Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Indiana, has almost zero support from one of the most important groups in the Democratic Party’s coalition: black Americans.

Related: Poll Puts Black Voters’ Support for Trump at Record Numbers

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Still, liberal actor Robert De Niro believes Mayor Pete has the “best shot” at beating President Donald Trump in 2020.

The Hollywood legend told The Daily Beast that Buttigieg has “all the credentials” to beat that “piece of s***” Trump come next November.

“Buttigieg I like a lot,” De Niro said.

“He’s got all the credentials — Rhodes scholar, Afghanistan veteran — even though he’s young, and if he could get a chance it could be something special, I think.”

De Niro believes Buttigieg’s LGBT identity will help bring in minority support, despite the fact that the candidate does poorly with black Americans.

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“As a gay person, he’s someone who comes from a marginalized community, so people from other ethnic groups can identify with him, even if they’re not gay, because they know what it’s like,” De Niro said.

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Buttigieg is currently polling at 0 percent among black voters in the key primary state of South Carolina.

“I think he’s the best for what we need now. I have friends who really like him a lot, as I do,” De Niro continued.

“With Obama, he had the middle name ‘Hussein’ and a lot of things that people tried to use against him — including Trump with the whole stupid ‘birther’ thing — and he went right through it. It could happen with Buttigieg. And there’s Bloomberg,” added De Niro.

But there’s a significant problem: Black voters in Buttigieg’s hometown haven’t been happy with him.

One Republican strategist emphasized Buttigieg’s built-in disadvantage with the black community.

“All the fundraising in the world cannot save the young politician from Indiana, and doing well in a state that more closely resembles Norway than the rest of the United States does not help his case,” wrote GOP strategist Shermichael Singleton at The Hill.

“His trouble with black voters runs deep,” he also said, in part.

“For many black voters, the calculation is simple,” Singleton continued.

“If Buttigieg is poorly equipped to deal with matters of race in a place as small as South Bend, then he certainly is not capable of dealing with them across the entire United States.”

This piece originally appeared in The Political Insider and is used by permission.

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