Presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg has been moving in on constituencies long considered reserved by the GOP: religious and rural voters.

The South Bend mayor routinely quotes Scripture during campaign speeches to justify his policy proposals. He was the first Democratic presidential candidate to hire a faith outreach coordinator. He's among a limited number of candidates to release detailed plans to lift rural voters.

He's not likely to win large numbers of evangelical or working-class white voters who made up President Donald Trump's 2016 coalition — nor does he need to. But convincing voters in rural areas of states with early nominating contests, such as Iowa and South Carolina, will be key to winning the Democratic primary.

And he, or whoever else the eventual Democratic nominee is, will need to convince enough moderates in swing states such as Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania to turn the 2020 election.

That’s according to more than a half-dozen religious studies experts, rural planners and voters who talked to IndyStar, many of whom say it’s smart of Buttigieg to reach beyond the Democratic base and simply make the argument to other Americans that they have a choice. And they say Buttigieg is talking about the right kinds of ideas.

“I do think it’s important for Democrats to go after the rural voters, both for perception and strategy," said David Craig, chair of the Religious Studies program at IUPUI. “When you look at those presidential maps after the elections, even when Democrats win, the whole darn thing is red. That is a bad perception. Strategically, Democrats have to contest those areas.”

The effort comes as Buttigieg faces a stark political reality. He has the money to stay in the race for the long haul, but he's routinely polling in the single digits nationally in the primary, giving him a limited amount of time to make a move in the crowded Democratic field.

Last week, he launched a radio advertising campaign across Iowa with spots in which he offers his own solutions to problems he says Trump is making worse.

"When the president gets on Twitter to brag about the high-stakes game he’s playing with China, he’s not seeing the same rural America that I see," Buttigieg says in one advertisement.

"The one where net farm income has been cut almost in half these past five years. Where small-town residents live hours away from a decent hospital. Where household budgets are stretched so thin that desperation often turns to depression and addiction.

"This reckless trade war is tearing apart the very fabric of rural America. And while subsidies might soften the blows temporarily, they can’t repair the permanent damage being done to family farms."

'He speaks Christian'

In stump speeches, Buttigieg often says his party doesn’t talk enough about religion. A practicing Episcopalian, he often uses Scripture to advocate for more progressive policies, such as welcoming immigrants and raising the minimum wage.

“Whoever oppresses the poor taunts their maker,” he said at the second Democratic debate, citing Proverbs 14:31, in describing how the Senate had blocked a House bill that would raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour.

Democrats don't do enough to connect their faith with their policy positions, said Craig, the religious studies chair at IUPUI. He noted Buttigieg has used the idea of welcoming the stranger, a parable from Matthew 25, to push both for immigration reform and more humanitarian treatment of immigrants on the border.

“One of the things I like about Buttigieg, he speaks Christian," said Craig. "He speaks Christian from a position that other Christians have a hard time dismissing. (President Barack) Obama also could speak a certain version of Christianity."

Buttigieg sometimes uses faith in a more personal way. He's set himself up as a foil of sorts to Vice President Mike Pence, the former Indiana governor who routinely describes himself as "a Christian, a conservative and a Republican, in that order." Pence also is a proponent of marriage being between only a man and a woman, based on his reading of the Bible. The openly gay candidate is married to Chasten Buttigieg.

"Your quarrel, sir, is with my creator," Buttigieg has said in criticism of Pence's views on marriage, which serves as both a political zinger and a way religion can be used to support LGBTQ rights.

And, of course, Buttigieg criticizes those on the religious right, including Pence, for their support of Trump, arguing the president does and says things are that decidedly not Christian.

"Look, when I read the Bible, there is an awful lot about hypocrites in there," he told The Washington Post in May. "Frankly, neither priests nor government officials come off very good in the New Testament ... And again, I'm old enough to remember when it was conservatives who said this, but I'm going to say it: The presidency is not just a policy position; it is a moral position."

An interesting choice

Buttigieg became the first among the 20-plus Democratic candidates in more than half a year of campaigning to hire a faith outreach coordinator.

