White House hopeful Pete Buttigieg dropped out of the race for president Sunday after a disappointing finish in South Carolina left him without a path to victory in the coast-to-coast Super Tuesday contest.
The former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, announced the decision on the same day he had breakfast with former President Jimmy Carter in Plains, his second pilgrimage to meet with the Georgia Democrat.
Even Carter, who didn’t endorse the candidate, seemed to hint at Buttigieg’s tough path ahead. Of Buttigieg’s future plans, Carter told reporters: “He doesn’t know what he’s going to do after South Carolina.”
Buttigieg responded: “Every day, we’ll do the math.”
The math looked forbidding to Buttigieg, whose campaign lost momentum after top-two finishes in Iowa and New Hampshire.
He finished far behind former Vice President Joe Biden in Saturday's South Carolina primary, where he hoped to show he could attract African-American voters. Exit polls showed just 3% of black voters in the Palmetto State supported his bid.
His campaign had acknowledged he was unlikely to win any of the 14 states that cast ballots on Tuesday, but it hoped to pick off delegates in targeted congressional districts that spanned more centrist suburban areas.
And national polls showed him hovering around 10% of support, as his insistence that there was middle ground between “revolution and the status quo” failed to energize voters torn between Bernie Sanders’ liberal brand and more veteran alternatives.
It’s welcome news for Biden, who is trying to consolidate moderate support ahead of Tuesday’s vote to try to slow Sanders, the national front-runner who is leading the polls in some of the more populous states.
Buttigieg’s decision came hours after he tried to draw comparisons with Carter, whose underdog campaign for the White House in 1976 has similarities to his own path from small-town Indiana to a top-tier presidential contender.
It was Buttigieg’s second trip to southwest Georgia to visit with the 95-year-old former president, who is recovering from a string of recent ailments that left him briefly hospitalized.
(Two other White House hopefuls have also made the journey: U.S. Sen. Cory Booker, who has since dropped out of the contest, trekked to Plains with Rep. John Lewis in January 2019. And U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota visited shortly after.)
Carter, one of Georgia's superdelegates, has not taken sides in this year's contest. But he revealed after the 2016 election that he supported U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders in the primary against Hillary Clinton.
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