MSNBC’s Willie Geist Confronts Buttigieg Over His 2% Among Black Voters

EXCERPT:

GEIST: "Mayor Buttigieg, it’s Willie Geist. Good to see you this morning, I’m going to tell you something you’ve heard probably one million times which is that you cannot win the Democratic primary without doing better than you’re doing with black voters. That’s just a fact. The latest 'Washington Post'/Ipsos poll has Joe Biden with 48 percent nationally support among black voters, Bernie Sanders at 20, you have to go way down the list to find you at 2 percent with Andrew Yang and Tom Steyer. So I would ask a question this way, for people thinking about voting for new Iowa who like you a lot, like what you see from you, they think you do well in the debates but have somewhere in the back of their mind he might do well in Iowa, maybe he does well in New Hampshire but boy, I don’t know how he’s going to win South Carolina at 2 percent support among black voters. What do you say to that voter to reassure them that number somehow will change in a way it hasn’t over the last several months?"
BUTTIGIEG: "Well first is that my support among black voters is strongest among those who know me best, in South Bend, in the Midwest, here in Iowa, too, Iowa of course does not have as large a number of an African-American community as other states, but those who are here we’ve been able to be very competitive, today I will be campaigning with the mayor of Waterloo which has the most African-Americans by proportion of any community in the state and he is the first black mayor of the city. And we are going to continue driving that message and also sharing South Bend’s story, not only for me but from others, elected officials from our community who can speak to the work we’ve done on the ground.”