22 United States The EconomistFebruary 15th 2020
1O
rdinarily a candidate who comes
first equal in Iowa and backs that up
with a strong second in New Hampshire
would leap to the front of the primary pack.
In the case of Pete Buttigieg, who won 24%
of New Hampshire’s primary votes to Ber-
nie Sanders’s 26%, one week after narrowly
taking the most delegates from Iowa’s cau-
cuses, that has not happened. In YouGov’s
poll for The Economist, Mr Buttigieg re-
mains stuck behind Mr Sanders, Joe Biden
(still), Elizabeth Warren and Mike Bloom-
berg. Voters who have seen plenty of Mr
Buttigieg in the early states evidently think
he might be the party’s best bet to beat Do-
nald Trump in November. Democrats else-
where still seem unsure about who he is.
Mr Buttigieg is ridiculously young to be
doing so well. It is 13 years since the pudgy-
faced Rhodes scholar graduated from Ox-
ford. Since then he has already got through
three brief careers. First he was a globe-
trotting financial analyst at McKinsey, a
consultancy. Then he became a navy re-
servist, volunteering for an active tour as a
“dirt sailor” (one who serves with the army)
in Afghanistan. He completed eight years
as mayor of South Bend, a once-glum-but-
now-reviving city of 100,000 souls in
northern Indiana where Mr Buttigieg was
brought up by his parents, both professors
at Notre Dame university. The fact that Mrs
Buttigieg was a linguist and Mr Buttigieg
senior was an expert on Gramsci is some-times used to cast doubt on his rustbelt cre-
dentials. But the Midwest is home to cul-
tural theorists as well as welders.
In conversations with The Economist
over the past year, Mr Buttigieg has com-
pared his rise to that of Emmanuel Macron
in France or Matteo Renzi in Italy. Each was
under 40 when first elected. America has
never had a presidential candidate quite
like him, not just because of his age or his
family’s Maltese ancestry. He has taken to
calling himself a “progressive veteran”. He
is a brainy polyglot able to converse in Ara-
bic, Dari, French, Norwegian and Spanish,
among other tongues. He likes to chat
about philosophy. One wealthy donor, who
has spent time in conversation with all the
main Democratic contenders, lauds him as
“fantastic” and the “most intellectually cu-
rious by a mile” of all of them.
More striking, he is gay, married and
unabashed in talking about how his Chris-
tian (Episcopalian, formerly Catholic) faith
brought him to the “love of his life” his hus-
band Chasten, a teacher. That seems to be a
powerful combination for many voters.
Some may be hostile to having a gay candi-
date, but plenty of conservative Democrats
are swayed by his faith and his talk of re-
spect for fellow veterans. At rallies older
voters get weepy when he describes find-
ing love. Some also swoon at his thought-
fully articulated sentences.
Mr Buttigieg has shown some guts too.Over six months in Kabul, as a lieutenant,
he was officially deployed in counter-intel-
ligence but in fact was often used “as a glo-
rified driver”. Taking others around the Af-
ghan capital—he counted 119 sorties
outside the base—meant he was at some
risk, but he never came under attack. He
says “it was scary” at times, such as when
rockets were fired at the base.
He was perhaps braver when, on his re-
turn, he published a column that first spelt
out how he came to accept he was gay. “I
was well into adulthood before I was pre-
pared to acknowledge the simple fact...It
took years of struggle and growth for me to
recognise,” he wrote. For a buttoned-up
man, that bout of self-examination, just
before he sought re-election as mayor in
2015, was difficult. The city’s voters, more
liberal than most Hoosiers, cheered his
frankness and he won with 80.4%.
A self-described introvert (though he
played guitar in a teenage band, “Turkish
Delight”) he has never been shy of stating
his ambitions for office. At Harvard, in
2004, he told a student newspaper that
“politics is in my bones” and said he
planned to devote his life to it. He also
wrote columns on domestic and foreign
politics for the Harvard Crimson. One could
prove to be relevant this year: he pondered
the lessons of the “intense and unpredict-
able” 1968 Democratic convention.
In his earliest electoral bid, a no-hoper
effort to be Indiana’s state treasurer in
2010, he spent a year criss-crossing the
state in a green Taurus. He learned fund-
raising (he is adept at it, with only Mr Sand-
ers outdoing him for donors). Jeff Harris,
his first campaign manager, now a political
operative, recalls that he put in 50 hours a
week calling potential donors, between
glad-handing voters and local party chiefs.
He lacked gumption only once, when he
declined to sample dishes of deep-fried
turkey testicles and brain sandwiches of-
fered in rural southern Indiana.One year of history
Crushed in a landslide, nonetheless “he
won by losing”, reckons Jack Colwell, a po-
litical columnist in South Bend. That
race—and his aborted run to be Democratic
national chairman in 2017—brought him to
public attention and the eyes of party
chiefs. In the mayoral races, managed by
Mike Schmul (an old friend who now runs
his presidential campaign), he proved pop-
ular among old voters and moderates who
have abandoned the Republican Party.
As for his record in South Bend, that was
decent but not miraculous: economic de-
cline and population loss went on for de-
cades after Studebaker closed a massive car
plant in 1963. Mr Colwell reckons the
young, technocratic mayor was the “cata-
lyst” in getting outsiders to invest, clearing
abandoned housing, improving city ser-SOUTH BEND, INDIANA
Pete Buttigieg bets his biography counts for more than his light political résuméMayor Pete’s progressSeeking an edge, edge