I don’t know who I will support in the California primary — my top 3 candidates are all out of the race already — my priority is just to beat Trump in November. The founder of this website that grew into an activist community has not been shy with his feelings about Pete Buttigieg, including this morning:

5) The biggest asshole of the night was small-liberal-college-town Mayor Pete Buttigieg, who gave a victory speech utterly divorced from the reality on the ground. His pretend “I won and shocked the nation” speech was everything we hate about politics—a Trumpian attempt to create reality by merely declaring it so. 6) It’s hard to see how Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar continue forward from here. Sure, there’s no reason to quit before New Hampshire, but they’ve got no juice left. They bet all on Iowa, and Iowa said, “We suck,” and that was that.

Buttigieg had the data from his well organized campaign and now that 62% of precincts are reporting it looks like he can not only talk the talk but walk the walk. It is a testament to himself and his political skill that he has managed to rise from obscurity to (more likely than not at least) win the most state delegates at the Iowa caucus.

We get it, Markos, that you don’t think Buttigieg should be the Democratic nominee and you want him out of the race. Buttigieg isn’t the first choice for most of us. Now, with a putative narrow win over Sanders in the Iowa caucus, fivethirtyeight’s pre-caucus projections gave Buttigieg a 15% chance of winning the nomination, so he needs to be taken seriously. We don’t know if this is (as many expect) the zenith of his presidential run or if he will be able to extrapolate his campaign from Iowa to the much more diverse Democratic electorate, but how is the time to let him show us how far he can go. In the mean time, we should stop doing Vladimir’s work and show respect for all the candidates. One of them will be our best hope for the future, all would be orders of magnitude better than Trump, and we need to be united to win in November.