Pete Buttigieg May Have Just Found a Way to Get Noticed in the Crowded Democratic Primary [View all]

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Pete Buttigieg May Have Just Found a Way to Get Noticed in the Crowded Democratic Primary
By Josh Voorhees
Feb 22, 20196:51 PM


Pete Buttigieg is having a hard time getting noticed. One month after launching his presidential campaign, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, remains little more than a hard-to-pronounce afterthought in a field that is getting deeper by the week. According to the most recent polling from Morning Consult, 62 percent of Democrats say they’ve never heard of Buttigieg, while nearly half of those who do know his name say they haven’t heard enough to form an opinion. The top-line numbers are more daunting still: Buttigieg polls at 0 percent—as in zero, nada, nothing—among Democrats, both nationally and in the early nominating states.

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Buttigieg, though, may have found the tiniest of openings this week—perhaps by accident.

During an event Tuesday in Philadelphia, an audience member asked him whether, if elected, he would be willing to pack the Supreme Court with liberal justices in response to the high court’s recent shift rightward. “I have not reached a considered position on the question of court-packing,” Buttigieg said over a few nervous-sounding laughs in the crowd. “Although I don’t think we should be laughing at it. Because in some ways it’s no more a shattering of norms than what’s already been done to get the judiciary to where it is today.”

It was an off-the-cuff, noncommittal answer, and yet it generated small but noticeable excitement in some corners of the internet. The 1/20/21 Project, a court-packing campaign with the backing of people like Harvard law professors Laurence Tribe and Mark Tushnet, celebrated the answer, as did NARAL president Ilyse Hogue. Progressive outlets like Common Dreams and Daily Kos likewise reacted positively, and ThinkProgress even went as far as to declare that Buttigieg had proved himself the only Democrat in the race who “seems serious about governing.”

Link to tweet

A few tweets and effusive blog posts won’t turn Buttigieg into a national figure, but they do suggest that, even in a field that is proposing bold policies on everything from day care to climate change, there’s still room for a candidate to go big in other, less obvious areas. Buttigieg’s full answer, which didn’t make it into the clip originally shared online, points to a few such directions he might consider:

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https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2019/02/pete-buttigieg-court-packing-electoral-college.html