5 Tough Questions Pete Buttigieg's Campaign Will Have to Answer
After two years of speculation about which of them is best suited to bring the Trump era to a merciful end in 2020, Democratic politicians who have been spending their free time forming exploratory committees, soliciting donations, giving inspiring speeches, and hanging out in Iowa diners are at last announcing formal bids to become the next president of the United States. Over the next few weeks, we'll take a look at each of the front-runners: Who are they? What do they stand for? And in order to have a shot at winning the nomination they seek, what tough questions will they have to answer first?
Previously, we looked at Kamala Harris, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker, Joe Biden, and Beto O’Rourke. Next up: South Bend, Indiana mayor Pete Buttigieg.
Why is the mayor of a mid-sized Midwestern city running for president?
With apologies to O’Rourke, a three-term congressman who lost a Senate race and is now running for President of the United States, Buttigieg—known around South Bend and/or the Internet as “Mayor Pete”—is the most obvious answer to the question, “Which serious Democratic hopeful is perhaps furthest out over his proverbial skis?”
Since graduating from Harvard College in 2004, Buttigieg (that’s “BOOT-a-judge,” which is why “Mayor Pete” comes in so handy) has worked on a handful of unsuccessful campaigns in Indiana, studied at Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship, and spent stretches at two consulting firms, including three years at global behemoth McKinsey and Company. In 2011, he was elected mayor of his hometown, and won a second term in 2015; a Naval reservist, he spent seven months in Afghanistan as an intelligence officer in 2014. These are extremely impressive credentials! Compared to the senators and governors and former vice presidents in the running, though, Buttigieg’s résumé reads like it accidentally got cut off after the first few lines.
The reason he isn’t seeking a job that somewhere between “medium-sized-city-mayor” and “President of the United States” is probably the same one that nudged Beto into the race: Buttigieg has the misfortune of being a bright Democratic star in a solidly-Republican state, which leaves him with few appealing prospects for seeking higher office. South Bend sits squarely in a red congressional district once represented in Washington by Mike Pence. Indiana hasn’t elected a Democratic governor since 2000. The state does not have a Senate election until 2022, and neither the 2016 nor 2018 contests were particularly close. Recently-ousted Democratic senator Joe Donnelly can credit his surprise 2012 win mostly to the fact that his opponent, Richard Mourdock, opined during the campaign that pregnancies caused by rape are “something that God intended.” (Mourdock still lost by fewer than six points.)
Perhaps Buttigieg surveyed his options and decided that if you’re bound to be a long shot in your next election, you might as well get ambitious about it. But deciding instead to mount a Senate or gubernatorial bid in the next few years—even a Beto-esque spirited losing effort—would do wonders for his national profile. (Buttigieg’s unsuccessful bid to chair the DNC in 2017, for example, did exactly that.) His challenge in this contest will be to articulate why he is so well-suited for the White House right now.
Can a millennial make a viable candidate?
“It’s time for a new generation of American leadership,” reads the splash page on Buttigieg’s web site. The 37-year-old has been widely touted as the first millennial major-party presidential candidate, as recently exhibited by his made-for-virality participation in the most online of all online debates: Is a hot dog a sandwich? (His ruling, for the record, is no.)
This distinction—the being-the-first-millennial-candidate one, not the hot dog one—sounds like a promising data point until you remember the people who actually elect this country’s leaders are...old. In 2016, people under 30 comprised just 13 percent of the electorate; good tweets, as the classic political science saying goes, are not the same as votes. The demographic groups most inclined to participate in elections might not be ready to cede the White House to the next generation just yet.
This is not an impossible barrier for a good politician to overcome. John F. Kennedy was 43 when elected president, and Barack Obama was 47. But like those men did—and to a greater extent than some of his more experienced 2020 competitors will have to do—Buttigieg has to rely on cobbling together a coalition of his more enthusiastic younger supporters and the more plentiful older voters in order to make a dent.
Buttigieg’s military service is one obvious distinction that he could argue demonstrates his maturity and fitness for the job; so is his purported ability to connect with conservative heartland voters. (More on this later.) Sometimes, the youthful, upstart underdog displays just enough charisma to sway just enough voters; sometimes, Marco Rubio loses his home state in humiliating fashion and has to suspend his campaign a few days later.
Where...where are his beliefs?
For someone who wants to be president, Buttigieg has exhibited a notable reluctance to talk about policy. His web site, incredibly, does not even have an “issues” page. The first tab is...a store. The rest of the site is just a short bio, a list of events, and a “Donate” prompt.
When asked about this dearth of specifics, Buttigieg explained to VICE that he wants to “articulate...values” and “lay out our philosophical commitments”—both of which, he argues, the right has done more successfully than the left—before getting into specifics. He goes so far as to suggest that candidates who claim to have their beliefs all “figured out on day one” of their campaigns might be “a little bit dishonest.”
It’s fair to point out that beliefs can change over time, and that early, grandiose campaign promises often get candidates in trouble down the line. Still, as Current Affairs’s Nathan J. Robinson points out, it’s not at all clear why he treats asserting values and espousing policies as mutually exclusive propositions, and the mayor’s underdog status does not leave him a ton of room for strategic missteps. “When asked why he wants to hold an office,” Robinson concludes, Buttigieg “talks much more about who he is than what he will do.”
In interviews, Buttigieg has provided a few tangible hints about how he’d govern. He says he backs the Green New Deal, for example, and a transition to single-payer health care, and abolishing the Electoral College. He supports statehood for D.C., and for Puerto Rico if it so chooses. His plan for reforming the Supreme Court—an expansion to 15 justices, five of whom may be seated only by unanimous consent of the other 10—is robust, if a little ambitious. (Because the Constitution requires the Senate to provide advice and consent on Supreme Court nominees, for example, transferring part of that power to some of its sitting justices might require a constitutional amendment.)
