Pete Buttigieg Will Endorse Joe Biden for Democratic Nomination

Buttigieg’s endorsement, which is set to come at a Biden campaign event Monday night in Dallas, follows the news that another moderate candidate, Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, was quitting the race and throwing her support to Biden. She also plans to back Biden at the Dallas event. Harry Reid, the former Senate majority leader, was also among those who endorsed Biden on Monday.

Buttigieg, the 38-year-old former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, sought to portray himself as an agent of generational change, his presence in the race an implicit argument against Biden and Sanders. But he rarely had a cross word to say about the former vice president, and in September pivoted his campaign to the center, making ever more forceful arguments against the progressive candidacies of Sanders and Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts.

Buttigieg, who as a candidate led the criticism that Sanders was too far left to defeat President Donald Trump, is throwing his support to Biden at a time when establishment Democrats are alarmed that moderate voters are too divided to stop Sanders, and fear his nomination would jeopardize Democrats’ House majority and many state-level elections.

Buttigieg won 26 delegates over the course of the first four early states, a number that would be inconsequential in all but the closest of convention fights. His biggest value to Biden may be in his ability to transfer some or most of his vaunted fundraising apparatus to the former vice president. Buttigieg raised more money than Biden in each fundraising period of 2019, despite beginning his campaign as a virtual unknown in national politics.

Within hours of Buttigieg’s withdrawal, staff members for Biden’s campaign began courting Buttigieg’s donors and fundraisers. Some, like Rep. Don Beyer of Virginia, swiftly announced their new allegiance to Biden. Others who had spent recent weeks privately trashing Biden as too old to defeat Trump in a general election, said they were likely to eventually move to back Biden but would not do so right away.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times .