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Updates From Pete Buttigieg’s MSNBC Town Hall At MSNBC Town Hall, Pete Buttigieg Finds a Friendly Crowd
(about 3 hours later)
Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Ind., one of a small handful of Democratic candidates to agree to a town-hall event on Fox News, visited the friendlier terrain of MSNBC on Monday. Pete Buttigieg thrives in town halls: It was one of them, on CNN in March, that initially sent him near the top of what is now a 23-person Democratic presidential field. But this one was different.
Quick on his feet and skilled at finding applause lines, Mr. Buttigieg, 37, has thrived in the town-hall format before. It was his performance at a CNN event in March that launched him to the top quarter of the 23-person Democratic field, and he received an enthusiastic reception in his Fox News appearance last month. Less than a month after he appeared on Fox News, whose audience gave him an enthusiastic reception but also combative questions, Mr. Buttigieg visited the more welcoming terrain of MSNBC on Monday. The Fresno, Calif., audience was friendly; the questions friendlier still. So receptive was the moderator, Chris Matthews, that his response to some of Mr. Buttigieg’s answers was a murmured “Good.”
The MSNBC town hall, which will be moderated by Chris Matthews in Fresno, Calif., ran for an hour and was far friendlier — both in terms of the questions and the audience — than previous events. In the absence of hardball questions, Mr. Buttigieg, the 37-year-old mayor of South Bend, Ind., found an opening for something missing from his previous appearances: detailed answers on policy. At points, he seemed to be fine-tuning in real time, working through kinks and grappling aloud with possible holes in his arguments.
The first question for Mr. Buttigieg was about gun control, which has become a litmus-test issue for Democratic candidates in a way that has not happened in previous presidential election cycles. Mr. Matthews pressed him on his proposal to require gun licensing along the same lines as driver’s licenses: How would that work, Mr. Matthews asked, when Americans already own 400 million guns? Asked whether prisoners should be able to vote — an idea that Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont has backed but that most candidates, including Mr. Buttigieg, have not — he at first offered a straightforward answer. Upon their release, he said, formerly incarcerated people should immediately regain their voting rights. But, he added, “I’m not there yet on when somebody’s still incarcerated.”
Mr. Buttigieg said his primary focus was on requiring licenses for all guns purchased going forward. “Retroactively is going to be tougher,” he acknowledged, while arguing that crafting a system for future purchases could eventually create a template to apply to past purchases. The “yet” was a notable inclusion, and Mr. Matthews jumped on it, asking if Mr. Buttigieg believed that voting rights for prisoners ought to be a subject of further conversation.
Also raised early in the event was Mr. Buttigieg’s experience coming out as gay while serving as a mayor in a conservative state — governed, at the time, by now-Vice President Mike Pence. He came out during an election year, he said, but was overwhelmingly re-elected “because people just cared about what kind of job I was doing for them as mayor.” “It’s not my position. I want to be really upfront about that,” Mr. Buttigieg said — before adding that he had spoken with activists who emphasized the level of discrimination in the justice system.
The question that prompted the discussion — from an audience member who said he and his husband had adopted sons through the foster care system and suggested, with a smile, that perhaps Mr. Buttigieg and his husband, Chasten, might do the same — concerned how to improve the foster care system. Mr. Buttigieg discussed, in broad terms, federal policies that would hold states to “a higher standard” on things like wait-lists and moving children from home to home. He also called for policies to prevent foster care and adoption agencies from discriminating against same-sex couples.
The audience was generally friendly to Mr. Buttigieg, but as the night went on, there were some more tense exchanges. One woman, for instance, told him that he had an impressive résumé, but that many of the women in the race had ones even more impressive. “Why,” she asked bluntly, “should the women of America vote for you over our sisters who are kind of more qualified?”
Mr. Buttigieg responded as he has in the past to questions about his comparative lack of political experience: by emphasizing the “executive experience” of being a mayor, especially of the sort of working-class city that President Trump targeted. But it was not the most forceful of statements — and he ended it by saying that if some Democrats were set on voting for a woman, he understood.
“Whether you decide to be for me or not, I promise that I will be for you,” he said.
Mr. Matthews also asked about voting rights for prisoners, which Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont has backed but most candidates, including Mr. Buttigieg, have not.
Mr. Buttigieg responded that, upon their release, formerly incarcerated people should immediately regain their voting rights. Regarding voting for currently incarcerated people, he said, “I’m not there yet.”
