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How Buttigieg got here
Buttigieg aides believe there is plenty of blame to go around for the campaign's demise.
The former mayor's month started better than most would have expected with a strong showing in Iowa.
But the Iowa results, because of the chaos that befell the state on caucus night, were not officially certified until weeks after Iowa Democrats caucused on February 3. Because the state party was ill-prepared for the caucus and used a faulty app that significantly delayed the reporting of results, much of Buttigieg's momentum out of the state was blunted and, while money followed the win, it wasn't as substantial as top campaign aides expected.
"I would say that there is a little frustration that there wasn't more clarity on caucus night in Iowa," said Schmuhl, "because I think that that could have been potentially much bigger for us and really helped our catapult strategy that we have devised a long, long time ago."
The delay, in the eyes of Schmuhl and others, thwarted their plan to try to mimic Obama's success in 2008.
Reggie Love, a former top aide Obama aide who is now backing Buttigieg, said, like his former boss, "Iowa did validate Pete."
But even Love admitted it hasn't been as clear for Buttigieg.
"I think it proved that his message does resonate with the toughest voters in the country," he said. "But Bernie also did well and there was a lot of noise around the process and by the time you had clarity around what even actually was validated, you were four days or three days to the New Hampshire primary."
Buttigieg then came within a few percentage points of Sanders in New Hampshire and picked up more national delegates from the state with a second-place finish.
But that performance was overshadowed by a resurgent Klobuchar, who used a strong debate days before the state voted to finish third in the primary. Klobuchar, not Buttigieg, saw her media attention surge and the Minnesota senator raised more than $12 million in nine days in the middle of February, a boom in money for her cash-strapped campaign.
Klobuchar's rise corresponded with the rise of former New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg, whose poll numbers surged in early February to the point that he qualified for the Democratic primary debate in Las Vegas on February 19. Bloomberg's ascension -- combined with his spending of more than $500 million on ads just to propel his run -- sucked up considerable media attention and further divided the growing anti-Sanders electorate.
Buttigieg responded to this one-two-punch of momentum killers by looking to focus voters on the reality of both his and the party's situation.
"We've got to wake up as a party," Buttigieg said during a February debate in Las Vegas. "We could wake up two weeks from today, the day after Super Tuesday, and the only candidates left standing will be Bernie Sanders and Mike Bloomberg, the two most polarizing figures on this stage."
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Posted by Erin Burnett to Trang Ánh Nam at March 1, 2020 at 6:08 PM
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