Pete Buttigieg on Harvard’s campus in Cambridge during his college days. | Courtesy Buttigieg campaign

And when the votes were counted, the winner was not the favorite—another unusually eager IOP participant, a determined worker in her own right, a woman who would go on to success as a trusted aide to two of the most famous women in politics. It was Buttigieg. To many who cast votes that night, the election marked a transformational moment—the debut of a young man who was steeped in history and political theory but had yet to actually apply those ideas in political combat.

“That election,” Heather Woodruff Grizzle, a year older than Buttigieg, who was the outgoing SAC vice president and is currently a strategist in New York, told me, “demonstrated that Peter really had the chops to do politics.”

As Buttigieg, the youngest of the Democratic field of (still) 15 hopefuls, has leapfrogged far more seasoned opponents to settle into the competition’s top tier, he has begun to take sharper attacks from both veteran politicians and his party’s progressive flank—accusations and insinuations that he’s a line-jumper, an opportunist trying to play at once the inside game and the outside game, glossing over finite qualifications with calmly delivered pledges of unity and an airy vision of the future.

People who knew him here at Harvard observed some of the earliest indications of this instinct for the political middle. But they also saw a serious-minded student coming of age at a time when politics suddenly mattered more than it had in perhaps a generation—and whose ideas were fashioned in response to a genuinely disruptive historical moment.

He got to Harvard in a year that pulsed with the unprecedented and highly divisive 2000 election and its contentious aftermath. His sophomore year began with the attacks of September 11, 2001. Throughout his junior and senior years, Buttigieg, along with the country generally, grappled with the global stakes of the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. As Buttigieg put the finishing touches on a capstone thesis about American foreign policy and good intentions gone bad, Mark Zuckerberg, sitting in his dorm room across the street from the IOP, activated as thefacebook.com a website that would change the way citizens organize themselves socially and politically. And at the end of that last semester, Buttigieg left amid a presidential election many viewed as a crucial referendum on America’s complicated attitudes about freedom, security and democracy. “People felt the importance,” IOP staffer Eric Andersen said, “of what was going on between 9/11 and really up through the election of 2004.”

It was this very particular meld of time and place, based on dives into the archives of the university and the IOP and more than 40 interviews with Buttigieg’s friends, roommates, classmates, faculty and staff, that forged the most enduring piece of his political education.

“The thing that most stood out during that time is that we saw, particularly with the Iraq War, that politics has consequences. … And I think that really was something that stuck with him." Jonathan Chavez, friend of Buttigieg at Harvard

“The thing that most stood out during that time is that we saw, particularly with the Iraq War, that politics has consequences,” said Jonathan Chavez, one year younger than Buttigieg and one of his good friends from the IOP. “That your voting or not voting is not just something that is sort of this game. That there really are sort of real-world dire consequences to action. And I think that really was something that stuck with him.”

From the IOP to his digs in Holworthy Hall in Harvard Yard and then Leverett House overlooking the Charles River to august, red-brick academic buildings to back booths in dive bars like Charlie’s Kitchen, Buttigieg was, said Jim Kloppenberg, one of his favorite and most influential professors, “sorting out how he thinks about politics.”

“A lot of his framework and intellectual scaffolding,” said Previn Warren, one of Buttigieg’s closest friends, “was shaped during those years.”

Buttigieg, Harvard College Class of 2004, would go on to be a Rhodes Scholar, a subordinate cog in a global consultancy, a reservist in the United States Navy, the mayor of a just barely medium-sized Midwestern city, and now the principal of an implacably precocious presidential candidacy. All those stops along the way, of course, lent him experiences that have animated his long-shot ascent in the bulging field. They also have served as lightning-rod sources of criticism from the progressive left for his “best-and-bright-ness,” a frictionless Ivy League track, those critics say, that has produced a platform of guarded prescriptions for change—Medicare For All … Who Want It; free college … but not for everybody—and a general distrust of conflict that exacerbates political fissures. But nothing molded him and his worldview more permanently than his four years here. At a moment when many in his generation turned away from a political system they saw as unresponsive at best and unscrupulous at worst, he not only stayed in the fray but upped his involvement. And this sensibility that has been surprisingly appealing to more middle-of-the-road Democrats in states like Iowa and New Hampshire emerged during his time here.

