What’s really behind Buttigieg’s lack of support among black voters?

ralled with Pete Buttigieg?”

Of course, this isn’t to say Buttigieg isn’t doing especially badly among black Democrats. He is. In the Quinnipiac survey, Buttigieg is at 23 percent among white Democrats and 4 percent among black Democrats. The Economist/YouGov survey put him at 16 among white Democrats and 2 percent among black Democrats. Which brings me to another obvious challenge for the mayor (and every other candidate) in winning black support: Biden. The former vice president is doing substantially better with black voters than he is overall, getting more than 40 percent of black voters in both the YouGov and Quinnipiac surveys. Buttigieg, I would argue, is going to have a hard time pulling that support from Biden. Older black voters in particular are more familiar with Biden from his time as Barack Obama’s vice president and have a pragmatic streak that may make them reluctant to help nominate a 37-year-old small-town mayor to take on President Trump.

I worry that political observers are making the same mistake that we did in 2008 and 2016: attributing a candidate’s challenges with black voters to something that candidate is doing wrong (Hillary Clinton in 2008, Sanders in 2016) as opposed to a rival candidate just being more popular with black voters ( Obama in 2008, Clinton in 2016). Maybe black voters, particularly older ones, just really like Biden, at least at this stage in the race.

What about younger black voters, who, according to polling from Morning Consult, aren’t as enamored with Biden? Here, Buttigieg may have more of an ideological problem. Even the recent polls that found Buttigieg surging also showed Sanders and Warren polling ahead of him among black voters in the polls I looked at.