Having a moment...

Buttigieg dashes to catch up with his newfound fame

The mayor is having a moment. His task now is to convert it into a full-fledged campaign.

By ELENA SCHNEIDER

Pete Buttigieg has the mojo. Now he needs a campaign.

The South Bend, Ind., mayor is earning glowing press coverage and enjoying a polling spike after a fiery rebuke of Vice President Mike Pence during a CNN town hall. But, so far, he’s got almost no on-the-ground operation in the early states, as he has to figure out how to convert his Twitter-trending bid into a sustained national campaign.

“Up to now, I haven’t seen or heard of anything he’s built here in Iowa,” said Jerry Crawford, a longtime Iowa Democratic operative. Buttigieg "hasn’t had the resources to build it yet, so now all this buzz, this boomlet he’s having can give him the finances to do it, but he’s still several stages behind everyone else.”

The challenge for Buttigieg goes beyond teaching America how to pronounce his last name. Local operatives said the 37-year-old lags behind the rest of the sprawling pack of 2020 candidates in building infrastructure in Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina — a problem Buttigieg’s campaign is racing to correct as money starts rolling in.

More like gushing in: The campaign announced Monday it raised more than $7 million in the first three months of the year, a staggering figure for a small-city mayor who was virtually unknown nationally starting the race. "We (you) are out-performing expectations at every turn," Buttigieg tweeted.

Crawford also warned that the “best talent” in Iowa and New Hampshire has already been snapped up by his 2020 rivals.

“Earned media can take you far, but a presidential campaign starts in Iowa,” said John Lapp, a Democratic strategist with deep experience in national politics.

Jaime Harrison, the former South Carolina Democratic Party chairman, said “there’s a lot of interest” in Buttigieg in the state, but that “at the end of the day, you have to have an operation, and he doesn’t have one here yet.”

“That’s not to say he can’t put it together quickly,” Harrison added.

“I haven’t even heard someone say his name out loud, much less have an infrastructure here to speak of,” said one unaffiliated Nevada Democratic operative, granted anonymity to speak candidly about Buttigieg's lack of an operation.

The Buttigieg campaign said it expects to double the size of its staff to 40 people in the coming weeks, adding workers to its finance, communications, digital and political teams. It's also recruiting state staffers in Iowa and New Hampshire, as well as courting consulting firms. But Lis Smith, the campaign spokeswoman, said it “won’t be [a] consultant-heavy" team.

On Monday, the Buttigieg campaign will move into its new headquarters, in an office building in downtown South Bend, that features the mayor's name in 2-foot tall letters painted on the wall: "BOOT EDGE EDGE."

Buttigieg told POLITICO that the “response has been tremendous since we arrived in a bigger way than before on the national scene, and I’m confident that’s going to bring us the resources we need to mount a credible effort.”

It’s a critical juncture for Buttigieg, and strategists warned that he needs to quickly scale up from a Twitter darling to a serious contender.

The spotlight is hot: In the past month, Buttigieg appeared on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” HBO’s “Real Time with Bill Maher” and Power 105.1’s “The Breakfast Club.” His book, "Shortest Way Home" jumped back onto the New York Times' bestseller list this week. His husband, Chasten Buttigieg, earned column write-ups on his Twitter personality by Elle and POLITICO, as well as coveted Twitter follows by Chrissy Teigen and Lin-Manuel Miranda.

Buttigieg was invited to appear on Ellen DeGeneres’ daytime talk show, the same stage that launched his 2020 rival, then-Texas Senate candidate Beto O’Rourke, into the fundraising stratosphere in 2018. The episode is scheduled to air on April 11.

“It’s the quintessential 2019 way of campaigning,” said Dan Sena, a Democratic strategist who led the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee last election cycle. “But the big, big, big, big question is: Does all of this translate into people actually voting for you? The biggest pitfall for him would be it just doesn’t translate from social media to the electorate.”

But while several Republicans running in recent presidential primaries benefited from a surge of media attention, they eventually stalled out — Ben Carson and Carly Fiorina in 2016, Herman Cain in 2012. And some strategists remain skeptical that Buttigieg will avoid their fate.

“If Twitter candidates were always going to win, Cynthia Nixon would be the governor of New York right now,” said Jess Morales Rocketto, a Democratic strategist who worked on Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign. “Twitter is not voters, and it doesn’t always translate, especially with voters in Iowa and New Hampshire.”

Yet there are early signs of Buttigieg support manifesting beyond the social media bubble. After the CNN town hall, he raised more than $600,000 and announced he’d reached the DNC’s threshold to make the debate stage in June.

In a follow-up fundraising email pitch in mid-March, the Buttigieg campaign asked donors to give $500,000 before March 31, the cutoff for the first fundraising quarter. He received that much by the day's end. The campaign made the same ask a second time — another $500,000 before the filing deadline — and, again, it pulled in that amount in one day.

Buttigieg said he’s “surprised by the pace” of the attention he’s received since it “happened so suddenly after the CNN town hall.” It has shaped the way his campaign will move forward, he said.

“It goes to show: It makes a difference when you get in front of a lot more people, and that’s going to be our objective in the weeks and months to come, to get in front of as many people as possible,” he said.

His appeal isn’t limited to the small-dollar donors who poured in after the CNN town hall. Susie Tompkins Buell, a Democratic megadonor, will throw a fundraiser for Buttigieg, even though she’s said she supports California Sen. Kamala Harris in the primary.

John Atkinson, who served on President Barack Obama’s national finance committee in 2008 and 2012, said “there are a lot of people within Obamaworld that are starting to coalesce around him.”

“I’ve been around a long time, and I know what a moment is and this is not a moment,” said Atkinson, who is planning to host a fundraiser for Buttigieg in Chicago next month. “This is the real deal.”

Buttigieg is also creeping up in national and Iowa polling, jumping up to 4 percent nationally in the Quinnipiac University poll released this week. Another poll released this week by Focus On Rural America, a progressive group, showed Buttigieg going “from an asterisk, so basically zero, to six percent, which is solidly in the second tier of presidential candidates” and “not an easy feat to accomplish,” said Jeff Link, an Iowa-based Democratic consultant who advises the group.

In the long slog of a primary, the “physical infrastructure, men and women knocking on doors for you here” can’t be underestimated, Columbia, S.C., Mayor Steve Benjamin warned — even if Buttigieg’s “Twitter game is on fire.”

“I’ve not met any of his staff on the ground here, but I do know he’s talking to folks,” said Benjamin, who served as Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman in the state in 2016. “It would behoove Pete, as well as other candidates, to lock down staff fast.”