DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) — Pete Buttigieg would like to turn the fight for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination into a contest about generational change.
But there’s one looming problem for the 37-year-old mayor of South Bend, Indiana: He’s yet to win over his own.
His lack of any ample base of support, even among fellow millennials, is a central challenge of his long shot bid to rise to the nation’s highest office.
He plays well across a broad spectrum of Democratic voters, but in small fragments that have left him an intriguing candidate stuck in single digits in national polls.
Buttigieg needs to try to leverage that kind of appeal into votes against a field where candidates with clearer ideological positions, such as Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, have more natural core constituencies.
