Former South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg has
announced he is ending his campaign for the White House.
Pete Buttigieg, 38, became the first openly gay presidential candidate from
a major party when he announced he was running for the Democratic nomination.
However, despite a successful start, his campaign lost momentum in recent
weeks.
Pete Buttigieg’s decision to drop out comes ahead of Super Tuesday, March 3,
in the Democratic race to take on Donald Trump.
Fourteen states will vote on Super Tuesday, by the end of which staunch
left-winger Bernie Sanders could have an unbeatable lead and be a step closer
to the nomination.
Pete Buttigieg’s departure leaves six Democrats still in the running – Joe
Biden, Michael Bloomberg, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Amy Kobluchar and
Tulsi Gabbard.
Speaking to supporters in his hometown of South Bend, Indiana, Pete
Buttigieg stressed the values he said his campaign had hoped to promote.
He said: “And so we must recognize
that at this point in the race, the best way to keep faith with those goals and
ideals is to step aside and help bring our party and our nation together.
“So tonight I am making the
difficult decision to suspend my campaign for the presidency.”
Pete Buttigieg pledged he would do “everything in my power” to
ensure a Democratic win in November’s election.
He won the first event of the primary season, the caucuses in Iowa on February
3. But he failed to repeat that success and win the delegates needed to make
him the front- runner and later confirm his nomination. On February 29, he
finished a distant fourth in South Carolina.
Joe Biden praised Pete Buttigieg’s campaigning effort in a tweet.
Pete Buttigieg’s husband, Chasten,
also addressed crowds of supporters in South Bend, saying: “About a year and a half ago, my husband came home from work and
told me – well he asked me: ‘What do you think about running for president?’
And I laughed! Not at him, but at life.
“Life gave me some interesting experiences, on my way
to find Pete. After falling in love with Pete, Pete got me to believe in
myself… and I told Pete to run [for office] because I knew there were other
kids sitting out there in this country who needed to believe in themselves,
too.”
Pete Buttigieg’s only political
experience had been as the centrist mayor of the 306th largest city in the US,
South Bend, Indiana between 2012 and January this year.
Before then, he had served as a US
Navy intelligence officer and in the Afghan war.
Pete Buttigieg was the first
millennial to run for the White House, and would have been the youngest
president to take office had he won.
The son of a Maltese immigrant, he had long been rumored as a possible
candidate in the 2020 election. But after announcing his candidacy in April
last year, he was able to break through a crowded group to become one of the
most recognizable faces in the campaign.
In that time, Pete Buttigieg raised more than $82 million, according to the
Federal Election Commission, one of the highest totals of all the candidates.
Pete Buttigieg – pronounced Boot-Edge-Edge – came out as gay aged 33 and
married his husband Chasten in June 2018.
He also struggled to build support among African-American voters, a point
emphasized by his poor showing in South Carolina.
Pete Buttigieg’s record as mayor came under fire among minority voters – he had fired South Bend’s first African American police chief and was criticized over how he handled the case of a white police officer who shot dead a black man last year.
Troy Price, the chairman of the Democratic
Party in Iowa, has resigned after last week’s caucus was beset with technical
issues, questions over accuracy and delays.
In his resignation letter, he said that “the precinct and satellite
caucus meetings themselves went well”.
However, Troy Price conceded that the process of reporting results was
“unacceptable”.
At the last week’s caucuses, Pete Buttigieg won with a narrow 0.1% victory
over Bernie Sanders in terms of delegates, while Senator Sanders won the
popular vote.
Since then, the Sanders campaign has asked for a “recanvassing”
check of the vote.
Iowa Democratic leaders will elect a new local leader on February 15.
Troy Price said in his letter:
“While it is my desire to stay in
this role and see this process through to completion, I do believe it is time
for the Iowa Democratic Party to begin looking forward.
“My presence in my current role makes that more
difficult.”
He then added that the Iowa
Democrats were “not the only party to blame”, and mentioned the
partners and vendors who were also involved.
The Iowa caucus is the important first step in choosing the challenger to
the incumbent president.
Primaries and caucuses are a string of nationwide state-by-state votes,
which culminate in the Democratic nominee being chosen at the party convention
in July.
