April 3, 2019

We Talked to Mayor Pete About Beating Trump, Coming Out, and Whether Female Candidates Get a Fair Shake

Pete Buttigieg’s profile is on the rise.

KC McGinnis/ZUMA Wire

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Can an openly gay war-veteran millennial become president in 2020?

This week’s guest on the Mother Jones Podcast is presidential hopeful Pete Buttigieg, the 37-year-old mayor of South Bend, Indiana, vying for a shot in a crowded Democratic field. 

In front of a sold-out crowd at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco last week, Mayor Pete, as he’s known to his constituents, had a candid conversation with Mother Jones Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery, in which he shared his plans to bring the rigor of running a small Rust Belt town to the White House. 

But first, he needs to beat President Donald Trump—and Mayor Pete says he knows how.

Listen to the full interview: 

Now hitting the campaign trail hard, Mayor Pete popped into third place in a recent poll in Iowa behind Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders. And on Twitter Monday morning, Pete announced that his team has raised more than $7 million in the first quarter of 2019—a significant amount for a candidate who, until a few months ago, wasn’t well known outside of South Bend. This also means that he meets the criteria to get onstage for the first two Democratic Party presidential debates, so we might be hearing a lot more from Mayor Pete. 

Fortunately, he’s got a sense of humor. Pete offered this advice to Democratic voters: “What you want to do is, you want to nominate a really kind of forward-thinking, inclusive, new-generation, young, good-looking mayor.”  

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

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And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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