April 3, 2019

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.

KC McGinnis/ZUMA Wire

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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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WE CAME UP SHORT.

We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

So we urgently need this specific ask, what you're reading right now, to start bringing in more donations than it ever has. The reality, for these next few months and next few years, is that we have to start finding ways to grow our online supporter base in a big way—and we're optimistic we can keep making real headway by being real with you about this.

Because the bottom line: Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. We really need to see if we'll be able to raise more with this real estate on a daily basis than we have been, so we're hoping to see a promising start.

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