Our live coverage of the three CNN town halls from Austin, Texas, has concluded for the night. Get caught up by scrolling through our posts below, or visit CNN Politics for more.
Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, remained at the Moody Theater to meet with voters after his town hall wrapped up tonight.
He shook hands with voters and spoke with them briefly.
South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg defended his position on abolishing the electoral college Sunday at CNN’s town hall, stating that the presidential candidate “who gets the most votes ought to be the person that wins.”
Buttigieg has made this position central to his 2020 pitch and Democrats are moved by it, in part, because Hillary Clinton received over 3 million more votes in the 2016 election.
“We ought to make sure that everybody has the same voice,” he said. “In Indiana write live because our state is very conservative, most years we have no voice at all in the presidential process. The same is true for some big states and some small states, some because they are liberal. All of them disfranchised and without a voice in the presidential process.”
Buttigieg also suggested upping the number of Supreme Court justices from nine to 15.
Here’s why he said wants to do that:
South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg slammed National Security Adviser John Bolton, suggesting that someone that was involved in the run up to the Iraq War shouldn’t be “allowed that near the Situation Room to begin with.”
Buttigieg did not mention Bolton by name, but when asked a question about the conflict in Venezuela, the mayor and veteran of the Iraq War accused Bolton of “carelessly” throwing out the possibility of using military force in Venezuela to deal with the presidency of Nicolás Maduro.
He added: “Hinting that troops might be sent to South America. I don’t understand how somebody leading us into the Iraq War is allowed that near the Situation Room to begin with.”
Bolton was an early supporter of the Iraq War and pushed for the initial invasion during his time, after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, as President George W. Bush’s undersecretary of state for arms control and international security.
Pete Buttigieg, a veteran of the war in Afghanistan, said he thinks his military experience could bring “a lot of perspective” to the office of the presidency.
Serving in the military also brings Americans together, Buttigieg said.
He continued:
Buttigieg also said the US must “put an end to endless war.”
“The Taliban are serious about being ready to lay down their arms. That’s a good sign. But I’m also concerned that the Afghan government seems to be an afterthought of this process because the peace needs to be sustainable. At the end of the day, we can’t be the guarantees of peace this Afghanistan,” he said.
Pete Buttigieg called Vice President Mike Pence the “cheerleader for the porn star presidency” on Sunday, lambasting the former governor of his home state of Indiana for defending President Donald Trump and questioning whether he stopped “believing in scripture when he started believing Donald Trump.”
The answer came when CNN’s Jake Tapper asked whether Pence “would be a better or worse president than President Trump?”
“Does it have to be those two?” he asked.
Buttigieg went on to say about Pence that “used to at least believe… he believes in our institutions and was not personally corrupt, but then how could he get on board with this President?”
“His interpretation of scripture is pretty different than mine to begin with,” he said. “My understanding of scripture it’s about protecting the stranger and the prisoner and the poor person and that idea. That’s what I get in the gospel when I’m at church and his has a lot more to do with sexuality and a certain view of rectitude.”
Pete Buttigieg said gaining the legal ability to marry his husband gave him a personal view of the importance of policy decisions by politicians “who had power over me and millions of others.”
Buttigieg, who came out as gay during his 2015 re-election campaign, said he entered politics “in Mike Pence’s Indiana” at a time that “you could either be out, or you could be in office, but you couldn’t do both.”
He called for a federal equality law to extend non-discrimination protections to LGBT people and said, “We’ve got to end the war on transgender Americans.”
“Let’s be under no illusion: There are attacks on transgender Americans from the Oval Office. Picking on troops, people willing to lay down their lives for this country, not to mention teenagers in high schools,” Buttigieg said.
South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg remembered the life of his late father on Sunday, telling an audience here in Austin that before he announced, he told his intubated father that he hoped he would make him proud and his father mouthed, “You will.”
Joseph Buttigieg, a professor emeritus of English and retired director of the Hesburgh-Yusko Scholars Program at Notre Dame, passed away in January to cancer, shortly after Buttigieg announced his presidential exploratory committee.
