Pete Buttigieg’s 2020 presidential campaign is historic. The mayor of South Bend, Indiana, is the first openly gay candidate to gain serious national traction on a run for the presidency. At the center of considering his campaign, in my view, is a tension between an unprecedented high-water mark for LGBTQ representation in national politics and an age-old question of whether or not a candidate whose policy positions aren’t exactly groundbreaking should be at the vanguard of LGBTQ representation in that space.

I think it’s important to acknowledge that already, Buttigieg’s campaign has provided previously unthinkable moments by giving discussions about sexuality new space in the national discourse. He has broken new ground by being a primary contender who’s opened up about the struggles of coming out as gay, perhaps most notably to Rachel Maddow, an openly gay MSNBC anchor.

“There were certainly plenty of indications by the time I was 15 or so that I could point back and be like, ‘Yeah, yeah, this kid’s gay,’ but I guess I just needed to not be,” Buttigieg told Maddow on April 15, offering an unprecedented moment: a presidential candidate on a major cable broadcast talking about the pain of coming out. Buttigieg continued: “There’s this war that breaks out, I think, inside a lot of people when they realize they might be something that they’re afraid of, and it took me a very long time to resolve that.”

Buttigieg’s story of coming to terms with his sexuality and his relationship with his husband, Chasten Buttigieg (now a celebrity in his own right) are featured in a campaign video he released last month, days after he officially announced his presidential run was moving from an exploratory committee to an official campaign. In this video, it’s obvious that Buttigieg’s campaign promises a great deal of potential in large part due to the fact that, even 10 years ago, it would’ve been unimaginable.

In fact, 11 years ago—as the 2008 campaign was entering its final days—then-candidate and future president Barack Obama even said he wasn’t in favor of gay marriage, keeping him in line with the Democratic Party’s views at the time. Obama would go on to change his view during his 2012 re-election campaign, making him the first president to take that position. The Democratic Party would follow suit later that year, and the Supreme Court would end up legalizing same-sex marriages in 2015, during Obama’s second term.

In the context of this recent and radical shift on the Democratic Party’s stances on LGBTQ issues, having a married gay man now running for president is truly a sign of how much has changed in a relatively short amount of time. But when it comes to Mayor Pete, as he’s come to be known by those perhaps uncertain of how to pronounce his last name (BOOT-edge-edge, BOOT-a-jedge, or BOO-tuh-judge, according to Chasten), the question of the value of a historic first must be weighed alongside the policy ideas a relatively moderate candidate is running on.