Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg said Sunday that he doesn’t regret a claim he made last year that Americans who vote for President Trump are “looking the other way on racism.”

Mr. Buttigieg was asked about the comment by CNN’s Jake Tapper, who said, “That’s almost 63 million Americans who you are painting with a pretty broad bush. Do you regret saying that at all?”

“No,” the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, answered. “I’m very concerned about the racial division that this president has fostered, and I’m meeting a lot of voters who are no longer willing to look the other way on that, looking for a new political home.”

He continued, “I think it’s one of the reasons that we have seen so many people, in addition to the die-hard Democrats who are coming to our events, we’re seeing independents and a remarkable number of people who tell me they are those future former Republicans that I like to talk about in our campaign. And it’s not that I am pretending to be more conservative than I am, it’s that if we don’t agree on everything, we can at least agree on turning the page and moving past what this president has done to this country.”

Mr. Buttigieg made his initial comments about Trump supporters during an October interview with Mr. Tapper, who asked at the time whether it’s a “racist act” to vote for the president’s reelection.

“Well, at best, it means looking the other way on racism,” Mr. Buttigieg said at the time. “But I think a lot of people are wondering what kind of deal even that is supposed to be.”

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