Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend, Indiana has impressed the political world by reporting that his presidential exploratory committee raised more than $7 million in the first quarter of 2019. The 37-year-old Democrat isn’t yet in a financial league with his boyhood idol Sen. Bernie Sanders, who raked in more than $18 million. But one of the media’s favorite candidates is showing that he can win over Democratic donors, too.

Mr. Buttigieg’s genial tone is very different from that of the hectoring Mr. Sanders. And unlike the Vermont socialist, the South Bend mayor seems open to working with people who don’t share his views.

While Mr. Sanders first generated attention as the Marxist mayor of Burlington, Vermont, Mr. Buttigieg has carved out a niche as the midwestern mayor most admired by coastal leftists. In 2014 the Washington Post called him the “most interesting mayor you’ve never heard of.”

Two years later, a New York Times column about Mr. Buttigieg carried the headline: “The First Gay President?” The column began:

South Bend, Ind. — IF you went into some laboratory to concoct a perfect Democratic candidate, you’d be hard pressed to improve on Pete Buttigieg, the 34-year-old second-term mayor of this Rust Belt city, where he grew up and now lives just two blocks from his parents.

But you still might be hard-pressed to make the case for electing Mr. Buttigieg President. Hong Zhuang, economics professor at Indiana University South Bend, writes in the Indiana Business Review that the South Bend area is doing well, but not quite as well as a community nearby: