Pete Buttigieg Has Cooled Off But His Campaign Says It's Time For "Phase Three" [View all]

[brooklynite]

Buzzfeed

When Pete Buttigieg walked onstage at this month’s Iowa Democratic Wing Ding dinner, the crowd exploded into perhaps their loudest cheer for any of the 20 presidential candidates there that night.

He still commands attention, and inside that room there was real affection from voters who will matter soon.

But six months have passed since Buttigieg’s breakout moment at a CNN town hall briefly propelled him from obscurity to serious contender, and this summer, he seems stuck in fifth place. Now, after a fundraising period in which he led all rivals, including former vice president Joe Biden and several senators with national followings, his team is working to build Buttigieg into a sustainable force capable of winning the Democratic nomination.

“The first phase was just getting people to understand how to pronounce this impossible to pronounce Maltese last name,” Lis Smith, a senior adviser to the campaign who has been with Buttigieg from the start, told BuzzFeed News. “The second phase was to blow everyone out of the water on fundraising — everyone out of the fucking water. Done. Done. Now the third phase is blow them out of the water with our organization and our organizational abilities.”