He embodies, to a fault, the party’s growing strength among college-educated whites. The son of parents who both taught college and a former mayor of a college town, he’s smooth, credentialed, hyper-articulate and a quick study who knows enough to charm and impress journalists and other white-collar creative types. In the primaries in 2020, it was his smattering of Norwegian; now it’s his familiarity with biographer Robert Caro’s critiques of New York development official Robert Moses.
If a management consultant were to design a progressive white Democrat in a bottle, the result would look a lot like Buttigieg, himself a former management consultant.
It’s become increasingly clear, though, that the Democratic Party’s new base among college-educated voters is a trap if it is pursued to the exclusion of an appeal to working-class voters. The party’s poor standing with non-college educated voters has begun to show up in eroding support among Latinos, a constituency that not too long ago was presumed to be a key pillar of the Obama-crafted “coalition of the ascendant.” There is still no sign that Buttigieg could appeal to these kinds of voters if his political life depended on it. Indeed, it did in the 2020 primaries, and he came up empty.
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