Inside the sudden end of Pete Buttigieg’s campaign

Soon after midnight on Sunday morning, Pete Buttigieg convened his senior advisers on a conference call. Sitting in a car after flying to Georgia from his last rally in Raleigh, N.C., Buttigieg told them the campaign was over.

Buttigieg’s staff had just briefed top donors two days earlier about his plans to push forward in the presidential race, looking deep into the March primary calendar for friendly Midwestern states. But in the hours between those two calls, Buttigieg’s disappointing fourth-place finish in South Carolina’s primary — and Joe Biden’s stronger-than-expected win there — squeezed the delegate math of the 2020 race. 

The narrow path forward the candidate saw days earlier had all but disappeared, and he knew it, according to a senior Buttigieg source who described his thinking. “The turning point was South Carolina,” said another person close to the Buttigieg campaign.

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