McKinsey Pete-- Fading

Remember when everyone had to learn how to spell Buttigieg because it looked like McKinsey Pete was a real contender? Don't worry if you didn't quite get the knack yet. This was a NY Post headline yesterday: Buttigieg receives 0 percent support from likely black voters in South Carolina: poll. African-Americans make up about two-thirds of the Democratic primary vote in South Carolina. Some think God took a rib out of Obama and created Status Quo Joe in 2006. Wait 'til they start learning about how long racist record before there was an Obama! Obama was still in elementary school when Biden was the poster child for the anti-integration movement in Delaware and beyond. Meanwhile, though, according to a poll he's leading among black voters in South Carolina. Bernie is second and then Kamala Harris. No one else is in double digits. In fact, everyone knows who Biden and Bernie are (100%) but among likely primary voters many say they haven't even heard of most of the candidates! In the "never heard of them" column:

• Beto- 19%
• Kamala- 12%
• Elizabeth Warren- 12%
• Cory Booker- 17%
• Amy Klobuchar- 39%
• Julian Castro- 38%
• John Delaney- 61%
• Tulsi- 51%
• Kirsten Gillibrand- 31%
• Frackenlooper- 56%
• Jay Inslee- 61%
• Eric Swalwell- 57%
• Andrew Yang- 55%
• Marianne Williamson- 64%
• Michael Bennet- 58%
• McKinsey Pete- 27%
• Stacey Abrams- 22%
• Wayne Messam- 75%
• Tim Ryan- 54%
• Mike Gravel- 67%
• Seth Moulton- 70%
• Steve Bullock- 67%

To be fair to Pete, there are six other candidates who also have zero support among black primary voters in South Carolina: Eric Swalwell, Tulsi, Tim Ryan, Julian Castro John Delaney and Michael Bennet. But Swalwell, Tulsi, Ryan, Castro, Delaney and Bennet never had that giant blast of p.r. from the mega-surge that McKinsey Pete had. Now the p.r. on Pete has turned-- the Fading Candidate. Geoffrey Skelley at FiveThirtyEight wrote that "Buttigieg’s upward trajectory in the polls has seemingly halted and he looks to have settled in at around 6 percent, down from a peak of 8 percent."

It all started following a March 10 CNN presidential town hall, when Buttigieg really caught fire. You can see voters responding to him in the itemized donations to his campaign, which spiked the day of the event and continued to skyrocket through the end of the month.

And it wasn’t just Buttigieg’s fundraising numbers that took off: The share of Democrats who knew enough about him to form an opinion of him-- found by adding together the share who said they had a favorable opinion and the share who said they had an unfavorable opinion-- has also risen precipitously. At the start of February, around 20 percent of Democrats had an opinion of Buttigieg, but by the beginning of May, that figure was above 50 percent.

... Buttigieg’s uptick in familiarity was significant because he gained a fair amount of support as people became more familiar with him... [T]the share of voters who said they were planning to vote for Buttigieg increased by 7 points from mid-March (when his support was about 1 percent) to mid-April (about 8 percent).

This represents a pretty dramatic rise, but Buttigieg isn’t alone in his polling surge. Harris and Sen. Bernie Sanders also had notable increases in their survey numbers around the time of their campaign announcements. And now it appears that Biden is enjoying his own polling bump following his entrance into the race. Nonetheless, those candidates weren’t polling at 0 percent like Buttigieg was. But now the Indiana mayor finds himself getting around the same amount of support as former Rep. Beto O’Rourke, a development that few people would have bet on just a couple of months ago. Buttigieg’s numbers have dipped slightly in the past couple of weeks, but that could be a side effect of Biden entering the race-- Sanders and other candidates have also experienced a slide in their numbers since Biden announced he was running on April 25.

As Vox noted last month, Buttigieg has made himself incredibly accessible to the media, which in turn has helped grow his profile, especially in the wake of the CNN town hall. But now Biden is capturing a ton of media attention, to the detriment of his Democratic opponents. And as we know from past elections, media coverage is an influential part of the “invisible primary”-- the period before voting begins, when donors, the media and party operatives are the biggest influencers of who leads the presidential nomination contest. Free airtime for a candidate can be the equivalent of millions of dollars in advertising, and it has helped Buttigieg attract support and donors.

It’s impossible to say what will come next for Buttigieg. Maybe his support has peaked, or maybe he will go on to new heights.

More likely he's had his day. People are finding out some unpleasant stuff about how he handled his time as mayor and others are beginning to recognize the hollowness of his consultant-speak campaign. Biden's got the non-progressive lane sewn up and Bernie and Elizabeth Warren have the progressive lane pretty much to themselves. The confused-pick-a-name-lane is fluid and that's where he is and where he'll remain (other than in the Identity Politics Lane, where he's the LGBTQ guy).