For a party in need of an identity, Pete Buttigieg may be the answer. He’s touting support from five past DNC chairs – but is it enough to make him the next?

As Donald Trump descended the golden escalator in the lobby of his namesake Fifth Avenue skyscraper to announce his candidacy for president, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, also had an announcement. In a personal essay published in the local newspaper that same day, Pete Buttigieg, a Democratic rising star who had also served in Afghanistan as a lieutenant with the Navy Reserves, came out as gay.

Now, nearly two years later, after Trump rode a dark horse campaign to the White House, the 35-year-old mayor of South Bend is mounting his own outsider bid to be the face of the opposition in the Trump era as the chair of the Democratic National Committee.

“This race is a test of whether the DNC is prepared to change,” Buttigieg told the Guardian in an interview. “I believe I represent that change.”

DNC leadership debate: candidates tout credentials as progressive Democrats Read more

A 2014 Washington Post profile called Buttigieg “the most interesting mayor you’ve never heard of”. The next year, Buttigieg won his re-election bid with 80% of the vote, a wider margin than the first time around. In June, New York Times columnist Frank Bruni proposed: “The First Gay President?”

And yet Buttigieg entered the contest for party chair last month largely unknown to Democrats outside of his home state of Indiana.

During the course of the months-long campaign, however, his compelling résumé and crisp public performances have attracted the attention of influential party officials and donors.

For a party struggling to forge an identity, Buttigieg could be the answer. As a self-described “first-generation American who also regularly attends church, has a couple of antique guns around the house, and who would like to be able to marry someone of my own choosing – in Indiana”, he scrambles the narrative of a country polarized along demographic, geographic and ideological lines.



He is a Harvard- and Oxford-educated, gay former Navy officer who was twice elected mayor of a Rust Belt city of 100,000 people in Indiana, a conservative state that was, until January, governed by Mike Pence.

“I do find a lot of people tying themselves up in knots trying to relate to people that I just think of as neighbors friends and family,” Buttigieg said with a sly smile, adding: “It’s my native language.”

In the race, which will be decided in Atlanta on Saturday, he’s angling to be the the compromise candidate: the one who is not too closely associated with either Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders. But he is trailing leading contenders in the contest.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Pete Buttigieg, greets supporters during a Democratic National Committee forum in Baltimore, Maryland. Photograph: Joshua Roberts/Reuters

Whoever is elected DNC chair will have the Herculean task of reclaiming ground ceded to Republicans not only in Washington, but in states and cities around the country, healing the ideological rift between centrist Democrats and progressives, and opposing Trump and the Republicans while developing a message of their own that resonates beyond the coastal states.



Buttigieg is pitching himself as the candidate who is best placed to do just that.

I don’t comfortably fit into identity-ideological buckets on the matrix Pete Buttigieg

He’s a Democrat from the Rust Belt, an industrial region that carried Trump to victory in 2016. He’s young, which he says uniquely positions him to connect with the rising electorate of millennial and minority voters. And, Buttigieg also likes to point out, to the chagrin of the candidates on stage with him at a DNC debate hosted by CNN on Wednesday, that he was the only one in the race at the time who joined a Women’s March on the day after Trump’s inauguration. The other leading candidates were at a Florida donor retreat, a fact first highlighted by conservative media outlets.



His campaign is touting endorsements from five past party chairs, including, most recently, former Vermont governor Howard Dean, the architect of the 50-state strategy, a political strategy that all of the candidates have pointed to as a success.

Dean said on Wednesday that he was reluctant to endorse a candidate but concluded Buttigieg was uniquely qualified to lead the Democratic party out of the woods after a calamitous defeat on election night.

According to public whip counts, no single candidate has reached a majority of support from the 447 voting members who will decide the contest. Buttigieg lingers in the middle of the eight-person race, far behind the race’s frontrunners, former labor secretary Tom Perez and Minnesota representative Keith Ellison.

Perez and Ellison are locked into a tricky dynamic that mirrors the acrimonious democratic presidential primary. Perez, who backed Clinton and was considered to be her running mate, has drawn support largely from the party’s establishment core, while Ellison, an fervent supporter of Sanders, is the favorite of its progressive wing.

Buttigieg has seized on the echoes in an effort to position himself as a break from the proxy fight.

“If the outcome of this DNC chair race is that half the party feels like it’s just been sent packing, we’re going to be that much further on a back foot dealing with the real opposition which is Trump and the Republican Congress,” Buttigieg said during a forum in Baltimore earlier this month.

But he has direct competition from Jamie Harrison, the chairman of the South Carolina Democratic party. The mayor’s best hope is if none of the candidates secure a majority on the first round and the election is decided with multiple ballots.

Organizing a unified opposition is the trick. Yet instead he says Democrats are wasting precious time debating whether the path forward lies in the fight for social and racial progress or with white working class voters. Buttigieg calls this a “false choice”. He offers himself as exhibit A.

“I sometimes joke that I spent Thanksgiving morning in a deer blind with my boyfriend’s father,” Buttigieg said. “I don’t comfortably fit into identity-ideological buckets on the matrix.”

Since entering the race in January, Buttigieg has traveled the country, meeting DNC members and answering their questions – the first of which is, usually, how do you pronounce your last name? (It’s Maltese: “BOOT-eh-jedge”.)

“It’s an inconvenient name but I’m sticking with it,” Buttigieg told a moderator during a forum last week. “Back home they just call me Mayor Pete.”

If he wins the DNC chairmanship, Buttigieg has said he will step down as mayor. If he does not, it seems unlikely he’ll retreat from the national stage for long.