WHERE DOES Pete Buttigieg go from here? Since early 2019 the youthful mayor of South Bend, Indiana, has far exceeded expectations—including his own—in his bid to become the Democratic presidential nominee. He easily qualified for the Democrats’ third presidential debate, on September 12th. His fundraising has been spectacular, notably the nearly $25m he gathered in the second quarter. Wealthy individual donors, including members of the LGTBQ community, are drawn to his cerebral, earnest and articulate manner. As an openly gay and married man he has blazed a political trail many would have considered impossible a few years ago.

Mr Buttigieg’s progress over the summer, however, was less impressive. His efforts in the first two televised debates were solid but stirred no thrill of enthusiasm from viewers. Like most members of the crowded Democratic field he proposes little that is distinct. Among Democrats who care most about electability, Mr Buttigieg is not seen as an especially potent threat to President Donald Trump. Successive polls suggest his support is drifting into the low single digits, even as his team hires bigger teams of organisers and volunteers, especially in Iowa and New Hampshire.

His main problem is his failure to appeal beyond a core of white, well-off, highly educated and urban liberals. Those supporters offer up plenty of money and host generous fundraising events. Mr Buttigieg, a Rhodes Scholar and former McKinsey executive knows how to connect with them. As a military veteran he also gets a warm welcome from supporters, again predominantly white, in small towns in New Hampshire and Iowa. But look beyond those two early-voting states, for example to South Carolina where black votes will be decisive, and polls show the Indiana mayor would be lucky to pick up 5%.

Mr Buttigieg struggles with African-American voters for a host of reasons. Some—but not all—are beyond his control. It may be that a youthful, white politician with limited experience of working in the black community would always find it tricky to fire up support among African-Americans, however much he calls out racism or touts his own well-meaning ideas, such as his “Douglass Plan”, to empower black Americans. It is understandable that other candidates, including Joe Biden (as Barack Obama’s vice-president), Kamala Harris or Cory Booker, should have an easier narrative to tell.

He has presented himself as a Midwesterner who presided over the economic recovery of a former rustbelt city and was handily re-elected as mayor with 80% of the vote. But those things do not mean that African-Americans, even in his city, are enthusiastic. Places like South Bend have long histories of racial segregation and discrimination. African-Americans do worse than whites in the city in school and college. They suffer higher rates of unemployment and poverty. As mayor, Mr Buttigieg has not focused on addressing those problems. In his memoir, “Shortest Way Home”, he has little to say about civil rights and race relations, beyond mentioning some symbolic efforts to rename a street and put up statues to celebrate African-Americans.

There is little question that Mr Buttigieg could have done more to promote racial diversity. Some African-Americans have grumbled that his presidential campaign team lacks non-whites in senior positions. (He has vowed to address that.) As mayor, one of his earliest acts was to demote South Bend’s black police chief—for allegedly unprofessional behaviour—and replace him with a white successor. Overall only 6% of South Bend’s police are black, although 26% of the city’s population is African-American. The mayor has admitted he simply failed in efforts to remedy that.

Since June 16th, when a white policeman in South Bend shot and killed a black man, those problems have been thrown into sharp relief. The mayor is hardly to blame for one fatal act, and he has made repeated efforts, including a brief suspension of his campaign, to listen to local voters’ anger over the incident. But he has also led an administration that has done too little to tackle police violence. During that shooting, the officer’s body camera was switched off, against procedure, suggesting the department falls short in rule-enforcement. It is worth recalling how in nearby Chicago the fortunes of the then mayor, Rahm Emanuel, plummeted after black voters abandoned him. That followed his mishandling of the aftermath of a shooting of a young black man by a white police officer in 2014.

How can Mr Buttigieg turn things around? He cannot change his record in South Bend, and would clearly be vulnerable if there were more incidents involving police there. But he could talk more boldly about his economic ideas to help minorities such as his plan to boost federal spending on schools in poor, black areas. Having a more racially diverse presidential campaign team would certainly help. But it can be tricky to make such changes without being accused of tokenism. His lack of endorsements from prominent black figures, in Indiana and beyond, is something to rectify too.

More importantly, though, Mr Buttigieg needs to address a wider electability issue, that is how to appeal not only to black voters, but to other groups too: blue-collar workers, residents of small towns and rural areas, women in suburbs. A punchier performance in the third Democratic debate will also be essential. Team Buttigieg, meanwhile, is betting heavily on its efforts to generate a strong showing in the caucuses of Iowa and the first primary in New Hampshire. The idea is that early momentum could sway voters in subsequent primaries. But that is a strategy that requires one or more of the frontrunners to stumble.