FRESNO — Pete Buttigieg is a breakout star in the presidential race in California, but his support emanates largely from coastal white liberals. Among California Latinos, however, he’s polling at 2%, which would doom his candidacy in the nation’s most diverse state.

And that assessment comes from none other than Buttigieg.

“We realize that we’re going to have to broaden our support,” Buttigieg told The Chronicle in an interview. “The challenge for us is to do it quickly. We don’t have the years to spend to allow people to get to know us, and it is harder when you’re not from one of those communities.”

So on Monday he headed to Fresno for what was billed as a meet-and-greet with voters in the Latino-dominated Central Valley city that is five times as large as the one he’s mayor of — South Bend, Ind., population 102,245. And then he headed to Fresno State University to be interviewed on a live town hall televised by MSNBC, a network popular among coastal liberals.

He found out that while voters may like him, it’s going to take time to win their vote.

Buttigieg, who would become the first openly gay president if elected, faced another potential challenge during his daylong trip to the heart of California’s Bible Belt. Fresno was also a hub of support for 2008’s Proposition 8, which banned same-sex marriage in California until the courts said it was unconstitutional.

But there was a thirst to see him here. The 520 tickets to the MSNBC event were gone in two hours. The 250 free tickets to see him speak and answer questions Monday at Tuolumne Hall were snatched up in 20 minutes online. Some drove more than two hours to be there. The audience at the morning town hall was more racially diverse than the audiences from his recent appearances in San Francisco and Southern California.

Buttigieg tried to bond with his audience by comparing the hard times that South Bend went through with the economic hardships in the Central Valley, where the unemployment rate can be several times as high as it is in San Francisco and many communities don’t have clean drinking water.

That helped him connect with 22-year-old Liam Kinder, who like many in the Fresno audiences were more Buttigieg-curious than die-hard supporters.

“Before I was a Bernie Sanders fan, but now I’m thinking about Pete, too,” said Kinder, a student at West Hills Community College in Lemoore (Kings County).

Buttigieg’s biggest challenge to winning votes in the Valley won’t be that he is an Ivy League-educated white son of college professors, said Kinder, who is half Mexican-American. “It’s because he’s young. There’s a lot of people here who would like someone like Joe Biden.”

Yet at the MSNBC town hall, Angelique Richard asked Buttigieg a question that she hoped would get him to confront his white male privilege: “Why should the women of America vote for you over our sisters — who are kind of more qualified?”

Buttigieg said he admired many of his Democratic rivals but said few could match his combination of executive experience and military service — he deployed to Afghanistan while serving in the Navy Reserve.

“I get it,” Buttigieg said of women who have told him they won’t vote for any male candidate this year. “And whether or not you will be for me, I will be for you.”

After the event ended, Richard shrugged when recalling Buttigieg’s answer. “It was OK. But it veered off into sounding like a politician’s answer at the end.”

Like Richard, Teresa Sanchez’s favorite candidates are Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren and California Sen. Kamala Harris.

“He’s kind of young,” said Sanchez, who lives in Fresno. “When you work in Congress, you have all the connections to how things are done. Like Biden or Warren or Harris. But he’s interesting.”

Without naming Biden, the 37-year-old Buttigieg offered contrasts Monday to the 76-year-old former vice president who served in the Senate for more than three decades. Buttigieg said President Trump could win re-election “if it looks like we (Democrats) represent the system. It happens if we look like ‘going back to normal.’ I think there are a lot of Americans who are not willing to go back to a normal that has failed them over the course of their lives — communities where it is as if the economic recovery of our lives never even happened.”

He spoke about his Christian faith, and how Republicans did not have a monopoly on talking about how faith informs their values. He introduced his husband, Chasten, who was standing near the front of the room. “Isn’t he great,” Buttigieg said, as the audience cheered loudly.

“Faith,” said Humberto Z. Gomez, a California Democratic Party regional director from the area, “is a way that he could talk to people here. That would connect him to the Latino Catholic community here.”

After the event ended, Gomez told Buttigieg in Spanish about the drinking water problems that plague the region. Buttigieg, who speaks several languages, responded in Spanish that he would try to help.

“That means a lot,” Gomez said. “The next time he comes here, he should speak in Spanish more.”

For now, just showing up meant a lot. Former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julian Castro is one of the only other of the two dozen Democratic presidential candidates to come to Fresno. That may change before California’s March 3 primary, which places the state — and its 495-delegate haul — earlier in the this election cycle. Plus, California is not a winner-take-all state, so it would benefit candidates to campaign all over the state, not just the coasts.

Nevertheless, “no candidates ever come here,” said Anne Flanagan, who drove an hour to attend the event. “Showing up goes a long way to people here.”

Joe Garofoli is The San Francisco Chronicle’s senior political writer. Email: jgarofoli@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @joegarofoli