Believe it or not, betting markets now rate Pete Buttigieg, the 37-year-old mayor of South Bend, Ind., in the top-tier of Democratic presidential candidates. He has about a 10% chance of winning the party’s nomination—right behind Joe Biden, and well ahead of Sens. Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker and Amy Klobuchar. His rise is a testament to changing American politics as well as his skill in packaging progressive policies and methods in a smooth, moderate persona.

Presidential politics has long been entrepreneurial, but it’s becoming more so all the time. Paths to the White House have multiplied. You don’t have to be a Senator or Governor to become a political celebrity in the age of social media and weak party establishments. What has Kamala Harris done in the Senate besides grandstand at hearings?

Yet the benefit of presidential candidates having served in Congress or a statehouse is they can be pinned down on policy issues. It’s harder to do that for a mayor. Local government is the most popular kind precisely because the issues often don’t correspond with national partisan divisions.

Mr. Buttigieg is taking full advantage of this, prioritizing appeals to pragmatism and economic opportunity over policy specifics. When pressed he more or less endorses the Green New Deal and single-payer health-care, but he also says he supports “democratic capitalism” and has expressed reservations about free college. He told the Daily Beast that “in many ways, that moral or tonal dimension of leadership is as important or more as the actual policies that they put forward.”

Mr. Buttigieg’s leadership style is genuinely unifying in some respects. A practicing Episcopalian and Navy veteran, he has criticized elite Democrats for condescending to heartland voters. Of efforts to end the Trump Presidency through investigations, he said, “if we’re . . . not paying attention to the reasons why a lot of people went and voted for somebody they disliked, then we’re kind of missing the point.”


But if Mr. Buttigieg rhetorically challenges his party’s Resistance wing, in an important respect he shares its larger progressive ambitions. To the extent he is running on a “big idea,” it is that the U.S. needs to rewrite its policy-making rules to eliminate norms and institutions that he believes block the progressive agenda. He caught the attention of activists in February as the first candidate to say he was open to expanding the Supreme Court. He’s since suggested eliminating the Electoral College and the Senate filibuster, adding Puerto Rico and Washington, D.C. as states and repealing the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision on political speech.

In a New Yorker interview the mayor gave the classic populist rationale for such dramatic changes: “the center of gravity of the American political system is no longer within shooting distance of the center of gravity of the American people.” Liberal priorities on gun control, climate change and so on would supposedly be easier to push through if it weren’t for institutional and constitutional obstacles.

Mr. Buttigieg describes “democratic reform” as a good-government project rather than a partisan power-grab aimed at the GOP. But that’s not how many on the left are interpreting his ideas. As the progressive millennial website Vox noted enthusiastically: “Rather than forge a policy compromise with Republicans,” Mr. Buttigieg “wants to transform ideas and structures that define American politics. If Sen. Bernie Sanders is a class warrior, Pete Buttigieg is a partisan warrior.”

Mr. Buttigieg told HBO’s Bill Maher that as a “laid-back intellectual young gay mayor from the Midwest,” he is the opposite of Donald Trump. He is also the opposite of Mr. Trump in a different respect: While the President panicked the intellectual class by blustering about smashing political norms, Mr. Buttigieg, a Rhodes scholar, speaks about restructuring the political system to favor his party with sophistication and plausibility.


This helps explain his sudden appeal and is one reason liberal intellectuals will be a key constituency in his presidential bid.