WEST DES MOINES, Iowa — When Pete Buttigieg was asked Thursday if it worried him that mostly white people attended his big rallies in South Carolina, he said yes.
But when Mr. Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend, Ind., was asked Saturday if he was concerned about speaking to a nearly all-white crowd in Storm Lake, a northwest Iowa town that is 38 percent Hispanic, he dodged the question.
While Mr. Buttigieg has established himself as a top-tier candidate in Iowa and New Hampshire, two states at the front of the Democratic presidential nominating calendar that are 90 percent white, he has struggled to win support from the black voters who make up the vast majority of the Democratic electorate in South Carolina, which comes fourth.
That has led Mr. Buttigieg to adopt divergent campaign styles for Iowa and for South Carolina.
In Iowa, Mr. Buttigieg is the centerpiece of his theater-in-the-round-style town hall events. The production is designed to show him as ascendant, with momentum building toward the state’s caucuses next Monday. In South Carolina, where the primary falls Feb. 29, Mr. Buttigieg still needs help telling his story, so he has invited prominent African-American supporters to interview him onstage, where he has faced sharper and more skeptical questions than he does in Iowa.
The divergent approaches illustrate Mr. Buttigieg’s continuing effort to introduce himself to black voters, many of whom have far stronger and longer political ties to former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. Mr. Buttigieg’s campaign style in South Carolina also shifts the attention and focus onto black voters themselves, in an effort to show he is working to understand their concerns and priorities and forge a connection to their lives.
The differences manifest in various ways. In South Carolina, for instance, the crowds are kept intentionally small, Mr. Buttigieg’s aides say, so he can work on introducing himself to black audiences. Large boisterous rallies are more common in Iowa.
Mr. Buttigieg doesn’t speak in the television ad he’s airing in South Carolina other than the perfunctory approving of the message. Instead, a half-dozen African-Americans from South Bend vouch for his mayoral tenure.
But in Iowa, Mr. Buttigieg is the narrator of his paid media push. In seven of the eight ads his campaign has aired in Iowa over the last week, Mr. Buttigieg is the lone speaker.
At his campaign rallies and town hall events in Iowa, Mr. Buttigieg, 38, is very clearly the established star of his own show. Adoring crowds of supporters, virtually all of them white, stand in packed theaters and high school gymnasiums.
Mr. Buttigieg’s Iowa stops begin with a crisp 13-minute stump speech filled with lofty rhetoric that asks audiences to imagine “the first day that the sun comes up over Iowa and Donald Trump is no longer the president of the United States.” He then takes questions for 25 minutes. His campaign touts the sizes of his crowds — the largest of any Democratic candidate in 16 towns he’s visited, according to the Buttigieg campaign.
In his last two swings through South Carolina, however, Mr. Buttigieg has dispensed with his stump speech. On Thursday, he sat for a pair of hourlong interrogations with black moderators who asked probing questions about his commitment to black America, his struggles to appeal to black voters and his stewardship of South Bend.
“The values of this campaign are the same and therefore the message is going to be the same no matter who I’m speaking to, but I do think that black voters expect a clear expression of what my agenda is for black Americans,” Mr. Buttigieg told reporters in Iowa on Saturday.
There’s no hard sell from Mr. Buttigieg in South Carolina and only the gentlest contrast with his rival Democrats. But in Iowa, he is telling Democrats that the time for choosing has arrived. He delivers a hardly subtle message that other candidates — like Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who was singled out by his campaign in an email to supporters — are too risky to nominate against President Trump.
With days to go before Iowa’s first-in-the-nation caucuses, Mr. Buttigieg is squarely in the homestretch, telling the 1,200 people who packed a West Des Moines elementary school gymnasium on Saturday that they could boost him to the White House just as they did Barack Obama, who won the caucuses in 2008.
“Iowa is in position to give everyone else permission to believe that we can do this,” he said. “I was here as a young campaign volunteer in 2008 when you gave America permission to believe in an unlikely candidate from the Midwest.”
In South Carolina, Mr. Buttigieg skips most of his lofty rhetoric and instead goes deep on policy. He also presents himself as quite aware of his deficiencies with black voters, as he did during a podcast last week with the CNN commentator Angela Rye.
