A surrogate for Pete Buttigieg said that the former presidential candidate believes that former Vice President Joe Biden will make a “phenomenal” president after Buttigieg ended his own campaign Sunday and endorsed Biden a day later.
In an interview with Hill.TV, Jennifer Holdsworth explained that Buttigieg “knows that Joe Biden is going to make an excellent president” and that Buttigieg did not want to pick up delegates on Super Tuesday without a clear path to winning the Democratic nomination.
The only reason to stay in, she said, would have been to move toward a contested convention.
“But if you can’t win outright, what’s the plan there?,” she said. “Then you’re going to hoard them and force a contested convention, and you know, the party right now is very split, and so I think anything that anybody can do to start to heal those wounds now is going to put us in a much better place to defeat Donald Trump in the fall.”
Holdsworth, who also ran the former South Bend, Ind., mayor’s campaign to be the Democratic National Committee chairman in 2017, said the sooner Democratic voters who supported different candidates could come together during the party’s primary “the better.”
She cited the 2016 race between Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
“I think, unfortunately, a lot of us are still licking the wounds from 2016 in the party, where there was such as division that lasted so far into the summer that we weren’t really able to coalesce and go into the fall as a united front, and Donald Trump and the Republicans were able to exploit that,” she said.
Holdsworth told Hill.TV that she has no question that Buttigieg believes that “the vice president is going to make a phenomenal president.”
“We do have some very small differences in how we would approach policy, but what I always said, even when I came on the show, is that everybody on that debate stage has the same ideals. We have the same values, and we have the same goals. The question is, how do we get there? So I think as long as we can bridge those gaps and bridge those answers, we’re headed to a good place as a party, and the mayor endorsing VP Biden was part of that,” she added.
Buttigieg officially endorsed Biden during a joint appearance in Dallas on Monday after suspending his own campaign the day before.
“When I ran for president, we made it clear that the whole idea was about rallying the country together to defeat Donald Trump and to win the era for the values that we share. That was always a goal that was much bigger than me becoming president, and it is in the name of that very same goal that I’m delighted to endorse and support Joe Biden for president,” Buttigieg told the crowd of supporters.
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