ALLENDALE, S.C. _ On a barren patch of land shaded by a single Southern live oak tree sits a cinder block building that serves as the Democratic headquarters of the smallest, poorest and most African American county in South Carolina.
Inside the modest structure, Pete Buttigieg stood under exposed beams and on a concrete floor partially covered with old scraps of orange carpet, eager to field questions as the first presidential candidate to visit Allendale County in more than a decade. Willa Jennings, the party's 70-year-old chairwoman, didn't start with a softball.
"I have to ask you this, OK? I hear a lot about how you don't have support from African Americans," she said. "I just want to know why they're saying that about you."
The South Bend mayor responded that it was "so important to earn support from black voters," noted that many candidates were polling at less than 5% with African Americans and chalked up his low numbers to being "new on the scene."
Jennings wasn't all that impressed. His excuse of not being known, she said, didn't square with the fact that the well-funded candidate had been in the presidential contest for nearly a year.
"He's very smart, but it might be too late for him to get to know my race," she said afterward. "The primary in South Carolina is in a couple months. I'm not sure he has the time."
Buttigieg can pack white folks into high school gyms in Iowa and New Hampshire with the best of them, and he leads the polls in those key first two voting states.
But if the 37-year-old political star is going to broaden his appeal enough to win the Democratic nomination, he's going to have to solve his struggles with black voters, one of the party's key voting blocs.
There is substantial ground to make up ahead of South Carolina's Feb. 29 primary. The Palmetto State is the fourth in the nominating process and the first with a majority of black voters.
The most recent poll there found Buttigieg with 0% among African Americans. Joe Biden, the former vice president to Barack Obama, continues to hold a commanding lead in South Carolina, thanks to his overwhelming support from black voters.
Buttigieg's three-state swing through the Deep South this week marked a reboot of his outreach efforts, a trip made up entirely of small, intimate affairs. The goal was for the mayor to spend as much time listening to black voters' concerns as he did on pitching his candidacy to them (not to mention having a drove of media on hand to document it all).
The move away from large rallies also reflects the reality that if Buttigieg were to hold such events in the states he visited _ North Carolina, South Carolina and Alabama _ he'd be unlikely to draw many voters of color. That only would reinforce the national narrative that he can't appeal to them.
Plenty of unwelcome developments and missteps for Buttigieg have helped fuel the perception.
The scrutiny ratcheted up in June, when a white South Bend police officer shot and killed a black burglary suspect armed with a knife, an incident that was not captured on the officer's body or vehicle cameras. The incident flared racial tensions in the city, brought renewed attention to the mayor's shaky relationship with some factions of South Bend's black community and forced Buttigieg off the campaign trail for a week as he weathered the fallout.
Since then, the mayor has returned campaign contributions tied to an attorney involved in the Laquan McDonald police shooting scandal in Chicago, has had to answer for 2011 comments he made about black students lacking role models and faced scrutiny for comparing the struggles for equality of LGBTQ people to those of African Americans.
Beyond that, his campaign has been criticized for misrepresenting the amount of support from black leaders for his Frederick Douglass plan, and the mayor was called out during the last debate for his team's use of a stock photo of a Kenyan woman to illustrate the platform, which aims to battle inequities for African Americans.
This week, Buttigieg slowly tried to chip away at it all, one interaction at a time.
"We're going to continue to make sure that we're reaching out to constituencies that maybe won't find their way to me on their own, that we've got to come to the table first, build that relationship, build that trust," Buttigieg told reporters in Okatie, South Carolina. "I think that's campaigning at its best, sitting down and having that conversation."
