That distinctiveness reminds Evan O’Connell, a French American citizen who campaigned for Macron and worked as communications director for Joe Sestak’s 2020 bid, of Macron. O’Connell says Macron won the attention of voters for being obviously different from other candidates, able to draw from both left and right.

That’s a view backed up by Macron’s advisers, some of whom were even more like Buttigieg than the candidate himself. Guillaume Liegey is a Harvard and McKinsey alum and early Macron adviser, who earned his political chops via Barack Obama’s presidential campaigns. He cast the Macron campaign as a force for openness in a country accustomed to cloistered, monarchical leaders.

“The objective was to break down bubbles by listening and engaging on doorsteps. To force our volunteers out of their bubble,” Liegey said. “By doing that, they opened a window on France that would never have been opened.”

Martin Bohmert, from the youth wing of Macron’s party, said the volunteers found issues and ideas on voter doorsteps that Macron could use to gain inroads across the political spectrum. “You have to be very careful not to talk to only one portion of the population,” he said.

The Upstart Olympics

When Mayor Pete’s opponents look at him across the debate stage, they don’t see the proud patriot and gay pioneer his supporters see. They don’t even see the next Bill Clinton, the last young Rhodes scholar Americans sent to the White House. Instead, Buttigieg’s rivals see another entitled white guy who thinks he can cut the line.

And they’re furious more Democratic primary voters don’t see it the same way. Can’t voters see that Amy Klobuchar is red-state friendly too, with 25 years more experience? Don’t we realize Joe Biden filled out presidential primary filing papers when Buttigieg was literally in diapers, in 1984?

Buttigieg is that most hated of rivals, an upstart.

Macron knows a thing or two about that. He began his political rise in 2016 and 2017 in a fugue of hubris. The collective reaction of French political elites amounted to: How dare he?

Macron started his presidential quest with no cash and no campaign experience: He’d never even held elected office. Macron was no outsider though. His CV included time as a presidential adviser and junior minister.

Like many Democrat reactions to Buttigieg’s failed runs for Indiana state office and Democratic National Committee leadership, the message to Macron from France’s political establishment was “you may be brilliant, but it’s not your turn yet.”

The idea of President Macron was deeply improbable a year out from his eventual victory.

While a minister in France’s socialist government, Macron was not a party member. Working from such a marginal perch, Macron’s new grassroots En Marche movement was viewed as little more than a distraction for the French from their depressing national leadership.

In a political culture that thrives on ideological clashes, Macron’s promise of a political revolution without ideology made little sense. Combining truth-telling, American-style optimism and a progressive take on capitalism, Macron was staking out something new: a radical center.

From this base camp Macron built a campaign outside of France’s system of public political funding. The strategy was to mobilize an army of volunteers—more of a movement than a party—to break through a crowded establishment field.

Macron’s targets were people who felt scorned for dabbling across the ideological spectrum, and people who’d been told their professional skills weren’t useful in a traditional French election campaign.

To keep his overachieving supporters in the tent, Macron set them free. He put them in charge of crowdsourcing his platform—knocking on 300,000 doors and conducting 25,000 longer conversations with voters—before even declaring his candidacy.

In parallel, Macron sat down with groups as small as a dozen supporters as he traveled France and the world while still a junior minister. He courted journalists and media owners: an earned media strategy designed to reinforce the “popular legitimacy and ideas he’d tested during town halls,” said Fabrice Pothier, an En Marche activist and former NATO official.

If that sounds like Buttigieg’s strategy, you’re not wrong.

While other Democratic candidates started with a bang and pundits focused on national polling numbers, save for a breakout CNN Town Hall appearance in March, Buttigieg operated largely under the radar. There was no Kamala Harris stadium-style launch rally, no Beto O’Rourke bar-top outbursts or $6 million daily fundraising hauls. Buttigieg quietly amassed tens of millions from loyal moderate and gay donors, elevated his husband Chasten’s voice and said yes to every interview request.

