Former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg has an endorsement problem.
More specifically, the 2020 Democratic primary candidate keeps padding the list of black people who supposedly support his candidacy to include anyone who so much as comes within striking distance of his campaign.
On Saturday, a South Carolina newspaper published an opinion article by Buttigieg wherein he claimed his “campaign has proudly partnered with” black-owned businesses in the Palmetto State, including Diane’s Kitchen in the town of Chester and Atlantis Restaurant in Moncks Corner.
As it turns out, though, the proprietors of those establishments have no idea what the former mayor is talking about.
“I stand for what I stand for, and I didn’t say I had a partnership,” the owner of Diane’s Kitchen, Diane Cole, told ABC News.
Cole said she explicitly told Buttigieg representatives prior to publication of the op-ed that she did not agree to any partnership with him or his campaign. Cole said she never even spoke to Buttigieg when members of his team met privately in her restaurant for a lunch that cost no more than $90. After ABC News contacted her, she received a series of emails from the Buttigieg campaign, one of which misspelled her name, asking her to agree to a position that would match the language of the op-ed. In the end, both parties settled on a statement that reads, “Diane’s Kitchen greatly appreciates Pete Buttigieg and his campaign for visiting and supporting my business. We are thankful for their willingness to choose Black owned businesses here in Chester, South Carolina.”
Atlantis restaurant owner Wendell Varner said similarly that he never agreed to any sort of “partnership” with the Buttigieg campaign.
“It’s a little disheartening to say that — that they would say that we have a partnership with them when we don’t,” Varner said. “We actually don’t support any presidential candidate, and we try to stay out of politics as a business entity.”
If it were just these two shop owners, this would not be much of a story. Maybe there were genuine misunderstandings between Cole and Varner and Buttigieg’s team. But the fact that the former mayor’s campaign keeps touting questionable support from African Americans, all while struggling to attract minority voters, gives the distinct impression that his representatives are intentionally misleading voters about the true status of his relationship with the black community.
Recall that the Buttigieg campaign last week hyped an endorsement from comedian Keegan-Michael Key, only to backtrack later and clarify that the black actor did not, in fact, endorse his candidacy. Earlier than that, in October, the Buttigieg campaign boasted that “400 South Carolinians, including business owners, pastors, community leaders, and students” had joined together to “endorse” his “Douglass Plan for Black America.”
But if you actually read through the list of the 400, you will find that at least 184 of the named individuals are white, some of the names repeat, some of the endorsers do not live in South Carolina, and some do not even support the former mayor, the Intercept reported at the time.
As if that were not bad enough, the top three individuals highlighted in a Buttigieg campaign statement announcing support for his Douglass Plan said later that reports of their alleged endorsements were news to them.
Columbia City Councilwoman Tameika Devine, Rehoboth Baptist pastor and state Rep. Ivory Thigpen, and South Carolina’s Black Caucus chairman Johnnie Cordero each said separately that they had agreed to no such thing.
The Buttigieg campaign, for its part, maintains that it has not tried to misrepresent support from specific black individuals or black-owned businesses.
On the South Carolina businesses specifically, “Buttigieg campaign officials said they viewed the op-ed as a chance to promote the fact that they were frequenting minority-owned businesses — not that they had forged a formal relationship [with] Cole’s restaurant,” ABC News reports.
The language used on the campaign trail “can be tough to calibrate,” representatives for the 2020 candidate added.
Again, if it were just one or two of these incidents, and if they came from a campaign that polled decently with black voters, this would be a nonstory. But this keeps happening with the Buttigieg campaign, and it is impossible to separate these disputed endorsements from the broader context of the former mayor’s overall struggle to win support from minority voters.
If it is not outright dishonesty, it at least looks awfully desperate.