“He was excited. He came to this country from a tiny nation. A place where Buttigieg is a common name,” Buttigieg said to laughs.
“He came here for the educational opportunities that this country offered he became an American citizen after that. He believed in education. He believed in this country, but he also was very passionate about all the ways it was falling short.”
He added:
Pete Buttigieg is not opposed to Medicare for all, but he said it should be an option.
“The best way to do that is a medicare for all who want it. We take some flavor of Medicare, you make it available on the exchange as a public option. And you invite people to buy into it,” he said.
But Buttigieg said putting it on the exchange isn’t the only solution. He said work is needed to improve the system.
“We have to do that unfashionable technical work to make the system more efficient. We have also just got to broaden assets until everyone has health care,” he said. “I refuse to accept that when citizens of just about every developed nation in the world enjoy this, that we should settle for less,” he said.
Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, said Sunday that experience was what qualified him to run for president – despite the fact that he is only 37-years-old and represents a city of roughly 100,000 people.
And in doing so, Buttigieg took a shot at both President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence.
He added that he had “more military experience than anybody to walk into that office on day one since George H.W. Bush.”
“I get I’m the young guy in the conversation, but experience is what qualifies me to have a seat at this table.”
Buttigieg said the question was “fair” and that he “shouldn’t be running if I weren’t prepared to answer it.”
The mayor’s age often comes up on the campaign trail, in part because Buttigieg looks even younger than his 37 years, a fact he often notes.
“I understand the audacity of running for president at my age especially because sometimes downstairs I’ll still get carded when I order a beer,” he recently said.
Outside the town hall earlier, Toni Schach told CNN she wanted to know where the candidates stand on two issues especially important to her, LGBT rights and the opioid crisis.
Schach struggled with addiction in the past and has been sober for more than a year.
Schach said she also interested in learning more about Pete Buttigieg and — more importantly, how to pronounce his name.
“When you read about it, it’s like boot-edge, boot-edge-edge. It’s like a million ways, so I am excited to hear how he pronounces his last name,” she said.
Schach said she also wants to learn more about his policy ideas on LGBT issues and how he “plans to work with the other side.”
Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Indiana, has taken the stage and is answering questions.
He joked a bit with CNN’s Jake Tapper about the pronunciation of his last name, which has baffled some people.
If you’re wondering how to pronounce Pete Buttigieg’s name, you are not alone.
Last year, his husband, Chasten, tweeted a list of possible pronunciations: “boot-edge-edge,” “buddha-judge,” “boot-a-judge” and “boo-tuh-judge.”
Are you still at a loss? No worries, Buttigieg was recently asked that question and here’s what he said:
Fun fact: Buttigieg’s name is Maltese and roughly translates to “lord of the poultry.”
But if Buttigieg is too tricky to pronounce, he has an easy work-around.
“Around South Bend, they just call me ‘Mayor Pete,’ and that’s fine with me,” he told reporters.
Pete Buttigieg, mayor of South Bend, Indiana, knows he’s a long shot for the White House.
In a recent Monmouth University poll, only 14% of Democrats and those that lean Democrat could form an opinion of him and 58% said they had never heard of him.
Should he win the Democratic presidential nomination and defeat President Trump in 2020, Buttigieg, 37, would be the youngest (and first millennial) president in US history, the first candidate to go straight from the mayor’s office to the White House and the first gay president.
Buttigieg announced his exploratory committee for a 2020 presidential bid on Jan. 23. In his announcement video, Buttigieg spoke about his city making a comeback and about his perspective as a millennial with issues like school shootings and people earning less than their parents.
Watch it below:
Rep. Tulsi Gabbard said Sunday that her experience in the Army has led her to not worry about taking on President Donald Trump in 2020.
“As a soldier, I’ve been through some tough situations before, so I’m not really worried about Donald Trump,” she said. “I’m focused on serving the people of this country, on bringing those values of service above self that every service member has in our hearts to the White House and restoring to the presidency honor and integrity and courage.”
