NBC 5 will livestream the announcement when it commences around 1 p.m. CT*
South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg is expected to announce Sunday that he will run for president in the 2020 election, but his big announcement has hit a bit of a snag thanks to Mother Nature.
The cold, rain and grey of South Bend, Indiana did not deter a hardy army of supporters of Pete Buttigieg from converging on the Studebaker 84 Center.
On Friday, Buttigieg’s campaign announced that its big campaign announcement event, originally slated to take place outdoors in downtown South Bend on Sunday morning, has been instead moved indoors to Studebaker Building 84 due to bad weather in the forecast.
Rain is now in the forecast for Sunday in the South Bend area, and temperatures will struggle to reach 60 degrees as a weather system moves through the area.
All road closures that had been announced around the event have been called off, according to South Bend officials.
Manning the press parking lot was volunteer George Terzakis from Blue Island, Illinois. Why? Because, said Terzakis, Buttigieg believes in the fundamental values of democracy including freedom and security and “policies that make sense.”
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Buttigieg’s campaign has drawn national interest since the South Bend mayor launched an exploratory committee for a possible presidential run. Buttigieg has been on the national stage before, losing in a three-way race for the chairmanship of the Democratic National Committee in 2017, and his record as mayor of the Indian town of South Bend has caught a lot of attention in recent years.
Mayor Pete, as he is known to his constituents in South Bend, has been the mayor since 2011. A long shot unknown, Buttigieg shot out of the gate in January raising more than $7 million in the first quarter of 2019 and is poised to become the 18th Democrat to throw his hat in the ring Sunday afternoon.
His resume includes Harvard and Oxford educations, military service in Afghanistan, fluency in eight languages, and marriage to the man he loves, Chasten Glezman Buttigieg, a high school teacher.
If elected, Buttigieg, 37, will be the youngest president in the history of the United States.
Eighteen candidates and eighteen months until Election Day.