“Part of our approach in South Carolina, you know, we do the big rally-type events, and I’ll be honest, it’s mostly white folks who show up,” Mr. Buttigieg told Ms. Rye during their chat at Claflin University, a historically black university in Orangeburg.
“In South Carolina,” Ms. Rye interrupted. “That scare you?”
“Yes,” Mr. Buttigieg replied. “I’m happy for the folks that are showing up, but in order not just to win, in order to deserve to win, I’ve got to be speaking to everybody.”
On Saturday night in Storm Lake, Mr. Buttigieg addressed a nearly all-white audience in a community that has the largest percentage Hispanic population in the state. Afterward a local reporter pressed him on whether he was concerned about local Latino turnout and the demographic makeup of his audience.
“I’m concerned about making sure we bring every voter that we can and bring every caucusgoer that we can into this process,” Mr. Buttigieg replied, without referring to Hispanic voters specifically.
Art Cullen, the Pulitzer Prize-winning editor of The Storm Lake Times, said Mr. Buttigieg appealed to rural Iowa voters because he visited frequently — Saturday was the third time he had been to Storm Lake — and because he came across as inoffensive, without the harder edges of Mr. Sanders or Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, whom Mr. Cullen’s newspaper endorsed.
“If you ask a voter ‘What is Pete about?,’ they will tell you he’s a nice young man,” Mr. Cullen said.
Mr. Buttigieg’s most devoted Iowa supporters agree.
At an event in Fort Dodge on Saturday, Kurt Paeper of nearby Humboldt was wearing his yellow “PETE” T-shirt and a button that designated him a “precinct team member” for the campaign. It was his seventh time seeing Mr. Buttigieg speak.
“His attitude, his compassion, it instills a calmness in people,” said Mr. Paeper, who is retired from the fertilizer business. “We could use a little bit of that.”
At his big Iowa rallies, Mr. Buttigieg takes questions drawn out of a fishbowl by a volunteer or a local organizer. The volunteer holding the fishbowl in West Des Moines on Saturday said she hand-wrote questions for people as they entered the gymnasium so the penmanship would be easy to read, but said no questions were censored.
At a campaign rally earlier this month in downtown Des Moines, Mr. Buttigieg faced these questions:
“What is your stance on Medicare and Social Security?”
“How would you start mending fences with our allies?”
“What is your plan to help teachers?”
“What is your position on net neutrality?”
“What is your plan for mental health care?”
“Will you lower health care costs?”
In Moncks Corner, S.C., on Thursday, Mr. Buttigieg sat down with Charlamagne Tha God, the host of “The Breakfast Club” syndicated radio show, which focuses on black culture.
Charlamagne, who was raised in Moncks Corner, began by pressing Mr. Buttigieg about why, if his “Douglass Plan” campaign proposal calls for African-Americans to receive 25 percent of federal contracts, he fell far short of that standard while he was mayor of South Bend.
“When you had the executive authority to distribute contracts to minorities within your own community in South Bend, you only issued 3 percent of contracts to minorities,” Charlamagne said. “So why will you be different on the federal level?”
Mr. Buttigieg contended, using an array of statistics, that there were not very many black-owned businesses in South Bend and that he had tried to help more grow.
“You don’t just get to wave a wand and decide, you’ve got to build these things,” he said. “The good news from a federal perspective, with the powers of the presidency, is that we have an opportunity to engage the entire American people’s entrepreneurial range, with all of black America in every region of the country, which means you’re not confined to a particular geography.”
J.A. Moore, a South Carolina state representative who attended Mr. Buttigieg’s stops in the state Thursday, said it was critical for Mr. Buttigieg to face tough questions from black audiences. Mr. Moore, who had endorsed Senator Kamala Harris of California in the race but has been neutral since she dropped out, called Mr. Buttigieg’s performance in Moncks Corner “the best I’ve seen him.”
“It’s vitally important because at the end of the day, African-Americans will challenge you, especially if you’re not from here, not being from our community,” Mr. Moore said. “Even if we don’t do it publicly, we do it privately all the time.”
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How Pete Buttigieg Tailors His Message to Black and White Voters - The New York Times
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