Polling has shown that a top issue for Democrats in 2020 is the ability to beat Trump.
Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard was asked Sunday to name the biggest policy mistake the United States had ever made. Rather than citing slavery or the genocide of Native Americans, she pointed to the march toward what she warned could be “nuclear catastrophe.”
She pointed to a cell phone alert — which turned out to be a false alarm — last year warning people in Hawaii to take shelter because a missile was incoming. She described residents of the state facing agonizing decisions about how to seek shelter and who to spend what they feared could be their last minutes with.
She continued: “Our leaders have failed us and brought us to this point. It doesn’t have to be this way. We have to correct our course. We have to end this new cold war and nuclear arms race that is currently being waged that threatens our very future and that costs us trillions of our taxpayer dollars — dollars that need to be spent and invested to serve the needs of our people here at home.”
Rep. Tulsi Gabbard said Sunday that she would sign the Military Justice Improvement Act, telling a questioner at CNN’s town hall that – as a veteran – she has “lived through experiences ourselves that our fellow brothers and sisters in uniform have gone through.”
Gabbard, an Army veteran, also lamented the fact that “there is a lack of recognition, of the serious change that needs to take place for there to be a true path for justice, for victims of sexual assault in the military.”
“I believe that we still today don’t know how rampant sexual assault in the military is, because there is still a fear of retaliation, there is a stigma and people who don’t want to be known as ‘that one,’” Gabbard said.
The question came from Joy Craig, a retired US Marine officer.
“This legislation is so important because it provides that path outside of the chain of command where you know that there is no one, whether it’s your team leader, platoon leader, first sergeant or commander, there is no one who will be able to stop your pursuit of justice and accountability if you’re a victim of assault in the this is such an important issue,” Gabbard said, adding that she served with people who felt like it was impossible to tell their own story of sexual assault.
Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard was asked whether she thought Rep. Ilhan Omar’s controversial tweets suggesting US support of Israel is motivated by money were anti-Semitic.
Gabbard didn’t answer the question directly. She said she doesn’t think Omar was trying to offend anyone and instead was trying to get at a deeper issue.
She continued: “What she was trying to bring up was something that was a deeper issue. And I don’t believe that her intent was to cause any offense to anyone.”
Some background: Omar apologized on Monday after she ignited a firestorm with her tweets. The messages – she suggested support of Israel is driven specifically by donations from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a prominent pro-Israel lobby group – were condemned by lawmakers on both sides of the aisle as anti-Semitic.
Rep. Tulsi Gabbard sought to explain her shift from advocating anti-gay policies in the early 2000s on Sunday night, saying her time in the military caused her to “go through some soul-searching.”
“I was raised in a very socially conservative home. My father is Catholic, he was a leading voice against gay marriage in Hawaii at that time. Again, I was very young, but these are the values and beliefs that I grew up around,” she said.
CNN’s KFile previously reported that Gabbard’s father led an anti-gay organization that advocated for conversion therapy.
Gabbard said she “personally never supported any kind of conversion therapy. I never advocated for conversion therapy. And frankly, I didn’t even know what conversion therapy was until the last few years.”
Gabbard said her views shifted when she deployed to the Middle East, “where I saw firsthand the negative impact of a government attempting to act as a moral arbiter for their people, dictating in the most personal ways how they must live their lives.”
“Race or religion or orientation, these were things that didn’t matter, because we were focused on our mission of serving,” she said.
She also touted her record in Congress, where she supported efforts to promote LGBT equality.
Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard refused to say whether she was a capitalist because she said doesn’t want to be labeled.
Asked by CNN’s Dana Bash if she identified as a capitalist, Gabbard went on to say that labels are often misused and misunderstood.
“See here is the thing with all these labels and, as you said, how they are used to define people and where they’re coming from. As you see, so many of these labels are misused, misunderstood,” she said.
Gabbard continued:
