Pete Buttigieg has a race problem. So does the Democratic party

During Wednesday’s Democratic debate, the newscast displayed a graphic illustrating the contrast between Pete Buttigieg’s lead in an Iowa CNN/Des Moines Register poll and the candidate’s polling at 0% among black voters in the latest South Carolina Quinnipiac poll.

Related: 'They barely mentioned us': Atlanta's black voters frustrated by Democratic debate

The two states have become stand-ins for two archetypal Democratic voters: white, moderate midwesterners; and black southerners. Based on Buttigieg’s recent surge in Iowa, some now consider him a frontrunner. But the latest coronation of Buttigieg and oversimplification of the Democratic electorate exemplifies what has consistently been wrong, and structurally racist, with the Democratic party’s presidential primary.

Circumstance has forced the Buttigieg campaign to confront its problem appealing to black voters. This week a video emerged of Buttigieg speaking in 2010 before a group identified with the Tea Party, the Koch-funded movement that mainstreamed America’s resurgent rightwing extremism and overt racism.

Buttigieg, then running for Indiana state treasurer, remarked that “there are many … who believe the Tea Party is motivated by real concerns about the direction of our government and the responsiveness of our government”. Speaking to the economic populism that was attributed to the Tea Party, Buttigieg said in South Bend: “You grow up with an intuitive sense about the importance of jobs.” He added: “Economics and employment and industry mean a great deal to me.”

Biden and Obama have also argued that early participants in the Tea Party had sincere concerns about government overreach and job loss. Yet neither of them chose to appear before a Koch-funded movement that reveled in racism. Noting that some members of a group may have legitimate concerns is markedly different from making explicit appeals to a larger rightwing movement to get their support in an election.

Black Americans – including those in South Bend, Indiana, where Buttigieg has served as mayor for seven years – have even sharper economic concerns than many in the white working class. Though a broad, multiracial working-class coalition is ideal to tackle capitalist greed, Buttigieg’s economic appeals have been neither multiracial nor responsive to the problems corporations and generations of white supremacy have created in the US.

According to a 2017 Prosperity Now study on the racial wealth divide in South Bend, the black unemployment rate is nearly twice that of white people. Black people earn half what their white counterparts make and have an income poverty rate that is almost twice that of black Americans overall.

Like many in the Democratic party, Buttigieg has focused on white midwesterners stuck in economic insecurity and not the many black midwesterners facing poverty and insecurity. Black families struggle acutely in the midwest, from Milwaukee – which has the highest joblessness rate of any major American city for black men in their prime working years – to Chicago, where blacks and Latinos face serious discrimination and insecurity in the temporary warehouse workforce.

But Buttigieg, like the Democratic party as a whole, prioritizes white voters. By centering their voices in the early primary states, centrist Democrats like Buttigieg limit the electoral narrative to white voters’ apparent concerns.

If 2016 has proven anything, it’s that a Democratic candidate cannot win the presidential election without enough black voter support, and Buttigieg has yet to show he can live up to the task. In 2012, he fired South Bend’s first black police chief, Darryl Boykins. Boykins taped the conversations of white officers to uncover racism in the department after officers were revealed to have used inappropriate language. Buttigieg failed to punish any of the white police officers who made the racist remarks.

Last week, the Intercept reported that Buttigieg’s campaign misrepresented black support for his “Douglass Plan for Black America”. An email stated that an op-ed would be published representing over 400 black supporters of the plan; in fact, about half the supporters were white. Of the black supporters it included, some hadn’t actually endorsed the plan.

A candidate with zero black support and a history of failing his existing black constituency does not bode well for the broader national issues black people face, including job insecurity, wealth inequality, incarceration and white supremacist violence. When that candidate can be considered a frontrunner, it reveals a fundamental, racist flaw of the Democratic primary system entirely.

Tracking the horse race of Democratic frontrunners with endless polls, relatively meaningless debates, and premature pronouncements about candidates who can’t connect with the party’s diverse base makes for good entertainment and revenue. Buttigieg and his monied backers may celebrate the fleeting success of a candidate who talks more about moderation and civility than he fights for racial and economic justice. But this political circus merely delays the Democratic party’s failure later.

• Malaika Jabali is a public policy attorney, writer and activist whose writing has appeared in Essence, Jacobin, the Intercept, Glamour and elsewhere