem – it’s the fact Democrat politicians in the USA from such backgrounds patronise the working class as uneducated or bigoted, and needing to improve themselves. Just like Gordon Brown did when he referred to a working class woman as a bigot for airing her concerns.
So the author of The Emerging Democratic Majority is having big second thoughts.
He didn’t take the normal, to-be-expected-by-all-people-everywhere reaction to black behavior into account — like all dreamy liberals. He must have been asleep during the integration and school battles of the 1960s and 70s. Now he’s waking up.
Conservatives should highlight prominent black progressives speaking about “whiteness” and reparations in their campaign speeches and advertisements aimed at Hispanics. Toss in Pete Buttigieg’s smarmy visage for extra effect. Make them the face of the Democratic Party.
Heh, heh, heh, heh….
I’ll perhaps get some heat for this but I don’t think reparations are a progressive policy. I see them in fact as a conservative policy. A well defined reparations policy would be an acknowledgement of past failures and be about taking responsibility for them. It’d be about paying back a debt rather than giving a hand out. These are all conservative concepts and sensitivities than progressive ones.
I can get on board with two conditions; no more griping. Ever. They take full responsibility for any societal failings after payment is made. Also, that Africa help with the payments since they profited from the sales.
“Progressive” is an inherently subjective term.
But politically speaking, it is a political movement with very specific beliefs, like the Tories or Labour. They have been embedded as a wing of the Dem party since the late 1800s, somewhat like how Labour and Tories have their sub-factions. Progressives briefly took power in the early 1900s, then retreated to the corners after WWI and Wilson’s administration, until coming out of the closet in force the last few years.
While their views have changed somewhat over time–thanks in part to yet more German socialists arriving in the 1920s to add some new dynamics to the ideas of that first German socialist who inspired the movement–they have been generally consistent. One of their biggest changes, an idea from those helpful Germans, was to drop the old-style racism of the movement from when it was in power and instead to co-opt and effectively weaponize minorities. Identity politics is essentially a century-old movement. It just didn’t gain much ground until recently, and that it has now is yet another contribution of those Weimar refugees: institutional capture. It is a slow process, it takes decades to change the face of a nation’s institutions without a violent revolution (and even the French Revolution struggled with it), but universities and government agencies are almost tailor-made for this kind of soft-revolution: generally protected against economic shocks and consequences of poor performance.
And yes, part of this shift from progressives thinking other races inferior to putting them on a pedestal (except Asians) was to take up the idea of reparations. Funnily enough the article references Hispanics, but them being treated as a different ‘race’ is in itself a somewhat indirect progressive accomplishment. They were just listed as ‘white’ until the late 20th century, at least officially.
You might say they don’t fit the title of their movement. Well, like I said, ‘progressive’ is inherently a subjective term. But more importantly, what would set them apart from say, Labour, who continue to hold that name while disdaining the working class? How many Conservatives seem to consistently vote for ideas that don’t seem particularly conservative? The Democrats seem to regard democracy as a dangerous way of running a country. In politics, names are simply that–they are not necessarily descriptions.
I was under the impression Democrats have a “woman problem” since that was the remaining white working class demo still voting Democrat and have started defecting now. Women were meant to be part of the Rainbow coalition surely?
The rough and tumble working people of these United States will not elect a man who has a husband.
Mayor Pete may have the credentials for POTUS, but he lacks the guts needed to sustain a successful presidency.
Many in America’s Midwest just might see Pete as he truly is: the south end of a north bound horse…
I’ll tell you what’s needed. We need to encourage the nobility to return to the venerated practice of dueling, an aristocratic artform eschewed by the hoi polloi that historically worked Darwinian wonders in the ranks of the ruling caste. The vital need for dueling in the upper strata is made clearly evident by those who have emerged to prominence since its cultural demise. Bring back the slap in the face and the bellowed challenge. Let’s have pistols at dawn and thrill to the deadly thrust of the rapier in the hand of the master swordsman. CSPAN ratings would go through the roof and the Plebes would love it!
I have never met a gay man I felt wasn’t mentally unbalanced, Buutplug is a fraud who has no idea what reality is.