Shayanne Gal/Business Insider
Former Mayor Pete Buttigieg.
- Former Mayor Pete Buttigieg is dropping out of the 2020 presidential primary after a disappointing finish in the South Carolina primary, according to multiple reports.
- Buttigieg leaves the race after an unexpectedly strong bid that included winning the Iowa caucuses and coming in second in the New Hampshire primary.
- His candidacy began gaining traction last spring with his near-constant appearances on television and interviews with print and digital publications.
- Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.
Former Mayor Pete Buttigieg will drop out of the 2020 race after rising from the little-known mayor of South Bend, Indiana to a top candidate in the 2020 field, according to multiple reports.
The news comes after Buttigieg's disappointing finish in the South Carolina primary.
Buttigieg's candidacy began gaining unexpected traction last spring as he blanketed national media with near-constant appearances on television and interviews with print and digital publications.
The early coverage of the then-mayor was overwhelmingly positive as he carved out a place in the race as a new voice and a fresh face.
LIVE UPDATES: Follow the rest of the results of today's South Carolina primaries
But Buttigieg eventually began to tangle with his competitors, accusing the more progressive candidates in the race of offering too radical of an agenda on healthcare, college affordability, and climate change.
He ran on a public option - or "Medicare for all who want it" - as an alternative to single-payer healthcare, more conservative approaches to student debt and taxes, and controversially lamented the national debt.
A Midwestern moderate
Buttigieg told Insider in a March interview that as the lone millennial voice in the 2020 field, he hoped to reframe the policy debate around values and make pragmatic the new progressive.
Buttigieg was slow to put forward policy proposals and spent the first several months of his campaign focused on broad arguments about values. He argued that conservatives had coopted concepts like freedom, security, and democracy, while liberals buried values-based messaging in 14-point plans.
"We often convey our positions and our values in a way that would make it almost psychologically impossible for a conservative person who might be open to what we have to say, for the first time in a long time, to actually get there," he told Insider.
He accused his party of ignoring the industrial Midwest and deprioritizing local and state races, which he said led Democrats to lose hundreds of seats during Obama's eight years.
A former Navy Reserve officer who was deployed to Afghanistan, a Harvard-educated Rhodes scholar, and an out millennial mayor in a deep-red state, Buttigieg has "a bio that reads like it was written by Aaron Sorkin," as the MSNBC host Chris Hayes put it. He regularly emphasized that he was the only 2020 candidate living a "middle-class lifestyle in middle America" and wasn't a millionaire or billionaire.
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