ATLANTA — Bernie Sanders’ campaign co-chair unloaded on Pete Buttigieg at a fundraiser over his outreach efforts to black voters, saying his failures with the community as mayor of South Bend, Indiana, made him unfit to be president.
Nina Turner, a top Sanders supporter, referenced the fatal shooting in June of Eric Logan, a 54-year-old black man, by a white police officer. Buttigieg, who has struggled to gain traction with black voters as he contests the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, stepped off the trail over the summer to deal with the aftermath but was met by angry protesters.
“When you can’t even take care of the needs of black folks in your own city,” Turner said Tuesday in Atlanta against the backdrop of “Bernie” signs. “When a black woman says to you, over the shooting of a black man in your city, and the black community comes together to tell you how frustrated they are, how sick and tired they are of being sick and tired, and then they say to you ‘I’m not going to vote for you for president’ and you say to this black woman, ‘I ain’t asking for your vote.’ I don’t think you are in any position to be the president of the United States of America.”
Neither Turner nor the Sanders campaign immediately responded to requests for comment from the Washington Examiner. But Turner, a 51-year-old former Ohio state senator, told HuffPost that she made the remarks in a personal capacity, and they did not represent the Vermont senator, 78.
“If that’s how you handle a police shooting in your city, what’s going to happen when you become president and there continues to be police shootings across the country on unarmed black men and women? ‘I didn’t ask you for your vote’? That’s callous,” Turner told the outlet, which first reported her statements. “I expect the mayor to know better.”
While Buttigieg, 37, is experiencing a surge in popularity in majority-white states like Iowa and New Hampshire, critics routinely suggest he is not connecting with African-Americans, pointing to South Carolina polling as evidence. The “First in the South” state’s Democratic electorate is mostly black, and this week the mayor registered less than 1% support with the demographic, according to a new Quinnipiac University survey. He often downplays concerns by saying he is continuing to work to earn their vote, attributing his slow start to low national name recognition.
“Most of the conversations that I’m having with black voters in the course of this campaign comes down to two questions. One question is can you win because we cannot take a chance in 2020 on unseating this president, and secondly, what is your agenda for black America, and is it going to make a difference in my life?” Buttigieg said in Atlanta this week during a stop at Morehouse College, a historically African American institution. “The most important one, of course, is to actually show that you can deserve to win black votes, and that is where making sure that I’ve communicated what we seek to do is so important.”
[Read more: ‘It was alarming’: Black leaders claim Buttigieg misled voters about the ‘Douglass Plan for Black America’]
In GA, Pete Buttigieg weighed in on how doing well in Iowa might help him w. black voters: “I know that a lot of voters in a lot of other early states, including the first state in the south to vote, South Carolina, will be keeping an eye on Iowa to see if we can really deliver.” pic.twitter.com/TqUwm2nGNu
— DJ Judd (@DJJudd) November 19, 2019
Buttigieg and Sanders will appear center stage at Wednesday night’s fifth Democratic primary debate in Atlanta. On Thursday, the mayor will address the National Action Network Breakfast, a conference organized by Rev. Al Sharpton, while the senator will host a rally at Morehouse.
