The youngest Democratic presidential candidate in the 2020 race, Pete Buttigieg, touted his mayoral and military experience as preparation for the presidency before a small crowd at South by Southwest Saturday.

Buttigieg, who was first elected mayor of South Bend, Ind., in 2011, said that since his first term, he has had more executive government experience than both President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence, and added that he would be the first president since George H.W. Bush to have served in the military. He was deployed to Afghanistan in 2014.

"As cheeky as it is as this 37-year-old youngest guy in the conversation, my simplest answer to why somebody like me deserves to have a voice in this conversation is experience," Buttigieg said.

Sitting down with Crooked Media's Ana Marie Cox, Buttigieg took the stage following U.S. Sens. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn.; and Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass.; and former Ohio Republican Gov. John Kasich for the Austin festival's government and politics sessions.

Buttigieg is not among the front-runners for the Democratic nomination, a field currently comprised of 14 prominent candidates that continues to expand, but he and Klobuchar are the only two from the Midwest, a region he said Democrats should not abandon. Hillary Clinton lost to Trump in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, where white, working class voters abandoned the Democratic party, likely tipping the election to Trump.

"Progressive traditions are largely built on the Midwest," Buttigieg said. "Why are we willing to allow white working class people to move on?"

Buttigieg joined Warren and others in highlighting money in politics as a priority issue because, he said, it has prevented Congress from delivering on widely popular policy issues including climate change and universal background checks for prospective gun owners.

"If we don't fix democracy by taking steps to reign in money in politics ... I think we will never really succeed in managing these other policy issues," Buttigieg said.

The mayor is the first openly-gay presidential candidate for a major party. Buttigieg said when Pence was first governor of Indiana, he believed the current vice president was someone he could work with across the aisle on mutual policy issues, but that changed after Pence supported Indiana's Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which gave businesses a legal defense to deny service to customers based on the owner's religion, a right that extended to their opinion on sexual orientation.

"You could just see, there was just this look in his eyes, that he was now in a place where somebody like me could never reach him," Buttigieg said.