Democrats aren't always known for embracing religion. Hillary Clinton, the 2016 nominee, was criticized by some Democrats for having too secular of an approach to campaigning.

Buttigieg's coordinator wants to take a more holistic approach in gathering support from worshippers.

The Rev. Shawna Foster told The Washington Post the intersection of religion and politics has been dominated by one type of religion, and she wants to reach more, specifically naming Native American spirituality, Sikhism and Baha'i as examples as alternative faiths.

She's a Unitarian Universalist. Even as they applaud the broader strategy, scholars contacted by IndyStar found Buttigieg's choice to lead it a head-scratcher — Unitarian Universalists are regarded as a liberal, highly educated group that follows no specific creed in the search for spirituality and truth.

More progressive worshippers might be open to that type of messenger, but more conservative voters, especially white evangelicals, might struggle to relate to that choice, scholars told IndyStar. They wondered whether he wasn't making a play for millennials.

"That is a religious group that is as open as it can possibly be," said Arthur Farnsley II, associate director of the Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture at IUPUI. "A very large number of Christians wouldn't think of them as Christians, and neither would some Unitarian Universalists. So many people aren't going to see that as an approach toward them."

Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey has since hired a faith outreach coordinator, but he picked a more traditional choice from the Bible Belt, a reverend from Grace Christian Church in South Carolina.

He will play a role specific to that primary, traveling the state to raise support for Booker.

The religious left

The religious right hasgrown intoa powerful voting bloc, largely focused on opposition to bothabortion and LGBTQ rights.

So, can a Democrat such as Buttigieg or Booker unite a religious left? It might not be so easy.

The religious left — a hodgepodge of more progressive Catholics, Protestants and Jews and more conservative historically black Christian churches — tend not to be so focused on so few issues.

Thirty-one percent of religious Democrats are white Christians, 22 percent are nonwhite Christians and 12 percent belong to other faiths, fivethirtyeight.com reported, citing data from Cooperative Congressional Election Study.

Farnsley said uniting the religious left into a large voting bloc would be difficult, but it's certainly possible to appeal to enough religious voters to make a difference.

“I think it’s unlikely any one candidate is going to unite a religious left," Farnsley said. "There are a lot of Democrats and people on the left who have faith commitments, but they have very different interests and it's proven fairly impervious to that kind of organization.”

He said Democrats have to walk a finer line than Republicans, because their base also includes agnostics and atheists who might be turned away by too much talk of Scripture and other religious references. According to fivethirtyeight.com, 65 percent of Democratic primary voters are religious, compared to 84 percent of Republican voters.

Still, Farnsley speculated that social justice issues could be a way to reach religious Democratic voters without alienating their nonreligious counterparts.

"A lot of people on the religious left are committed to social justice issues," he said, "and so my guess is there is a great deal of solidarity around poverty questions and government assistance to deal with poverty."

Growing interest in Buttigieg

Joe Smith said there’s a buzz around Buttigieg at his church, St. Thomas Aquinas in Indianapolis.

Smith, an African American Catholic who worked for U.S. Sen. Birch Bayh and Govs. Evan Bayh and Frank O'Bannon, thinks Buttigieg's willingness to openly talk about his faith will help bridge questions religious voters, especially African Americans, might have about his sexual orientation.

Support is growing among African Americans and Latinos, important segments of the Democratic base that have held concerns about marriage equality and other LGBTQ rights. The same, he said, goes for Catholics in general.

So much so, that Smith said many of his fellow parishioners are upset with the local archbishop for the firing of LGBTQ faculty and staffat Cathedral and Roncalli high schools, and Smith wonders whether the backlash could cause many to take a closer look at Buttigieg's campaign.

"I do know for sure the respect for him continues to grow," Smith said, "from my observation."

Tone down the partisan rhetoric with rural voters

Two proposals Buttigieg released targeting rural Americans appear to be aimed at giving voters who have heavily supported Trump a reason to vote for the Democrat.

In a 10-page proposal to improve access to health care, Buttigieg proposes expanding access to Medicare, Medicaid and plans in the Affordable Care Act, while increasing the availability of doctors and medical care.

