This is just embarrassing. Pete Buttigieg is experiencing a kind of bump in the polling in Iowa, and he thought he would celebrate by falsifying support from the black community.
Yesterday Pete Buttigieg put out a list of 400 Black South Carolinians that endorse him/his plan.
— Rachel R. Gonzalez (@RachelRGonzalez) November 16, 2019
-A lot of the people are confused because they didn’t endorse.
-42 percent of the list is white.
-They used stock photos from Kenya.
Yet we have heard nothing from his campaign.
Buttigieg campaign says that people had a chance to opt out of endorsing and received this email before it went public: https://t.co/PidpTyGtMe pic.twitter.com/d8xdihTpMv
— Ryan Grim (@ryangrim) November 15, 2019
From Slate:
The ethics of such a Big Tech–style opt-out approach aside, Cordero and Thigpen’s quotes indicate that the Buttigieg campaign and its “endorsers” may not have agreed on whether they were in fact “endorsers” at all.
And while you’ll note that the Buttigieg release above merely implies that the people endorsing the plan are black, a sharp-eyed Twitter user noticed that the email the campaign sent about the article to its signees claims that the 400 supporters involved are “black South Carolinians.” When the Intercept matched the names of the alleged supporters with publicly available information about South Carolina voters, though, it found that at least 184 of them are white.
So one of the untold stories of this campaign is that Pete Buttigieg, the openly gay candidate, gets ZERO support from the black community. Now, I wonder why that would be? Well, no one wants to admit it but African-Americans aren’t really down with the LGBT cause, generally.
Maybe that’s why Buttigieg had to do this:
On top of everything else, the Buttigieg campaign used a stock photo from Kenya to promote its Frederick Douglass Plan for Black America https://t.co/OqnGSIqCLS pic.twitter.com/qBqei71TdA
— Ryan Grim (@ryangrim) November 15, 2019
LOL! Embarrassing. Imagine if Trump had done something like that. The media would have excoriated him. I mean, they freak out over every little thing, sometimes completely made up. But their favorite candidate can do this and barely get any press at all. Weird huh?
Despite this, it’s a total moonshot for Buttigieg to catapult himself into the nomination. There’s a chance, but not with close to zero support from the African-American community…