Watch Pete Buttigieg question the notion of having a political ideology

(Image credit: Screenshot/NBC)

last updated 8 April 2019

2020 Democratic presidential hopeful Pete Buttigieg is surging right now. But while he has received quite a bit of positive press, NBC's Chuck Todd wanted to know where he lines up in terms of political ideology.

During an interview on Sunday's Meet the Press, Todd asked Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, where he would put himself on the political "spectrum." Buttigieg, though, dismissed the notion that he needed to — and he pointed to the American voter as proof. Buttigieg's argument was that ideology is so "scrambled" in the United States that it simply becomes folly to try to "align everybody as dots on spectrum."

Buttigieg said that there are voters in South Bend who voted for both former President Barack Obama and President Trump in subsequent elections, as well as those who both voted for him as a Democratic mayor and for Vice President Mike Pence when he was the Republican governor of Indiana. He also pointed out how Trump doesn't have an ideology — just a style — and that the Democratic Party only has an ideology in that it sets itself up as the antithesis of the GOP. Watch the clip below. Tim O'Donnell

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Tim is a staff writer at The Week and has contributed to Bedford and Bowery and The New York Transatlantic. He is a graduate of Occidental College and NYU's journalism school. Tim enjoys writing about baseball, Europe, and extinct megafauna. He lives in New York City.

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