Pete Buttigieg’s presidential campaign team has spent months trying to figure out what it can do to better relate to Black America in the face of dismal poll numbers and reported internal strife related to diversity and inclusion. But a clue to the disconnect could be with his former constituency in South Bend, Indiana, where he was mayor from 2012 to this year.

Speaking with The New York Post, several people who live on South Bend’s predominantly Black west side are sounding out a warning about the candidate, saying the Buttigieg tenure they remember was rife with neglect of the African American community, increases in violent crime, and a tone-deaf attitude to the poor.

“Rating him 1 to 10, I’d give him a 2,” said Cornish Miller, 62, a military supply company worker who lives on the west side of town. “Buttigieg talked about all the improvements he made, but he hardly made a dent.” 

According to a Quinnipiac University poll, Buttigieg is running at 4 percent with African Americans; far behind Joe Biden’s 27 percent, although the former vice president did see a marked drop in Black approval; and former New York mayor Mike Bloomberg’s 22 percent.

According to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, unemployment in South Bend was at 3.4 percent at the end of 2019. The city of 101,000 people also saw increases in violent crimes like assaults and arson. While murders, rapes and robberies did go down, crime there is still higher than the national average. When Buttigieg took office in 2012 violent crime was at 622, but jumped to more than 1,000 by 2018, according to FBI statistics.

That equals a poor quality of life for Black residents, who say they are displeased with Buttigieg’s performance.

“If he’s the next president, I fear for our country. He couldn’t run our city. How can he run the United States?” said Michelle Burger, 42, who also lives on the west side. “Look at all the crime — he didn’t do anything about it. Look at our quality of life. If he becomes president, the United States will become one big South Bend — a giant sinkhole. We’ll be in a new depression.” 

Residents on that side of town say it is the most neglected and that the only one street that has streetlights is the one that leads to the University of Notre Dame, which sits adjacent to South Bend.

One of his biggest critics, Rev. Sylvester Williams Jr., of the Interfaith Christian Union church, said Buttigieg was simply not in touch with those who needed the most help.

“We had a record number of homicides during his time as mayor, and it didn’t seem like he was feeling the people’s psychological, emotional and spiritual needs,” Williams told The NY Post. “It seemed like he was focused on creating a progressive city, that he was above tending to those basic needs.”

For his part, Buttigieg has acknowledged the distance between himself and Black and other nonwhite voters. On Fox News Sunday he said that as voters in Nevada and South Carolina, both sought after for early Latino and Black support, he plans to convince them that he’s the person who can defeat Donald Trump in November.

“For so many voters and certainly for a lot of voters of color that I talked to across the Latino, the Black and the AAPI (Asian American and Pacific Islander) communities, it’s about making sure that we get this right,” Buttigieg said.

But then there are those like South Bend Councilman Henry Davis Jr., who says the former mayor’s commitment to the city has been scant. For example, a six-month deployment in 2014 with the U.S. Naval Reserve, then a failed attempt to win the chairmanship of the Democratic National Committee.
“And then he came back and takes off again and wants to be president of the United States,” said Davis, who in 2015 lost against Buttigieg in the Democratic mayoral primary, the NY Post says. “So he really has never been here and committed to the growth...of this community. It’s always been a gateway to something that he believed was larger.”