Former candidate Buttigieg joins Klobuchar in endorsing Joe Biden | CBC News

Rivals no more, Amy Klobuchar, Pete Buttigieg and Beto O’Rourke united behind Joe Biden’s presidential bid on Monday as the Democratic Party’s moderate wing scrambled to boost the former vice-president just hours before voting began across a series of high-stakes Super Tuesday states.

Klobuchar, a senator from Minnesota, ended her Democratic presidential campaign on Monday and joined Biden at his Dallas rally Monday night.

“It is time to work together,” she told the crowd. “If we spend the next four months dividing our party and going at each other, we will spend the next four years watching Donald Trump tear apart this country.” 

Buttigieg also joined Biden on stage to publicly declare his support, as did former Texas congressman O’Rourke. O’Rourke dropped out of the race for the presidential nomination on Nov. 1, 2019, before the primaries began. 

The endorsements reflected deep concerns from the Democratic establishment that Bernie Sanders, a polarizing progressive, was positioned to seize a significant delegate lead when 14 states, one U.S. territory vote on Tuesday.

Klobuchar outlasted several better-known and better-funded Democrats, thanks to a better-than-expected third-place finish in New Hampshire. But she couldn’t turn that into success elsewhere, as she struggled to build out a campaign that could compete across the country and had poor showings in the next contests.

The three-term senator had one of this cycle’s more memorable campaign launches, standing outside in a Minnesota snowstorm last February to tout her “grit” and Midwestern sensibilities. Klobuchar argued that her record of getting things done in Washington and winning even in Republican parts of her state would help her win traditionally Democratic heartland states like Wisconsin and Michiga