"I think ten days from now is the very latest that you can get in the race," Pete Buttigieg, left, told POLITICO Thursday. | Getty South Bend mayor moves closer to decision on DNC race He said he would step down as mayor to serve as party chairman.

SOUTH BEND, Ind. — Pete Buttigieg, the mayor here who national Democrats often mention on the shortlist of rising stars in the party, said he is nearing a decision about whether to run for DNC chair and would step down as mayor if he were to win the job.

"I think ten days from now is the very latest that you can get in the race," Buttigieg told POLITICO in an interview on Thursday, citing a series of candidate forums that begin in mid January. The 447-member Democratic voting body will pick its next chair at its winter meeting Feb. 23-26.


If Buttigieg does decide to jump into the race, he would be joining Rep. Keith Ellison, New Hampshire Democratic Party chairman Ray Buckley, South Carolina Democratic Party chairman Jaime Harrison, Labor Secretary Tom Perez and Idaho Democratic Party executive director Sally Boynton Brown in the field.

Buttigieg has been weighing a run for weeks and has been making the rounds with committee members. But during a morning-long tour of the city Buttigieg refrained from saying whether he plans to become a candidate, though he did say that he would step down as mayor to serve as DNC chair.

"I don't see how you can do two things at once. It's one thing if you have the presidency, maybe," Buttigieg said. Both Ellison and Harrison have said they would leave their current jobs as U.S. congressman and lobbyist, respectively, if they were to win.

On one hand, Buttigieg seems like an unlikely candidate for the job. He doesn't have the national stature of Perez or Ellison and hasn't worked as closely with committee members as Buckley, Boynton Brown, or Harrison. But many voting members of the DNC have refrained from backing any of the declared candidates in the hopes that an alternative would emerge. And Buttigieg, who is gay, has gained attention this year after being the subject of a profile in a New York Times with the title "The First Gay President?" President Barack Obama also mentioned him as a top Democratic prospect for higher office in an interview with The New Yorker.

"This is a wide open election," former party chairman Howard Dean, who has spoken to most of the candidates, said of the race.

Buttigieg, a lieutenant in the U.S. Navy Reserve and Rhodes scholar, is ambitious and is quick to highlight some of his accomplishments in South Bend, like partnerships with the University of Notre Dame and cultivating the downtown area. When asked about considering running for DNC chair versus, say, looking at running for DNC vice chairman Buttigieg said he's really open to where he can be most useful to the party.

"I'm looking at where I fit into the conversation," Buttigieg said. "There can be a lot of ways to do that. What I care about though is our party moves forward in a way that's going to work, that makes sense on the ground in the world I live in and is not going to devolve into a factional struggle."