Cheers greeted Pete Buttigieg when he took the stage at Scripps College in Claremont.

“Wow! It’s like you’re (polling) at 2 percent,” quipped political journalist Peter Hamby, who interviewed Buttigieg in an hourlong public event Wednesday night, Feb. 27.

Actually, 2 percent might be an uptick. The mayor of South Bend, Indiana (population 102,000), Buttigieg wasn’t even listed in a November poll of Democratic presidential candidates conducted by POLITICO/Morning Consult.

“You start from zero and then you hopefully go somewhere north of zero,” Buttigieg told reporters before the event in Balch Auditorium.

“I also think there’s some virtues (to not being well-known). I get to define what we’re doing without the risk of being defined by people who think they already know me.”

The son of a Maltese immigrant, Buttigieg isn’t yet an official candidate. He has formed an exploratory committee for the 2020 Democratic nomination. But he’s clearly hoping his unique message and resume – Harvard grad, Rhodes Scholar, Naval Reserve officer who served in Afghanistan – will help him gain traction against better-known, better-funded Democrats hoping to deny President Donald Trump a second term.

If he beats his long odds, 37-year-old Buttigieg – pronounced “boot-edge-edge” – would be the first millennial U.S. president and the youngest to hold the office. He’d also be America’s first openly gay president; he married his husband, Chasten, last June.

Buttigieg, whose memoir is titled “Shortest Way Home,” thinks his experience as a two-term mayor of a Midwest city that struggled to overcome the loss of auto industry jobs applies to the White House. A congressman, he said, hasn’t had to manage a municipal budget or coordinate multiple agencies responding to floods.

“The most important part is to try to hold our community together,” said Buttigieg, who was first elected in 2011 at age 29 and won 80 percent of the vote during his re-election four years later. “So you try to map that on to the presidency, where it requires, obviously, a radically different scale. But I think (there’s a) fundamentally similar structure.”

Buttigieg said Americans should press for political leaders who can restore democracy and confront the idea that “our representative republic is getting less representative.”

He supports statehood for Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico. He’d like to end the Electoral College. He’s also talked about “packing” the Supreme Court by adding seats to stop it “from becoming more politicized.”

Democrats, he believes, get too caught up in talking about policy instead of what they stand for.

“I think one thing conservatives were very effective about doing over the last 30, 40 years, is winning the battle of ideas and the battle of values, and allowing policies to follow from that,” Buttigieg said.

“One reason Democrats sometimes have trouble connecting is because we go right to the policy… I’m more concerned about winning a debate about values.”

Freedom, Buttigieg said, shouldn’t just be about freedom from regulations or government; it can also be about the right to “live a life of your choosing.”

He also believes it’s important to talk to voters about values without talking down to them.

“The expression ‘You’re voting against your interest’ is something that is unfortunate,” he said. “It makes it that much harder for people in my part of the country to believe that some of these political figures have our best interests at heart.”

“People in the middle of the country are not resistant to change,” he added. “We just to know what the change means for us. (Otherwise), there will be an appeal to voices like the current president, making impossible promises about turning back the clock.”

Buttigieg said he supports expanding a program that forgives student loan debt in exchange for public service, as well as Medicare “for all who want it” in the form of a public option sold in health insurance exchanges along with private plans. Any smart security policy in the 21st century, he said, needs to address climate change “because climate has reached crisis proportions.”

Going forward, Buttigieg said he’s working toward getting enough donors – 65,000 are needed – to qualify to be a participant in any Democratic National Committee-sponsored presidential debate.

And if he doesn’t win the nomination?

“Part of what I hope to achieve, even through the conduct of this process, is to kind of elevate the level of ambition that we have intellectually as a party,” he said.

“We’re in a moment that calls for profound solutions … our party has forgotten how to debate big, big bold ideas.”