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Pete Buttigieg had a plan for February. It didn't work out as he hoped.

Pete Buttigieg had a plan heading into February: Turn a strong performance in Iowa into enough momentum to compete in New Hampshire, notch a strong showing in Nevada and survive South Carolina.

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By
Dan Merica
, CNN
CNN — Pete Buttigieg had a plan heading into February: Turn a strong performance in Iowa into enough momentum to compete in New Hampshire, notch a strong showing in Nevada and survive South Carolina.

By winning the most delegates in Iowa and placing within a few percentage points behind Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders in New Hampshire, the former South Bend, Indiana, mayor successfully implemented the first two steps of that plan. But he also placed a distant third in Nevada and got trounced in South Carolina, finishes that highlight the former South Bend, Indiana, mayor's persistent issues with voters of color.

Looking ahead to March -- and especially Super Tuesday -- Buttigieg's path toward the nomination is far narrower than just one month ago. This has forced the candidate to confront the real possibility that, without a significant change in the state of the race, his campaign may be coming to an end.

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Buttigieg conferred with advisers on Saturday night about his path forward. But he also told supporters in Raleigh, North Carolina, that he is "proud of the votes we have earned, and I am determined to earn every vote on the road ahead."

His uncertain path ahead was even clear when he met with Jimmy Carter in Plains, Georgia, on Sunday. After the former president lauded Buttigieg, he remarked: "He doesn't know what he's going to do after South Carolina."

The problems for Buttigieg are particularly acute right now. The former mayor had long dealt with pressure from the left and Sanders, but former Vice President Joe Biden's rise also puts pressure on him from the party's center, where scores of the donors that had long backed Buttigieg are eying Biden as a more viable option.

The challenges for Buttigieg's strategy rest on three unexpected realities: A severely delayed result out of Iowa, Sen. Amy Klobuchar's boost in New Hampshire and former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg's more forceful presence in the race ahead of the Nevada caucuses.

"There's still a lot of oxygen being sucked up in the race," said Mike Schmuhl, Buttigieg's campaign manager. "When you stack all those people (running) up, there's not a lot of space or not a lot of wiggle room for any campaign to operate. And so, we're kind of in a crunch right now between South Carolina and Super Tuesday."

Buttigieg aides argued for months that the former mayor, by showing he could win in Iowa, would be able to convince skeptical voters across the country that he was a safe bet and his poll numbers in South Carolina and nationally would begin to surge in the back half of the month. Many aides likened it to what happened to Barack Obama in 2008, where a win in Iowa catapulted him to not only electoral success, but a surge of money.

That hasn't happened. Buttigieg finished far behind Biden in South Carolina, national polls have found him hovering in the high single digits for months and his campaign is lowering expectations heading into Super Tuesday.

"The path has tightened and is tightening for everyone," said a top Buttigieg aide at the end of February. "That is definitively true, but don't think that is unique to our campaign."

The aide continued: Buttigieg "knows where we are. He has been aware of this for a long time."

The Iowa swagger is gone

The uncertain state of Buttigieg's campaign was clear in the final days before the South Carolina primary, where the candidate spent the week trying to do something he has been unable to do for the better part of a year: Establish a reliable foothold with black voters.

With a distant fourth-place finish, he wasn't able to do that.

The competitiveness with which the Buttigieg campaign approached Iowa, where the mayor barnstormed the state by often headlining five public events in a single day, was long gone in the days leading up to the South Carolina primary. Instead, Buttigieg spent his days headlining at most three events, with some being invite-only roundtables where the audience was, exclusively, the media.

Now Buttigieg's campaign is turning its focus to Super Tuesday, where 14 states across the country will vote and award roughly a third of all available delegates.

The former mayor's campaign is lowering expectations, telling reporters that its focus is on strategically deploying resources across the country and hoping to rack up delegates by at least meeting the delegate threshold -- 15% -- in key congressional districts.

"Our goal is to minimize Sanders' margins on Super Tuesday and rack up delegates in the March 10th and March 17th contests, which are much more favorable to us," the campaign wrote in a memo that was used as a fundraising pitch on February 25.

Buttigieg's campaign is also not as flush with campaign cash as it was months ago.