He started in these elite environs as an untested academic. He ended as much an orator and operator, less theoretician, more fledgling politician. He railed against the timidity of the Democratic Party coming out of 2000, then embraced its safest, most centrist candidate in 2004. He spoke out against the Iraq invasion but would join a military becoming mired in two wars. The Buttigieg increasingly evident on the campaign trail today, politically liberal, tonally and temperamentally moderate, by predisposition an idealist and institutionalist but ultimately a pragmatist, came into sharp relief for the first time through what he did at Harvard.

Had Al Gore, not George W. Bush, won in 2000, Buttigieg has said, he “happily” would have become “a literary critic at some university.” That, of course, is not what happened, and so that’s not what he did. Instead, that fall, on the fourth floor of Holworthy, his roommates told me, Buttigieg cut out from the pages of the New York Times the red and blue map of the results of the election and taped it to the wall by the door.

“He was so fascinated by it,” Steve Koh said.

“I remember seeing that map a lot,” Pete Schwartzstein said.

And as November stretched into December, as people from coast to coast argued over Florida’s hanging chads and the popular vote versus the Electoral College and the Supreme Court made Bush the 43rd president, the map on the wall in the dorm was a constant graphic reminder of “this unnerving, unsettling sense,” said John Beshears, “that, gosh, this democratic process that we rely on is kind of fragile, and subject to these forces that you didn’t learn about in high school or earlier when you were talking about democracy.”

Major events during Buttigieg's freshman year at Harvard: the 2000 presidential election between George W. Bush and Al Gore — culminating in the prolonged Florida recount. | AP; Getty Images

Buttigieg already was keenly interested in politics, but the remarkable events of his first semester injected a fresh energy and urgency. He quickly became a regular at the IOP. A brainy only child in South Bend, Indiana, he had grown up a JFK devotee, and the Institute of Politics acts as a kind of hands-on memorial to the assassinated president and Harvard grad. As a high school senior Buttigieg had won an essay contest, too, commissioned by the JFK library. It was about, of all people, Bernie Sanders—but Buttigieg admired Sanders, he made plain in what he wrote, not so much for his more radical roots or even the courage to self-identify as a “socialist” but for his attempts at “conciliation and bi-partisanship on Capitol Hill.” Sanders, as the teenaged Buttigieg saw it, was by that stage of his career trying to change the system from within. And the institution within the institution of Harvard that Buttigieg plugged into first and the most was the JFK-inspired IOP.

Students who were juniors and the most active in the organization couldn’t help but notice him. “I remember thinking that he was very smart and then also gracious in a way that not every college student is,” Erin Ashwell said.

“I clearly remember kind of two types of people at the Institute of Politics,” Eugene Krupitsky said. “There were the kinds of people that walked in the door and you knew they were there because they were going to run for office someday and they were there to kind of learn it all and make connections.” These were the sorts of undergrads who incorporated into their AOL Instant Messenger handles the letters FPOA, for “future president of America,” one member of the Class of 2005 recalled. And at the IOP, said one student treasurer, there were “more wannabe senators than you could shake a stick at.” But the second sort of person, added Krupitsky, was someone like Buttigieg. “His approach, quite honestly, initially,” he said, “was really very much about intellectual curiosity.”

Buttigieg was a history and literature major, “Hist and Lit” in Harvard lingo, in part because of his parents—his father was an English professor, and his mother is a linguist—but also because “anything else I wanted to study,” he would explain, “I could study it through the guise of history.” In some sense, though, his most significant syllabus was the constant, high-profile programming at the IOP. Jason Sauer called it, “one part coed fraternity, one part political fantasy camp.” The forums that year included “The Essence of Leadership,” “The Challenges of the New Economy,” and “The Future of the Supreme Court,” as well as an all but rolling seminar on the 2000 election—taught variously by scholars, strategists, combatants and candidates to come. And that year’s fellows—the rotating reporters and political and policy professionals brought in to be instructors and mentors—included Rick Davis, the manager of John McCain’s just-wrapped-up presidential bid, and Donna Brazile, who had run the show for Gore.