We Talked to Mayor Pete About Beating Trump, Coming Out, and Whether Female Candidates Get a Fair Shake

Pete Buttigieg’s profile is on the rise.

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Can an openly gay war-veteran millennial become president in 2020?

This week’s guest on the Mother Jones Podcast is presidential hopeful Pete Buttigieg, the 37-year-old mayor of South Bend, Indiana, vying for a shot in a crowded Democratic field. 

In front of a sold-out crowd at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco last week, Mayor Pete, as he’s known to his constituents, had a candid conversation with Mother Jones Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery, in which he shared his plans to bring the rigor of running a small Rust Belt town to the White House. 

But first, he needs to beat President Donald Trump—and Mayor Pete says he knows how.

Listen to the full interview: 

Now hitting the campaign trail hard, Mayor Pete popped into third place in a recent poll in Iowa behind Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders. And on Twitter Monday morning, Pete announced that his team has raised more than $7 million in the first quarter of 2019—a significant amount for a candidate who, until a few months ago, wasn’t well known outside of South Bend. This also means that he meets the criteria to get onstage for the first two Democratic Party presidential debates, so we might be hearing a lot more from Mayor Pete. 

Fortunately, he’s got a sense of humor. Pete offered this advice to Democratic voters: “What you want to do is, you want to nominate a really kind of forward-thinking, inclusive, new-generation, young, good-looking mayor.”  

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GREAT JOURNALISM, SLOW FUNDRAISING

Our team has been on fire lately—publishing sweeping, one-of-a-kind investigations, ambitious, groundbreaking projects, and even releasing “the holy shit documentary of the year.” And that’s on top of protecting free and fair elections and standing up to bullies and BS when others in the media don’t.

Yet, we just came up pretty short on our first big fundraising campaign since Mother Jones and the Center for Investigative Reporting joined forces.

So, two things:

1) If you value the journalism we do but haven’t pitched in over the last few months, please consider doing so now—we urgently need a lot of help to make up for lost ground.

2) If you’re not ready to donate but you’re interested enough in our work to be reading this, please consider signing up for our free Mother Jones Daily newsletter to get to know us and our reporting better. Maybe once you do, you’ll see it’s something worth supporting.

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