Money is still consistently coming into the campaign, said a source with knowledge of the campaign's fundraising, with the campaign raising above its daily average over the last few days. But the campaign's federal election reports have shown Buttigieg's operation is quickly spending whatever money it brings in -- and then some.

According to his financial filing for January, the former mayor entered February with $6.6 million in the bank and spent 227% more than they raised the first month of 2020. And the campaign has yet to hit their goal of raising $13 million before Super Tuesday.

One reason for the issue: The percentage of Buttigieg's fundraising from small dollar donors -- over time -- has fallen from 65% in early 2019 to just 29% in January, according to his financial filings.

Those money problems have led the campaign to only reserve $1.6 million in television ads in Super Tuesday states, according to data from CMAG, a small number that pales in comparison to most of his competitors. And because they are eager to avoid spending TV advertising money in expensive markets, the former mayor has trips planned to Raleigh, North Carolina; Dallas and Oklahoma City in the days before Super Tuesday as a way to get earned media without spending money on television ads.

How Buttigieg got here

Buttigieg aides believe there is plenty of blame to go around for the campaign's uncertain footing.

The former mayor's month started better than most would have expected with a strong showing in Iowa.

But the Iowa results, because of the chaos that befell the state on caucus night, were not officially certified until weeks after Iowa Democrats caucused on February 3. Because the state party was ill-prepared for the caucus and used a faulty app that significantly delayed the reporting of results, much of Buttigieg's momentum out of the state was blunted and, while money followed the win, it wasn't as substantial as top campaign aides expected.

"I would say that there is a little frustration that there wasn't more clarity on caucus night in Iowa," said Schmuhl, "because I think that that could have been potentially much bigger for us and really helped our catapult strategy that we have devised a long, long time ago."

The delay, in the eyes of Schmuhl and others, thwarted their plan to try to mimic Obama's success in 2008.

Reggie Love, a former top aide Obama aide who is now backing Buttigieg, said, like his former boss, "Iowa did validate Pete."

But even Love admitted it hasn't been as clear for Buttigieg.

"I think it proved that his message does resonate with the toughest voters in the country," he said. "But Bernie also did well and there was a lot of noise around the process and by the time you had clarity around what even actually was validated, you were four days or three days to the New Hampshire primary."

Buttigieg then came within a few percentage points of Sanders in New Hampshire and picked up more national delegates from the state with a second-place finish.

But that performance was overshadowed by a resurgent Klobuchar, who used a strong debate days before the state voted to finish third in the primary. Klobuchar, not Buttigieg, saw her media attention surge and the Minnesota senator raised more than $12 million in nine days in the middle of February, a boom in money for her cash-strapped campaign.

Klobuchar's rise corresponded with the rise of former New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg, whose poll numbers surged in early February to the point that he qualified for the Democratic primary debate in Las Vegas on February 19. Bloomberg's ascension -- combined with his spending of more than $500 million on ads just to propel his run -- sucked up considerable media attention and further divided the growing anti-Sanders electorate.

Buttigieg responded to this one-two-punch of momentum killers by looking to focus voters on the reality of both his and the party's situation.

"We've got to wake up as a party," Buttigieg said during a February debate in Las Vegas. "We could wake up two weeks from today, the day after Super Tuesday, and the only candidates left standing will be Bernie Sanders and Mike Bloomberg, the two most polarizing figures on this stage."

The message continued throughout the former mayor's run in Nevada, where Buttigieg finished a distant third behind Sanders and Biden.

Buttigieg responded by turning up the heat on the Vermont senator, stoking some of the fears that Democrats have long held about what Sanders, as nominee, would mean to down ballot races. And his campaign put a finer point on it in the days leading up to the first in the west caucus.

"If the dynamics of the race did not dramatically change," the campaign wrote in a memo, "Democrats could end up coming out of Super Tuesday with Bernie Sanders holding a seemingly insurmountable delegate lead."

The question for Buttigieg's campaign going forward is whether they can recover from their February strategy failing to deliver the momentum they had anticipated. Even the most ardent Buttigieg supports believe that, if they can't, the campaign won't make it another month.

And Buttigieg, in a possible sign that he sees himself at the end of his unexpected rise, even slipped at his CNN town hall and said he was at the "end" of his campaign.

"Somebody once called (running for President) an MRI of the soul," he said. "By the end of it -- or, frankly, by the middle of it, you feel like people have gotten to know just about everything about you."

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