2020 Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg has said time and again that he believes Americans who voted for President Donald Trump are racist. On Sunday, CNN’s Jake Tapper asked Buttigieg if he regretted saying this.
Does Pete Buttigieg Really Believe 63 Million Americans are Racist?
“Republicans have been seizing, including in a new Trump ad, a statement you made that ‘Anyone who supported this president is, at best, looking the other way on racism.’ You’ve also said that on my show,” Tapper explained. “That’s almost 63 million Americans who you’re painting with a pretty broad brush. Do you regret saying that at all?”
Buttigieg responded without hesitation.
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Pete Buttigieg never seems to miss an opportunity to smear @realDonaldTrump’s supporters.
Today, he went on CNN & stood by implying that 63 million Americans who supported President Trump are racist.
That's shameful, divisive, & wrong.pic.twitter.com/SihGl3SdE0
— Ronna McDaniel (@GOPChairwoman) February 2, 2020
“No. I’m very concerned about the racial division that this president has fostered,” the former South Bend, Indiana mayor explained. “And I’m meeting a lot of voters who are no longer willing to look the other way on that, looking for a new political home.”
Polls Show Trump Approval is Up with Minority Voters
If Buttigieg believes Trump and his supporters represent racism, a host of recent polls might bely that argument.
An Emerson poll in early December put Trump at 35 percent with black voters and 38 percent with Hispanics.
“If you add in Asian voters at 28 percent approval,” notes Emerson’s director of polling Spencer Kimball, “our number is very close to the new Marist poll,” which finds Trump’s approval at 33 percent among non-white voters. Trump received 34 percent approval among black voters in a recent RasmussenReports poll, and a CNN poll puts Trump’s approval among non-white voters at 26 percent.
Rush Limbaugh said of these polls, “We’ve got three polls today showing Donald Trump at 30 percent or higher with black voters. We’ve got Emerson, we’ve got Rasmussen and we’ve got Marist!”
Do people that support Warren, Bernie, Buttigieg, or Biden really think that these people will vote for someone that has implied they are all racist and evil for supporting Trump? Give me a break. #YangUnitesAmerica pic.twitter.com/o5cnTASSDE
— Jonathan D. Chang (@jdschang) February 2, 2020
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‘You can’t dispute the fact that African-Americans have been benefiting from President Trump’s policies’
“You can’t dispute the fact that African-Americans have been benefiting from President Trump’s policies,” said Katrina Pierson with the Trump campaign. “Four years ago, the president asked the black community, ‘What do you have to lose;’ now we are thinking, ‘Imagine what we stand to gain!’”
No doubt the unemployment rate falling to a 50-year-low has something to do with Trump’s rising popularity with non-white voters.
Buttigieg can continue to call Trump supporters racist all he wants. He’ll be lucky to get anywhere near the Democratic nomination–much less the only poll that counts in November.