Pete Buttigieg has reason to celebrate after a recent poll of 2028 primary voters found his support among black voters surging to 1 percent. Though the result is well within the margin of error, it's still a notable accomplishment for a Democrat whose black support is often marked as "statistically insignificant."
Buttigieg ended his presidential campaign in 2019 after a distant fourth-place finish in South Carolina. Multiple polls leading up to the primary found 0 percent of the state's black voters planned to support him. Buttigieg performed slightly better in a Fox News poll, where an asterisk indicated that his black support was "less than one-half percent."
Little has changed since. Last summer, for example, Buttigieg recorded yet another goose egg with black voters in a nationwide poll from Emerson College. That same poll showed him leading the 2028 field with 16 percent of the vote, a fanciful result.
It goes without saying that Buttigieg has no chance of winning the nomination in 2028. His lane no longer exists. Jon Ossoff has cornered the generic white guy market, and Democrats have already released a new and improved version of the ambiguously gay, Bible-adjacent, "Aw shucks, let's just get along" persona that Buttigieg pioneered in 2020. His name is James Talarico.
Nevertheless, Buttigieg should be proud of himself for achieving statistical significance with black voters. It's hard to overstate the astonishing whiteness of his 2020 campaign. "High Hopes" by Panic! at the Disco blaring out nonstop through shoddy PA systems. Wildly popular in the "boat shoe strongholds" of Nantucket, Martha's Vineyard, and Cape Cod.
Vice president is a perfectly adequate aspiration.
Speaking of which, Kamala Harris is still leading the field in these (mostly meaningless) early polls. She can't possibly run again, can she? That would be amazing. Harris hit the campaign trail this week with Abdul El-Sayed, another Democrat struggling with black voters. What a treat it was to see the Michigan Senate candidate squirm in his seat as the former VP slurred her way through a DEI word salad. El-Sayed's previous approach to black voter outreach—putting local pastors on the campaign payroll—was arguably more dignified.
Harris running again and winning the nomination would be one of the funnier outcomes. She could team up with Buttigieg, who was reportedly her "first choice" for vice president before deciding it was "too big of a risk" to pair a black woman with a gay white man. That's how she ended up with Tim Walz, a raging heterosexual.
In other 2028 news, child billionaire Alex Soros recently posed for a photo with billionaire J.B. Pritzker, the Democratic governor of Illinois. Pritzker, who appears to have lost an entire Alex Soros's worth of body weight on GLP-1 medication, is almost certain to run for president because why not. Illinois is thriving on his watch, just as California is thriving under White House hopeful Gavin Newsom.
Democrats will be spoiled for choice.
