Young, moderate and gay: is Pete Buttigieg the Democrats’ saviour?
With Joe Biden and Kamala Harris unable to boost dangerously low approval ratings, Pete Buttigieg is preparing to ride to the rescue.
This is primed to be a landmark year in the life of Pete Buttigieg, even by the accelerated standards that the mould-breaking former mayor, military veteran and Democratic presidential candidate has already set.
The US transport secretary celebrates his 40th birthday on Wednesday, a day before the Biden administration marks its first. For the White House it has been 12 months scarred by confused messaging, humiliating defeats at home and abroad, and the sense that a rare political opportunity is being squandered.
The same cannot be said for Buttigieg.
He burst into America’s political consciousness in 2019, when the young, gay, multilingual, moderate and media-savvy mayor of South Bend, his hometown in Indiana, somehow made himself a frontrunner for the Democratic nomination. He has continued to advance his prospects since joining Joe Biden’s cabinet, where his main job is to sell to voters the administration’s flagship achievement: a once in a generation investment in physical infrastructure that has the broad support of most Americans.
Now, with the president and the vice-president, Kamala Harris, both proving unable to boost their own dangerously low approval ratings; with a resurgent Donald Trump manoeuvring for another tilt at the Oval Office; and with Democrats on course for disaster at the mid-term congressional elections, Buttigieg has been mooted as the great hope to ride to the party’s rescue in the 2024 election.
“If he is gearing up to run for president, he’s certainly not saying so. He’s too smart to talk about it,” said Charlotte Alter, who profiled Buttigieg in her book The Ones We’ve Been Waiting For, which charts the emergence of ten leading millennial politicians in America.
In 2020, his youth counted strongly against him – the four Democratic candidates who earned more delegates than he did were all in their seventies – but Biden’s erratic performance has amplified concerns about the demands the job places on older presidents. In 2024, Buttigieg would be just a year younger than John F Kennedy was when he was elected president in 1960, four years younger than Bill Clinton in 1992 and five years younger than Barack Obama in 2008.
“2020 was too soon, but 2024, that’s at the younger edge of the norm,” said Stephen Farnsworth, a political scientist at the University of Mary Washington, Virginia. “The good news for Buttigieg is that being transportation secretary is not a job filled with landmines. When you think of the challenges on the vice-president’s agenda [Harris has been tasked by Biden with the divisive problems of migration and voting rights], you can see why a presidential candidate might like a gig like transportation secretary. It is a job, in the wake of the Biden infrastructure bill, that is more or less the political equivalent of being Santa Claus.”
In South Bend, the city where Buttigieg grew up, went to school and was universally known as Mayor Pete during his eight years in office, the only aspects of his record that people can agree on are his intelligence and his ambition.
Kelly Jones stood against him as the Republican candidate for mayor in 2015, losing by a landslide. She respects Buttigieg’s intellect but argues that his record as mayor is woeful. “South Bend is a crime-ridden town,” she said. “Lots of shootings, theft, violent crime, and this has not been taken seriously for years.”
Some of the harshest criticism comes from Democrats. “Pete Buttigieg has an abysmal record here in South Bend, and others should be weighing in on this as well,” said one elected Democratic official in the city.
And then there is the question of his sexuality. Buttigieg is the first openly homosexual member of the US cabinet. In 2019, another Morning Consult poll indicated that only 40 per cent of people thought America was ready to elect a gay president.
Plenty disagree. The vicious tribalism of today’s (Sunday’s) party politics would actually protect Buttigieg on that count, argues Waylon Peterson, a 20-year resident of South Bend, who was having dinner with his daughter at a restaurant near the municipal building.
“Politics is so divided in this country right now that if the Democrats select a gay man, the party and its supporters will back him, just to avoid Trump,” he said. “It won’t be the biggest factor in whether or not he gets elected president.”
THE TIMES