IOWA FALLS, Iowa — How exactly do you define Pete Buttigieg’s politics? That’s a question that will be important to voters this winter as they examine the 37-year-old, and it animated the mayor who wants to be president over the weekend in Iowa.

More than a dozen journalists joined him on his giant new bus for what he promised would be hours of freewheeling discussion. The goal of the four-day tour was, in part, to see how he would hold up under prolonged exposure to reporters. “If I couldn’t manage that,” Buttigieg explained Saturday night, “you would find out.”

The early moments were a little awkward, and filled with small talk. “Did you eat the steak that you fried up?” a reporter asked.

Hours earlier, Buttigieg had delivered a strong performance at the Polk County Steak Fry, the kind of event that can elevate Democratic presidential candidates and show off organizational strength in the first caucus state.

“I ate a steak,” Buttigieg replied dryly. “It was unlikely it was the steak I fried up.”

But Buttigieg had a lot on his mind, particularly with regard to how he’s running and how he’s being perceived. He believes peeling away support from former vice president Joe Biden — who leads most national polls and was second in a new Iowa poll out Saturday — is part of his path to the nomination. And in a long exchange prompted by a question about how he defines himself politically, Buttigieg rejected most labels and called populism a “slippery” term.

“The one I find the most problematic, actually, is centrist,” said of descriptions that have been applied to him. “It says you’re about being in the middle, and there are ideological centrists in this race. I don’t view myself as part of that ideological framing.”

“Pragmatic, on the other hand,” Buttigieg added, “I would embrace.”

Buttigieg curbed his candor when asked to specify whom he viewed as the ideological centrists. (Biden is the most prominent candidate appealing to that voting bloc.) “I’ll let you work that out,” Buttigieg said. “I would say the folks who define themselves by saying that the left is too far left, how about that?”

He also took exception to being tagged as an incrementalist, though his approach to health care policy — not Medicare for All, but a public option — is similar to Biden’s.

“Incrementalism sounds wrong,” Buttigieg said.

Moderate?

“I think moderate is largely about tone,” he allowed. “I’m definitely tonally a moderate.”

The conversation then shifted: How does Buttigieg see populists, who on the right identify with President Donald Trump and on the left identify with rivals such as Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren?

“I think that’s maybe the most slippery term of all,” he said. “I think anyone who wants to win an election is trying to be popular. I guess my anxiety with populism is ... I think it misstates the balance between following the people and leading the people.”

Later, between stops in Iowa Falls to Waterloo, the discussion came back to labels.

“The label I’m most comfortable wearing,” he concluded, “is Democrat.”