Spotlight on 2020 Democratic Presidential Candidate Pete Buttigieg
South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg—as of mid-December—is fourth in the 2020 Democratic presidential candidate polls, with a national polling average of eight percent according to the New York Times. While attending Harvard College for his undergraduate degree in History and Literature, the 37 year old South Bend native was elected as student president of Harvard’s Institute of Politics. After graduating from Oxford’s Pembroke College on a Rhodes Scholarship, he worked at a consulting firm in Chicago before returning to South Bend to begin his political career. Buttigieg, who describes himself as progressive, has been the Mayor of South Bend since 2013 and was a U.S. Army lieutenant from 2009 to 2017.
Buttigieg first announced his running campaign in January of 2019. If elected, he would be the youngest and first openly gay president in US history. According to the current national Democratic polls, Biden is in the lead, followed by Warren, Sanders, and in fourth, Buttigieg. According to these polls, the United States values older candidates, but Buttigieg has claimed that “we need bold ideas. We need a different perspective, and I think it’s not a bad thing to come from a different generation.” Buttigieg stands as the only millennial in the race. Leveraging his youth, Buttigieg’s presidential campaign website says he “belongs to the generation that came of age with school shootings, the generation that provided the majority of the troops in the conflicts after 9/11, the generation that is on the business end of climate change, and the generation that—unless [we] take action—stands to be the first to be worse off economically than their parents.”
In 2018 as mayor of South Bend, Buttigieg implemented “Smart Streets,” which involved converting one-way streets into two-way streets, adding bike lanes, and building new sidewalks in an effort to revitalize the city’s downtown. He also oversaw a $50 million investment in South Bend’s parks and riverfront. Despite this traction, unlike most other presidential candidates in recent history, Buttigieg has not served in Congress, as a governor, or as a vice president. He will also have to expand his coalition in order to win the nomination, as he has very little support, for instance, among Black voters, who are a crucial Democratic constituency. Yet Buttigieg’s momentum is undeniable. In an attempt to wedge himself between the party’s moderate and progressive wings, Buttigieg told the Boston Globe, “If you want the most ideological candidate”—that being Elizabeth Warren—“you’ve got your choice. If you want the one with the most years in Washington under their belt”—that being Joe Biden—“you’ve got your choice. But for everybody else, I might be your candidate.”
Buttigieg’s main beliefs are summarized as follows:
- Guns: Member of Mayors Against Illegal Guns, and supports universal background checks and banning guns in schools.
- Healthcare: Released a plan to expand Medicare coverage and keep private health insurance plans; wants to tackle how to manage surprise billing and introduce an out-of-pocket spending cap for Medicare.
- Immigration: Supports providing a pathway to citizenship for Dreamers.
- College costs: Believes that college is too expensive for many people. He supports expanding the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program that clears loans in exchange for public service.
- Climate change: Supports the Paris climate agreement and Green New Deal; wants net-zero emissions by 2050, double clean electricity by 2025, zero-emissions in electricity generation by 2035, and net-zero emissions from industrial vehicles by 2040.
- Discrimination: Proposed the Douglass Plan to reform and invest in health care, education and other areas to dismantle “racist structures and systems,” focused on supporting African Americans.
- Abortion: If elected, he would repeal the Hyde Amendment and he would not support abortion regulations.
- Supreme Court: Proposed a 15-justice court with 5 Democratic appointees, 5 Republicans and 5 selected by agreement of the other justices.
- Electoral college: He supports abolishing it.
- Vaccines: He believes in personal exemptions to vaccines when there is no public health crisis.
- Foreign policy: Would not move the U.S. embassy in Israel back from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv.
Buttigieg, who is ethnically Jewish but a devout Christian, came from a city with a Jewish population of less than 3000; he has not had sufficient opportunities to engage with Jewish communities. However, he is definitely on the radar of the Jewish organizational world, and has participated in the American Jewish Committee’s Project Interchange trip to Israel. However, he cannot compare to Joe Biden’s decades of involvement with the community. On the topic of Israel, Buttigieg is closer to Warren and Sanders than to Biden: he is viewed as a centrist, positioned on the “Biden/Klobuchar” side of the Democratic spectrum, rather than on the “Sanders/Warren” progressive end. However, during the J Street conference in October, Buttigieg joined progressive voices within the party when he expressed his support for the idea of leveraging U.S. aid to Israel to ensure that the Israeli government does not annex the West Bank or expand settlements.
At the same time, Buttigieg manages not to come across as hostile or antagonistic to pro-Israel mainstream Democrats. His calm demeanor, the lack of a strong progressive constituency pushing him far left on issues relating to Israel and the lack of a relevant voting record all help make his views on Israeli policies more palatable for a broad swath of Jewish Democratic voters. Speaking to a group of Jewish leaders in meeting hosted by Steve Rabinowitz and Aaron Keyak in Washington, DC earlier this year, Buttigieg described his approach to Israel more as a mentor than as a critic: “The right approach when you have an ally or a friend that is taking steps that you think are harmful to you and to them, you put your arm around your friend and you try to guide them somewhere else,” Buttigieg said.
by ABBY SULLIVAN