Pete Buttigieg jabbed at 2020 Democratic rival Elizabeth Warren over her campaign trail claims of funding her presidential bid strictly with grassroots support.
“It was exactly a year ago on this day and in this place that we first launched this exploratory committee for president that became my campaign,” Buttigieg, 38, told the U.S. Conference of Mayors in Washington. “I had no big email list, no senatorial PAC. I had a personal fortune amounting to literally thousands of dollars and a name that didn’t exactly roll off the tongue.”
The former two-term mayor of South Bend, Indiana, was alluding mainly to the Massachusetts senator.
Warren, 70, has been hit by both Buttigieg and supporters of former Vice President Joe Biden, 77, such as former Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell, for claiming to be funding her White House bid purely on grassroots donations when she transferred millions of dollars from her 2018 Senate campaign coffers after announcing she was running for president.
“You know, according to Forbes magazine, I’m literally the only person on this stage who is not a millionaire or a billionaire,” Buttigieg told Warren at December’s Los Angeles, California, primary debate. “This is the problem with passing purity tests you yourself cannot pass.”
On Thursday, Buttigieg also knocked the man he’s hoping to replace in November: President Trump. Blocks away from the White House, Buttigieg said he embarked on his campaign for the right to challenge Trump in the fall “to make the case for a president accountable to reality.”
“Mayors don’t get to spin alternative facts when there’s a problem,” he said. “We don’t get to print our own city currency while failing to balance our budgets. And we don’t get to divide our own public for political gain.”
Buttigieg’s candidacy was once considered to be a long shot. But the Harvard and Oxford graduate, Afghanistan War veteran, and openly gay candidate now consistently polls in the top four of what has been a historically crowded field.
With an average of 16.3% support in Iowa less than two weeks out from the Feb. 3 caucuses, he only trails front-runner Biden’s 21% by about 5 percentage points.