In another, 14-page plan, he proposes to provide resources for job creation, infrastructure improvement and access to education.

Trump's presidency has been exposing a political rift of where people live in the United States. In the 2018 midterm elections, Democrats made significant gains in suburban areas to retake the House, for instance. But Mike Braun's U.S. Senate victory in Indiana reflected the GOP's continued strength among rural voters.

Trump's approval among rural voters is 62 percent, according to an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll conducted July 15-18 among 900 registered voters, compared to 47 percent for suburban and 33 percent for urban voters.

Buttigieg is talking about the right kinds of ideas to help rural Americans, according to rural policy analysts who spoke to IndyStar, but they question whether he's using their language.

For one, he lays out his positions academically rather than in plain language, though that might change as he continues to stump. For another, he criticizes Trump and other Republicans when laying out his plans, both in TV interviews and in his position papers. That might play well with liberals, but it could instantly cause traditional GOP voters to go to their partisan corner.

"I think having a rural platform is incredibly important going into this next presidential cycle," said Emily Wornell, a research assistant professor in the Indiana Communities Institute at Ball State University. "But I do think there are some things that have the potential to make it harder for rural folks to see themselves in these platforms and for it to resonate with them. There is a tendency for urban folks to talk about rural places in this kind of savior complex way, rather than recognizing a lot of the great things already happening and being able to build upon those."

Rural America is diverse, too

Buttigieg recognizes one key issue that could dramatically help rural America, the rural planners told IndyStar. That issue — immigration — is one that Buttigieg has framed in starkly different terms than Trump, with his promise to build a wall.

Buttigieg offers ideas to increase legal immigration in his proposals. He points out rural America is not monolithic, with 1 of ever 5 rural Americans being black, Latino or Native American, and he says many rural communities need to increase population to survive.

Many rural communities are shrinking in population, rural planners say, creating stress on their long-term viability. In addition to convincing young graduates to stay home, rural communities could use an influx of immigrants to fill jobs, open businesses and grow the local economy, said David Terrell, executive director of the Indiana Communities Institute at Ball State and former deputy chief of staff to former Lt. Gov. Becky Skillman.

"We've done some studies about the growth of immigration in rural Indiana," Terrell said. "That will be the salvation of a lot of rural communities. I think some of the tension you are seeing, the age-old tension of assimilation which is being playing out, may take a half a generation to a generation to resolve."

Terrell said Buttigieg also does a good job of recognizing the difference between rural life and agricultural life, creating proposals to help each. Politicians talk a lot about farmers, he said, but the reality is agriculture accounts for a small percentage of rural jobs.

"Eastern and Midwestern rural American is very different from Southern and Western rural America," Terrell said, "geographically, ethnically and racially there is quite a diverse audience that needs to be reached."

Short on substance, 'long on Democratic narrative'

Republican Joe VanBibber, a 71-year old retiree in Tipton, a half-hour north of Noblesville, thinks Trump will easily win rural American in 2020.

He said many conservative voters take issue with the president's personality, but they love his policies. VanBibber, who had a long career working for the local phone company and served a stint as county commissioner, didn't find much to like in Buttigieg's proposals.

He found them sweeping but too vague. He doesn't think Buttigieg knows how to talk to rural voters.

"Mr. Buttigieg seems to be a smooth talker and a nice young man, however America is overpopulated with smooth-talking, nice young men," VanBibber said. "I only say that because I find him short on substance and long on Democrat narrative."

Curt Kovener, a 67-year-old Democratic voter in Crothersville, which is between Indy and Louisville along I-65, also thinks the countryside will remain Trump territory for the foreseeable future. He said farmers are concerned about tariffs, but are getting through with the help of subsidies.

Most of his friends are staunch Trump supporters. Kovener, a former township trustee who publishes the Crothersville Times, a one-man operation that largely prints public notices and other transactional news, said rural America isn't hurting enough yet for significant numbers to vote for a Democrat. He suspects it may take a generational shift.

"At some point the worm will turn and common sense will come out," he said.

Call IndyStar reporter Chris Sikich at 317-444-6036. Follow him on Twitter: @ChrisSikich.