Rep. Seth Moulton (D-MA) implied in an interview that was published on Thursday evening that he was cooler than South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg (D) when they were undergraduates at Harvard.
Moulton and Buttigieg overlapped at Harvard—Moulton graduated in 2001 and Buttigieg in 2004. Politico asked the struggling presidential candidate if he knew Buttigieg in college:
On fellow Harvard alum Pete Buttigieg
Q: “Did you know Mayor Pete in college?”A: “No. I think we hung out with different groups of friends. Not at all, I was not hanging out with the Harvard Democrats.”
Q: “What was your friend group like?”
A: “Athletes. People who went out and, you know, had a good time.”
Fast forward to the 2020 presidential election cycle and Buttigieg is a top-tier candidate who raised $24 million last quarter while Moulton, who is lucky to even reach 1% in most polls, failed to qualify for the first two debates and is in danger of not qualifying for any of the debates.
While an undergraduate at Harvard, Buttigieg appeared on Chris Matthews’s Hardball program during the show’s college tour. Buttigieg asked presidential candidate Dick Gephardt a question about the youth vote during the 2004 election cycle in which Gephardt argued that he was the best fit for Democrats like an old pair of shoes while John Edwards, a whippersnapper with some similarities to Buttigieg, was saying that he still believed that a son of a millworker could beat the son of a president for the White House in America.