How Will Democrats Explain South Bend?

The search continues for a premise to the Buttigieg candidacy.

Some readers thought it unfair last week when this column described potential Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg as “a small-city mayor with a middling record.” This assessment may have been too kind to the media’s favorite millennial. Regardless, it appears that the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, is almost ready to announce a 2020 run.

Campaign officials will also have to figure out how to explain why the mayor of America’s 299th largest city—which is growing its economy more slowly than some neighboring communities—should be our 46th President. Mr. Buttigieg took a crack on Sunday’s Meet the Press. Here’s an excerpt from NBC’s transcript:

CHUCK TODD: I’m going to put up a couple of numbers here having to do with South Bend. The poverty rate is still over 25%. The eviction rate 6.7%, which is fairly high. Not the highest in Indiana, but on the high end of Indiana. Obviously, you’ve been reelected. So voters believe you’ve put the city in the right direction in that sense. But these are still tough numbers. What haven’t you been able to accomplish that you wish you would?

MAYOR PETE BUTTIGIEG: Well, there’s so much work to do in a community like ours. I think people know that it’s the hometown of Notre Dame. They might assume that it’s a wealthy, homogenous college town. But we’re a city that was devastated by the loss of industry, especially when the auto factories left in the 1960s. When I took office, there were articles about whether South Bend was a dying city. Our poverty rate is too high, but it’s down. We cut unemployment by more than half. And we’ve been able to change the trajectory of the city to where we’re growing in population and in investment at a pace we haven’t seen in a generation. It’s not like all of our problems are solved. But I think one of the reasons that I wound up getting reelected with 80% of the vote is a sense that we had really changed the story for our city.

After blaming his city’s struggles in part on auto factories which closed more than a decade before he was born, Mr. Buttigieg then proceeded later in the interview to blame racism, among other factors.

While he may have changed the story of his city, he will still need to explain the reality.

More From The Wall Street Journal (subscription required):