Pete Buttigieg: Everything you need to know about the 2020 presidential candidate
He was the first openly gay man to launch a major bid for the presidency.
Pete Buttigieg, more commonly known as "Mayor Pete," announced his presidential exploratory committee on Jan. 23, 2019, and followed up with an official campaign launch on April 14, 2019. Buttigieg, who came out as he was pursuing his second term as mayor of his hometown, is hoping to become the nation's first openly gay presidential nominee of a major party.
Out of the running: Saying that "the path has narrowed to a close," Buttigieg announced Sunday night that he is suspending his 2020 presidential campaign. He said, "I will no longer seek to be the 2020 Democratic nominee for president, but I will do everything in my power to ensure that we have a new Democratic president come January."
Name: Pete Buttigieg (it's Maltese and pronounced "boot-edge-edge")
Party: Democrat
Date of birth: Jan. 19, 1982
Hometown: South Bend, Indiana
Family: Husband to Chasten Glezman, dog dad to rescues Truman and Buddy
Education: He studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar; B.A. in History and Literature, Harvard University (2004)
What he does now: Buttigieg has been the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, since 2012, and is serving his final year in that position. He is a board member of the Indiana Association of Cities and Towns, the Truman National Security Project and the United States Conference of Mayors.
What he used to do: Buttigieg was an intelligence officer in the U.S. Navy Reserve from 2009 to 2017. Before making a transition to public service, Buttigieg was a civilian contractor for the global consulting firm McKinsey & Company. He worked there between 2007 and 2010, after completing his studies at Oxford.
Key life/career moments:
Buttigieg was 29 when he was first elected as mayor of South Bend in 2011. At the time, that made him the youngest mayor of a U.S. city with a population of at least 100,000 people, according to The Washington Post.
In 2009 and 2013, Buttigieg was commissioned as a Navy intelligence officer while serving as mayor. He took a leave of absence to serve in Afghanistan in 2014 for a seven-month deployment and he earned the Joint Service Commendation Medal for his counterterrorism work.
Buttigieg and husband Chasten, a teacher who he met on the dating app Hinge, married on June 16, 2018 at Episcopal Cathedral of St. James in South Bend. Right after getting married, the newlyweds attended a Gay Pride Week block party downtown before continuing on to their wedding reception, according to a story about their wedding from The New York Times.
Where he stands on some of the issues:
Struggling to gain support from the African American community early in Democratic presidential primaries, Pete Buttigieg has unveiled a full-scale policy plan aimed at uplifting and supporting black Americans.
After the mass shooting in Las Vegas, Buttigieg, a U.S. Navy Reserve veteran who was deployed to Afghanistan, denounced military-style assault rifles.
"I did not carry an assault weapon around a foreign country so I could come home and see them used to massacre my countrymen," he tweeted.
Fundraising:
Buttigieg announced today that he raised $4 million dollars just days after having a strong showing at Monday's 2020 Iowa Caucuses, an impressive amount for the once little-known mayor.
Buttigieg set a high bar for the Democratic field with fundraising in 2019's second quarter. Buttigieg kicked off the second-quarter fundraising race amid fanfare in September 2019 at a time when the Democratic field held more than 20 other candidates. No other 2020 Democrats were able to top the $25 million he raised between April 2019 and June 2019.
What you might not know about him:
Buttigieg came out publicly in a 2015 essay in the South Bend Tribune, less than two weeks before the national legalization of gay marriage. Buttigieg has said that he thought coming out would be a "career death sentence," but after he publicly did, in the middle of his reelection campaign, he won 80% of the vote, more than he received when he was first elected.
Buttigieg was invited to join the Phi Beta Kappa academic honor society when he attended Harvard. Seventeen former presidents, including Bill Clinton, George H.W. Bush, Jimmy Carter, Franklin D. Roosevelt and John Adams, were members.
He ran unsuccessfully for chairman of the Democratic National Committee in 2017.
Buttigieg was named co-recipient of the John F. Kennedy New Frontier Awards in 2015.
He was valedictorian of his high school class. As a senior at St. Joseph High School, he was also voted "Most Likely to Succeed" and "Most Likely to be President."
Buttigieg plays piano and guitar, and has performed with the South Bend Symphony Orchestra, according to his official campaign profile. He's also a polyglot, meaning he speaks multiple languages.
ABC News' Justin Gomez and Abby Cruz contributed to this report.