This is a solid foundation. Mayor Pete’s problem, though, is that he’s competing in a race in which already-more-established candidates like Bernie Sanders and (especially) Elizabeth Warren have unveiled a torrent of specific, wonky proposals: dueling wealth taxes, a tech industry reform framework, universal childcare, and so on. By failing to do the same—and, more importantly, by expressing a weird affirmative disinterest in doing so—Buttigieg risks being dismissed as a lightweight. This dynamic might be particularly challenging during debates, if he comes across as obviously unprepared relative to the other candidates onstage. Values are good; having a plan for putting them into practice is just as important.
Can he be the Democratic Party’s elusive connection to the Upper Midwest?
So far, Buttigieg is one of two 2020 candidates hailing from one of the six Midwestern-ish states that Barack Obama won once or twice, but that Hillary Clinton lost: Iowa, Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. (Ohio congressman and longer-than-long-shot Tim Ryan is the other one.) The mayor began dangling this carrot in front of Democrats well before he became a presidential candidate. “Why not have somebody from the industrial Midwest at a time where my party...has struggled to connect in these parts of the United States?” he asked Mehdi Hasan on The Intercept’s Deconstructed podcast. In a 2016 Medium post titled “A letter from flyover country,” he noted that he won 80 percent of the vote in a “‘rust belt’ city” in “the seat of a county that would split its vote evenly between Clinton and Trump.”
Perhaps the deftest recent demonstration of Buttigieg’s fluency in the culture wars lingo came during an appearance on The Breakfast Club, when he was asked about where he stands on Chik-fil-A. The chain was the subject of nationwide protests in 2012 after its CEO expressed opposition to same-sex marriage, and then nationwide counter-protests after customers who opposed same-sex marriage went out and bought a ton of waffle fries as a show of support. “I do not approve of their politics,” allowed Buttigieg, who is openly gay. “But I kind of approve of their chicken.” The message isn’t subtle: If Democrats want Middle America back, Mayor Pete is the guy who can deliver it.
Given the Democratic Party’s dominance of South Bend politics—it hasn’t elected a Republican mayor since 1964—I’m not sure his record of electoral victories there, by itself, constitutes clear evidence of broad bipartisan appeal in the heartland. But in a recent Iowa poll, Mayor Pete finished a surprising third, trailing only Sanders and Biden, and in a late 2016 New Yorker interview, none other than President Obama named the then-34-year-old Buttigieg as a future party leader who could pose a legitimate challenge to Trump. For Democratic voters still reeling from the Midwest shellacking they endured in 2016, the possibility of finding a hero who can take back the region in decisive fashion may be too tantalizing to ignore.
That Iowa caucuses first in the incremental primary process could be a huge advantage for Buttigieg, because success begets media attention and media attention begets more success. If he wins there, or even just beats out a few of his big-name competitors, the ensuing “HERE COMES MAYOR PETE”-style coverage will boost his name recognition among voters in New Hampshire, Nevada, South Carolina, and the dozen states that vote on Super Tuesday a month later. Because Buttigieg is more dependent on Iowa than, say, Harris or Biden or Sanders, look for him to invest heavily in this contest to try and ride a wave of momentum afterwards.
How well did he actually do as South Bend’s mayor?
The history of local politicians who have decided to run for president is, to put it delicately, not kind to local politicians who have decided to run for president. In 1992, Irvine city councilman Larry Agran earned some grassroots support in California and among mayors in other cities, but was excluded from debates and managed to receive only three votes at the Democratic National Convention. Before launching his career as Donald Trump’s chief cable news apologist, “America’s Mayor” Rudy Giuliani finished fourth in the GOP’s 2008 New Hampshire primary and dropped out a few weeks later. The only office Green Party candidate and recount grifter Jill Stein held before launching her White House bids was a seat on her Massachusetts hometown’s legislative council, and we all remember how that shitshow turned out.
Some aspects of being a mayor could, in theory, play to a presidential candidate’s advantage. Unlike many legislators, mayors see the impact of their work every day, because they live and work in the middle of it. Mayors can be especially attuned to the needs of their constituents for the simple fact that they have fewer constituents than a senator or governor or member of Congress. By and large, mayors are less interested in partisan politics than they are in solving problems, because they know if the potholes don’t get fixed, voters blame the chief executive before they blame anyone else. There are ways, in other words, for Buttigieg to spin his mayoralty-heavy resume as a strength—one that no other 2020 candidate can offer.
Again: in theory! Because Buttigieg has had only this one job, his performance will be subjected to especially close scrutiny. His efforts to reduce “blight” by razing decrepit South Bend homes might be an inspiring example of a no-nonsense, roll-up-your-sleeves brand of politics; they might also be a fancy way of describing government-facilitated gentrification. Even as he’s spearheaded a revitalization of the downtown corridor, 40 percent of South Bend’s African-Americans and one-third of Hispanic residents are below the poverty line. A bizarre incident in which he demoted the city’s black police chief for secretly recording officers who had made racist comments—Buttigieg explained that the chief’s potential violations of federal wiretapping laws forced his hand—is sure to draw renewed media interest.
Perhaps the portrait that emerges from the forthcoming examinations of South Bend is one of a city in which Americans of all backgrounds and income brackets would want to live. If it does, maybe Buttigieg becomes the nominee notwithstanding his lack of traditional national experience—the affable, neighborly “Mayor Pete,” as likely to officiate your quickie wedding or dazzle with his Norwegian language skills as he is to ask for your vote. If it’s anything different, though, Buttigieg’s candidacy will be in trouble, because he’ll have nothing else to turn to in order to make his case.