The “yet” was a notable inclusion, and Mr. Matthews jumped on it, asking if Mr. Buttigieg’s position was evolving.
Not really, Mr. Buttigieg said — but, he added, he had had some interesting conversations with people who noted the level of racial bias in the justice system.
“We don’t have a fair system, and we have a systematic racial bias in who is incarcerated in the first place,” he said. “If we can’t correct that, it does make my position harder to defend.”“We don’t have a fair system, and we have a systematic racial bias in who is incarcerated in the first place,” he said. “If we can’t correct that, it does make my position harder to defend.”
This real-time musing was evident from the first question of the night, on gun control, which has become a prominent issue for Democratic candidates in a way not seen in recent presidential elections. Mr. Buttigieg supports requiring a license to own a gun, a sweeping and controversial proposal made last month by another candidate, Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey.
But how could that work in practice, Mr. Matthews asked, when Americans already own some 400 million guns?
“Retroactively is going to be tougher,” Mr. Buttigieg acknowledged. “So let’s get it right going forward. Look, let’s figure out a system —”
“Have you changed on this?” Mr. Matthews said, interrupting. “Because I thought you said a while ago that you believed in licensing of all guns.”
“Look, I think we can start on a go-forward basis,” Mr. Buttigieg said. “Then we’ll have a system we can actually use to look at what we can do retroactively, too.”
The topics ranged widely in the hourlong forum — from what a hypothetical President Buttigieg would say in his first meeting with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia (“Well, don’t mess with our elections, for one thing”); to President Trump’s tariffs (“A tariff is a tax, so if you ever believe the Republicans don’t raise taxes, that’s what they’re doing right now”); to abortion (he called for repealing the Hyde Amendment and promised, without saying the words “Roe v. Wade,” to appoint judges who “share my view that freedom includes the freedom to make decisions about your own body”).
Asked about reparations, Mr. Buttigieg — who has struggled to gain support from black voters — initially seemed to dodge, calling for a commission to examine the issue. But as he went on, he grew more forceful.
“You can’t just have racist policies for one generation to another, all the way up to this present day, and replace them with maybe less-racist policies, or neutral policies, and expect everything to just get better,” he said, adding, “We have to systematically reverse that.”
The sharpest question of the night may have come from an audience member, who told Mr. Buttigieg that, while he had an impressive résumé, many women in the race were more impressive.
“Why,” she asked bluntly, “should the women of America vote for you over our sisters who are kind of more qualified?”
Mr. Buttigieg responded as he has to past questions about his comparative lack of experience: by emphasizing the “executive experience” of being a mayor. But it was not the most forceful of statements, and he ended by saying that if some Democrats were set on voting for a woman, he understood.
“Whether you decide to be for me or not, I promise that I will be for you,” he said.
In one moment that quickly drew criticism on social media, Mr. Buttigieg — asked whether it had been appropriate for fellow Democrats to push Senator Al Franken to resign after eight women accused Mr. Franken of sexual misconduct — said, “I think it was his decision to make, but I think the way we basically held him to a higher standard than the G.O.P. does their people has been used against us.”
When Mr. Matthews pushed, he repeated, “It was his decision.” Pressed further, he said, “Well, it’s not a bad thing that we hold ourselves to a higher standard.” Asked a fourth time, he finally said, “I would not have applied that amount of pressure at that time before we knew more.”
The event ended, however, just as genially as it began. Mr. Matthews played a video clip of a young Mr. Buttigieg asking a question of Richard A. Gephardt, the former House Democratic leader, during Mr. Gephardt’s 2004 presidential campaign: Why, he asked, was Mr. Gephardt the only presidential candidate not attending a Rock the Vote event? Did he care about young voters?
Mr. Buttigieg, who seemed taken aback by the clip, said with a laugh that he felt bad about how harsh he had been. Then Mr. Gephardt himself appeared on screen to turn the tables — except his question was the softest softball of the night.
“I’ve always been optimistic about America because the people are good and they’re good citizens,” he said, before assuring Mr. Buttigieg that he was doing a “great” job on the trail. “You’re out there now meeting thousands of them. Am I still right?”
When an eighth grader took the microphone a few minutes later to ask the final question, on his climate change plan, Mr. Buttigieg smiled.
“Well, thanks for your question,” he said, before calling for a carbon tax, building retrofits, better soil management and a quadrupling of federal funding for energy research and development. “Thanks for not being as tough on me as I was.”