Buttigieg’s national polling average didn’t hit double-digits until the last week of November. Like Macron, who sneaked up on the French elite he’d spent years courting, Buttigieg rose to the top of the Iowa and New Hampshire polls before anyone could put him back in his place. And it’s Buttigieg who’s still standing as others drop out of the race, or are relegated from the debate stage.

Not identical twins

The similarities between Macron and Buttigieg are not endless.

The dozen or so Macron advisers and activists POLITICO spoke to all agree: Buttigieg is not upending the political landscape the way Macron did in France.

“There is one enormous difference: Macron fundamentally refused even to be called a centrist, he insisted he was from the left and from the right,” said Antoine Guery, Macron’s EU-level communications manager. Buttigieg did not have that luxury in a Democratic primary race that has dragged the entire field leftward.

Macron also methodically laid out a global vision from the beginning.

When POLITICO conducted Macron’s first on-stage interview after he launched En Marche (Forward!) in 2016—his equivalent of a presidential exploratory committee—the interview took place in English in Brussels, the de facto capital of the European Union, rather than France.

To try that idea on for size: Imagine Buttigieg diving into the 2020 campaign via a Canadian TV interview, in French. From there Macron went on to deliver a series of grand speeches on the future of the EU, a tradition he has carried all the way through to his recent assertion that NATO is “brain dead.”

By the time Macron was facing off against the far-right Marine Le Pen in France’s presidential runoff vote, the French press wrote of Macronism as a political philosophy. While Buttigieg toys with ideas like expanding the Supreme Court bench and has a high-profile “Medicare for all who want it” policy, no one speaks of Buttigiegism.

Can you imagine Mayor Pete lifting from Macron’s playbook to deliver a foreign policy speech in front of the Parthenon in Greece next summer? Or perhaps a mass rally at Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate as then-candidate Barack Obama hosted in 2008? Probably not.

What European officials do see is that Buttigieg’s military experience as a soldier in Afghanistan could give him the international cachet to rescue a fractured NATO and build trust over how the U.S. would fight future wars via coalition.

In office, the same audaciousness that propelled Macron’s ascent seemed to signal his downfall. With the luxury of a large parliamentary majority to back him up, Macron allowed himself to appear aloof and imperial, a far cry from the sleeves-up campaigner he promised France.

While he evidently enjoyed promising grand EU reforms, when it came to domestic politics, Macron seemed to take on entrenched domestic interests only from the right. It was labor unions which had to reform, not employers; it was a wealth tax that needed cutting, not income tax; and struggling rural families were hit with a fuel tax to fight climate change, rather than large polluting companies.

Furious rural voters reacted violently and forced Monsieur le President to ditch his regal act. His penance was weeks of marathon town hall meetings to reconnect with the voters who took a chance on him in 2017. Macron’s approval rating still languishes in the mid-30s, lower than Trump’s and down from a high of 66.

While Macron was a transformative candidate, in governing he couldn’t escape his political foundation: Just 24 percent of French voters chose him in the first round of presidential voting. In the end, he won his presidency not because of who he was, but mostly because of who he wasn’t: the far-right Marine le Pen.

Buttigieg might win the White House in much the same way that Macron won the Élysée Palace—a small core of support attached to a larger bloc of voters holding their nose simply to kick out Trump.

Once in office Buttigieg would face different challenges than Macron. He would have either a wafer-thin Senate majority, or an obstructionist Republican Senate to deal with. There would be no room for an imperial Buttigieg presidency.

Yet Buttigieg could still use the same executive power Trump has, the same military Trump has, in a smarter way. He could pitch a real NATO reform plan (as opposed to a Trump lecture), much more easily than Macron can pitch new Eurozone rules to Angela Merkel, to give one example.

Unlike Macron—or perhaps also because of the lessons Macron provides—Buttigieg has the luxury of promising a restorative presidency. He can be groundbreaking because of who is, instead of which party or political norms he smashes along the way. Even for an audacious 39-year-old president that would surely come as a relief.