Although Iowa awards only 41 of the
1,991 delegates required to become the Democratic White House nominee, the
state’s vote is usually considered the first clear indication of each
candidate’s standing within the race.
This year the Iowa Democratic Party
distributed a new app, called Shadow,
to precinct officials that was supposed to help them report results more
quickly.
It was an issue with this app, which
the party said was a coding error that led to the delay in results and ultimate
chaos on February 3.
Pete Buttigieg declared victory for
himself that same day, before any of the results were released.
In the end, the results were finally released three days later than
expected.
By that time the chairman of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) had
already weighed in, calling for a review of the vote totals.
The second vote that took place – the primary in New Hampshire on February
11 – was more clear-cut. Bernie Sanders came in first, with Pete Buttigieg
second and Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar in third place.
Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren, previously considered frontrunners, came in fourth and fifth – each with zero delegates.
Pete Buttigieg and Bernie Sanders are taking
the lead in the Iowa caucuses, the first vote to choose the Democratic
candidate to run against President Donald Trump in November’s election.
The vote has been chaotic, beset by technical problems and delays in
reporting results.
According to Iowa’s Democratic Party, data from 71% of precincts showed Pete
Buttigieg on 26.8%, with Bernie Sanders on 25.2%.
Elizabeth Warren was third on 18.4% and Joe Biden fourth on 15.4%.
According to the other preliminary results released on February 4 from all
of Iowa’s 99 counties, Amy Klobuchar was on 12.6%, and Andrew Yang on 1%. Tom
Steyer and Tulsi Gabbard were on less than 1%.
However, the state party has still not declared a winner from February 3
vote. Democrats have blamed the delay on a coding error with an app being used
for the first time to report the votes.
Iowa was the first contest in a string of nationwide state-by-state votes,
known as primaries and caucuses, that will culminate in the crowning of a
Democratic nominee at the party convention in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in July.
Eleven candidates remain in a Democratic field that has already been
whittled down from more than two dozen.
The results represent the share of delegates needed to clinch the party
nomination under America’s quirky political system. Iowa awards only 41 of the
1,991 delegates required to become the Democratic White House nominee.
In the popular vote count, partial results showed Bernie Sanders leading
with 32,673 ballots, while Pete Buttigieg was second at 31,353.
However, Pete Buttigieg, 38, came top in certain rural areas with smaller
populations, and so far has more delegates.
Iowa Democratic Party Chairman Troy Price told a news conference on February
4 the fiasco had been “simply unacceptable”.
“I apologize deeply for
this,” he said of the turmoil, which has provoked calls for Iowa to
lose its coveted spot atop the presidential voting calendar.
“This was a coding error,”
Troy Price said, while insisting the data was secure and promising a thorough
review.
Elizabeth Warren was third with 25,692, followed by Joe Biden at
16,447 and Amy Klobuchar at 15,470.
State party officials earlier said
the problem was not the result of “a hack or an intrusion”.
Officials were being dispatched
across the Hawkeye state to retrieve hard-copy results.
They were matching those numbers
against results reported via a mobile app that many precinct captains said had
crashed.
The mobile app was developed by tech
firm Shadow Inc., run by veterans of Hillary Clinton’s failed 2016 presidential
campaign.
The app was put together in just two
months and had not been independently tested, the New York Times reported, quoting people briefed on the matter by the
Iowa Democratic Party.
The Democratic Party in Nevada, where
caucuses will be held on February 22, has reversed a decision to use the
company’s software.
Voters flocked on February 3 to more
than 1,600 caucus sites, including libraries, high schools and community centers.
President Trump said earlier that
the Iowa Democratic caucuses had been an “unmitigated disaster”.
If elected, Pete Buttigieg would be
the first openly gay US president.
The 38-year-old is the former mayor
of South Bend, Indiana, a city of just over 100,000 people.
Pete Buttigieg is a former Harvard
and Oxford University Rhodes scholar, who served as a military intelligence
officer in Afghanistan and used to work for global management consultancy
McKinsey.
Rivals say Pete Buttigieg, who is younger than Macaulay Culkin and Britney Spears, is too inexperienced to be US president.
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