Though he has surged in recent national and state polls, Pete Buttigieg has struggled to make inroads with one of the Democratic Party’s most important constituencies. | Spencer Platt/Getty Images 2020 Elections Buttigieg confronts his black voter problem ‘A lot of people don’t know who he is on this side of the country or what he stands for,’ says one top South Carolina Democrat.

ORANGEBURG, S.C. — Pete Buttigieg wants to have a conversation with African American voters. But he can’t seem to reach them.

He scheduled a meet-and-greet Monday in Orangeburg — a city that is 76 percent black — but only a dozen or so people of color showed up in a crowd of more than 100. At a town hall the night before — held at a North Charleston high school where minority enrollment is 97 percent in a city that is roughly half-black — it was another overwhelmingly white audience.


The composition of his audiences is a familiar issue for Buttigieg, who has surged in recent national and state polls but struggled to make inroads with one of the party’s most important constituencies.

Recent polling shows Buttigieg winning only 2 percent among African Americans, so he needs to begin addressing the issue quickly to have any hope of contending for the Democratic nomination — or competing in South Carolina, an early primary state where African Americans cast roughly 60 percent of primary votes in 2016.

“A lot of people don’t know who he is on this side of the country or what he stands for,” said state Rep. Jerry Govan, a veteran lawmaker who represents Orangeburg and chairs the state’s Legislative Black Caucus. “The only thing people are getting about him is what they’re seeing in national media.”

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Since Buttigieg’s last trip to South Carolina in March, national media have reported his dismissal of South Bend’s first black police chief in 2011; his remark in 2015, later walked back, that “all lives matter” — a stance that some Democratic activists view as a devaluation of “Black Lives Matter”; and criticism over how his housing initiative hurt black and brown families.

Recognizing his need to gain traction among black voters, the South Bend, Ind., mayor has recently embarked on an outreach tour that unofficially kicked off last week with a meal with civil rights leader Al Sharpton at Sylvia’s, a famed soul food restaurant in Harlem.

Next came a campaign swing here — a trip marked by three visits to cities with large minority populations.

At his event in Orangeburg, Buttigieg outlined his agenda for black America, an agenda that focuses on home ownership, health care, entrepreneurship, criminal justice reform and education.

“One of the most important pieces of homework for our campaign is to make sure that there is no question in the minds of any minority voters, black voters here in South Carolina or anywhere in the country, where I stand and what I will do,” Buttigieg told the audience.

He argues that minority voters who know him best, residents of South Bend, helped reelect him mayor. “But out here, people are just getting to know me,” he said. “Trust in part is a function of quantity time, and we’re racing against time.”

“I need help,” Buttigieg conceded.

Antjuan Seawright, a South Carolina-based Democratic strategist, credited Buttigieg for meeting with Sharpton but stressed that he needs to build relationships in South Carolina and talk to voters here.

“I actually think it’s malpractice for him to not spend significant time with black voters,” he said, “because it’s very clear that we are the most dominant force in the Democratic primary and we will decide who the Democratic nominee will be.”

At his first event in North Charleston, Buttigieg made a direct appeal to supporters to help him expand his base “to not only help this campaign but to shape it, to find people who perhaps do not look like you and make sure that they are aware of this message and they are communicating to us how this campaign can best speak to them.”

While many of his competitors have ties to South Carolina and staff on the ground, Buttigieg’s campaign hasn’t hired a team in South Carolina yet. Many black leaders say they haven’t heard from him.

“I don’t know who he’s reached out to,” Govan said. “I haven’t heard anything from the other leadership in the area as far as him reaching out to them. I don’t know who he’s talking to.”

State Rep. Annie McDaniel, who represents a rural community and has endorsed Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) , said she hasn’t heard much about Buttigieg.

“I’ve heard a little, but I hadn’t heard a whole lot,” she said. “Now, I don’t know if that means I may not be in the circle of influence that he possesses, that I’m old and he’s young and he’s of a different generation. I’m not exactly sure.”

State Rep. JA Moore, who said he received a call from Buttigieg before endorsing Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) and becoming a co-chair of her state campaign, said he had a “robust” and “constructive” conversation with the 37-year-old mayor.

But, he warned, “he has absolutely no chance to become the nominee if he can’t build a coalition of African Americans and especially African American women.”

“Mayor Pete has a lot of work to do when it comes building that relationship,” he said.

Buttigieg told a small group of reporters Monday that his campaign will soon announce on-the-ground staff in South Carolina. He also estimated meeting with “a few dozen” black leaders during this visit, but attributed the lack of diversity at his campaign events to a lack of established relationships or professional staff on the ground.

“It’s one thing to kinda put out word and see who finds their way to us,” he said. “It’s another to really be building the relationships in neighborhoods and organizations and churches that will help invite people into this process who maybe wouldn’t find their way to me otherwise. We know we’ve got our work cut out for us. That’s exactly why we’re here now and why we won’t stop returning until we’ve built the kind of coalition that we want.”

Columbia City Councilwoman Tameika Isaac Devine, who also serves as mayor pro tem, met with Buttigieg ahead of his final event in the state, an invitation-only town hall in Columbia on Monday night. Devine said she was asked to recommend invitees, an indication that the campaign was trying to get Buttigieg in front of black leaders in the community. That event, however, was also dominated by white attendees.

Buttigieg acknowledges the task ahead in South Carolina if he wants to be competitive.

“We’ve got a lot of work cut out for us. We’re building a campaign staff team that’s gonna reflect the diversity of our party and our generation, but clearly we’ve got a long way to go before we can say the same about our support base,” he told reporters Sunday. “In order to win and in order to deserve to win, my campaign needs to go above and beyond in reaching out to black voters.”

Buttigieg is up against a formidable group of candidates, including two black senators — Harris and Booker — and a popular former vice president Joe Biden, who served eight years alongside the nation’s first black president. Biden released a list of nearly two dozen endorsements throughout the state on Monday, and reportedly raised more than $100,000 at a weekend fundraiser hosted by South Carolina state Sen. Dick Harpootlian.

“To have somebody who comes on the scene who is not a candidate of color and who has also not been a national figure for years means we’ve got to do in a matter of months that same kind of trust-building and relationship-building work,” Buttigieg said, addressing the disadvantage he has in the black community as a white male candidate without a long national profile.

Trav Robertson, chair of the state Democratic Party, said Buttigieg has been reaching out to elected officials, particularly throughout regions with large concentrations of African Americans. He said Buttigieg visited the party’s last executive committee meeting and noted a surge in interest in his campaign after his “Meet the Press” interview last month, when he was asked about the housing policy and “all lives matter” remark.

“We got a significant number of telephone calls in our office wanting to know when he was coming to South Carolina and when his staff was gonna be on the ground,” Robertson said. “But at the end of the day, all of these candidates running for president have had some type of leadership, and, you know, there’s always gonna be a discussion about decisions they made or didn’t make. That’s just part of the give-and-take.”