Pete Buttigieg taps Tinseltown to fill coffers (2024)

The presidential hopeful Pete Buttigieg may have sworn off corporate funding for his campaign, but the insurgent from Indiana is unlikely to go short.

While Joe Biden, the former vice-president, won the headlines launching his bid for the White House last week, the out-of-nowhere campaign of “Mayor Pete” grabbed the attention of the Democratic Party’s donor networks, not least in lucrative Hollywood.

Buttigieg, 37, has two Tinseltown fund-raisers coming up. In June the gay Democrat will be welcomed by Hollywood’s gay power elite at the home of the producer and Glee creator Ryan Murphy.

Before that he will be receiving an even more influential benediction: Gwyneth Paltrow and her husband, the writer-producer Brad Falchuk, will host the multilingual, piano-playing, army-veteran, ex-Harvard, ex-Oxford mayor of South Bend, Indiana, in early May. The event will be co-hosted by Bradley Whitford, the actor who played Josh Lyman in the political TV series The West Wing.

Buttigieg’s new buddies will come in handy as he tries to navigate the new style of Democratic politics, which pooh-poohs corporate money and measures support in terms of grassroots giving.

The only thing as important as voter support at this stage of the primary race is financial backing, which defines a campaign’s momentum and staying power. But whereas in previous years candidates would seek to woo kingmakers, grandees and titans of industry to fund their ambitions, now the trend is for “authentic” small-money donors.

A movement that was begun by Barack Obama, who raised record sums from rich and poor alike, was perfected in 2016 by Bernie Sanders, whose army of socialist dreamers propped him up against Hillary Clinton and her bucketloads of Wall Street cash.

Sanders, 77, is setting the pace again this time round, already raising $20m from his admirers. Other candidates such as Elizabeth Warren, 69, Kamala Harris, 54, and Beto O’Rourke, 46, have also mobilised armies of small donors.

Warren has shunned big-money fund-raising, which she sees as undermining her campaign to reform capitalism and a waste of her time. The Massachusetts senator is focusing on the campaign trail rather than flattering big donors.

But so far it is Buttigieg who has become the media’s darling, thrilling fans with his erudition and appealing combination of Midwestern values and coastal elite credentials. He has bagged $7m in donations so far, despite being the mayor of a small college town.

On Friday, Buttigieg acknowledged this new reality by promising not to allow lobbyists to serve as fundraising “bundlers” in his campaign, nor to accept corporate political money or contributions from fossil fuel businesses. He will hope that friendly Hollywood cash can make up any shortfall.

One candidate who is seemingly not playing by the new business-shunning rules is Biden. On Thursday he kicked off his campaign at the Philadelphia home of a senior executive of the telecoms conglomerate Comcast. The previous night he held a conference call with big-money donors to rally support and ask for help in closing the funding gap between himself and the rest of the field.

Biden’s early pitch is a simple one: he is the man to beat Donald Trump. This week he will hold events in Pennsylvania, his native state and a bellwether for the election. The 76-year-old will emphasise his experience and his links to Obama, but most importantly his connection to exactly the kind of hardscrabble Rust Belt and Midwestern states that Trump was able to wrest from Clinton’s grasp in 2016.

So far, the pitch appears to be working. A poll taken after his announcement showed that 43% of voters would pick Biden, ahead of 36% for Trump, who refers to the former vice-president as “Sleepy Joe”. After playing down initial expectations, on Friday evening Biden’s team merrily announced that he had outstripped every other candidate for the first 24 hours, raising $6m from 96,000 donors. “AMAZING news”, the campaign note crowed.

But can Biden keep it up? His name recognition and long association with Obama may work to his benefit, but a long and compromised record as a moderate senator does him few favours with the party’s activist base, many of whom are likely to prefer a female candidate, such as Warren or Harris, or a younger face and landmark gay nominee, such as Buttigieg. Biden has run twice before without success.

Just before launching his campaign last week, Biden phoned Anita Hill, who, as a young black lawyer, gave testimony at a 1991 Senate judiciary committee he presided over. Hill accused Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment, but her allegations were dismissed by the committee. Thomas was appointed to the Supreme Court and still holds the post 28 years later.

Hill, 62, described Biden’s phone call as unsatisfactory and lacking a genuine apology. The Hill issue, combined with accusations by several women of Biden being overly tactile, could be an impossible hurdle for the former vice-president to clear.

For however much money Biden raises, if he cannot persuade Democratic women to support him in the primaries, he is likely to fall short of the big prize once again.