Iowa caucuses: Pete Buttigieg's closing ad focuses on unity and change

Pete Buttigieg’s campaign for the Democratic nomination for president is focusing on unity and change in the closing ad it is releasing before the Iowa caucuses on Monday.

The 60-second ad, obtained by The Guardian, was distributed to a set of supporters ahead of its release on Friday. It features a voiceover by the South Bend mayor combined with clips of his supporters and moments of Buttigieg speaking at different points in the campaign.

“When this campaign started, we didn’t know where it would take us but we knew where we wanted to go,” Buttigieg says. “The old style of politics is broken. We can’t keep doing the same thing and expect different results. There is hunger for a new kind of politics, defined by belonging, boldness, action.”

The closing ad is a key indicator that even as Buttigieg has begun to take a sharper and more critical approach to his rivals ahead of the caucuses, especially Bernie Sanders and former vice-president Joe Biden, he is still leaning on his original messaging themes of turning the chapter and giving up on “old style politics”.

The ad then features Buttigieg supporters explaining why they support the 38-year-old mayor.

“I believe in Pete because of what he stands for,” says a young man.

“I believe that he can bring us together rather than dividing us,” says a second Buttigieg supporter, an older man.

“Pete believes that we should pay teachers like doctors and respect them like soldiers,” a woman says.

The ad closes out with Buttigieg saying the day of the Iowa caucuses “is our shot to turn the page to what comes next”.

The ad is a shift in tone from some of the comments Buttigieg has been making in Iowa lately. At a campaign stop in Decorah, Iowa, on Thursday, he accused Biden and Sanders of being too fixated on the past rather than the future.

“I hear Vice President Biden saying that this is no time to take a risk on someone new,” Buttigieg said at his first of four stops on Thursday. “But history has shown us that the biggest risk we could take with a very important election coming up is to look to the same Washington playbook and recycle the same arguments and expect that to work against a president like Donald Trump.”

He then turned to Sanders, criticising the senator for promoting “a kind of politics that says you’ve got to go all the way here and nothing else counts”.

Biden responded on Thursday, telling reporters at a campaign stop that he wasn’t sure “what Pete’s is talking about”. The former vice president, who is running on his perceived electability against Trump, had run an ad that implored voters: “This is no time to take a risk.”

In Ankeny on Thursday night, Buttigieg told hundreds of Iowa voters that Democrats’ best chance of winning the White House in 2020 was with a candidate who is “looking to the future” and can “open the door to a new generation of leaders”.