Pete Buttigieg, fresh from the debate stage the night before, joked that he thinks there is a reason why the word “hopeful” was turned into a noun and is frequently used to describe candidates.

“You notice this? I’m a 2020 hopeful, all of a sudden, at the debate last night with all the hopefuls? Right?” Buttigieg said during a Wednesday campaign stop at Legacy Plaza in Newton. “It’s because running is an act of hope!”

Buttigieg told the crowd of reportedly more than 330 people packed inside one of the original Maytag buildings that he sees “that sense of hope,”

especially in a community like Newton “that did not take sitting down some of the body blows and gut punches” the economy threw at it.

The former mayor of South Bend, Ind., conceded he knows it sounds funny “to use a word like ‘hope’ in a moment like this, seeing what’s going on in our politics and around our country.” But Buttigieg told his Iowa constituents that he is using the word on purpose.

“Because it’s what we need in order to be involved and change things at all.”

Including the youth in those sorts of changes is also important, Buttigieg suggested, noting that when he was mayor he put together a task force of diverse young people from all the different high schools in the area. The “best moments in our history,” he claimed, has been the activism of young people.

The Democratic candidate said there needs to be ways for people — “sometimes (who are) not even old enough to vote” — to be able to have a voice. Buttigieg said he sees more young people stepping up against issues like substance abuse and climate change, among others.

At the Newton campaign stop, Buttigieg received questions from Iowa constituents passionate about these exact issues.

One guest who had cited studies pushed back on Buttigieg’s climate change plan, advising it might be too vague and that any plan that is not written by scientists will fail; he also said if the debate is any indication, Americans “are not scared enough” of the affects of climate change.

Buttigieg said he agreed with everything the man said except one:

“And that’s the idea that we need to be more scared,” he said. “While this is as scary as you say and is a planetary emergency underway, and — for some of the reasons you described — is accelerated and has these feedback loops … fear can be paralyzing.”

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is where voters ought to look to for data, Buttigieg added. He cited the IPCC’s 2018 report instilling a 2030 deadline for the world to cut carbon emissions and significantly combat the effects of climate change.

“If we don’t have a president that believes in this now, then we’re going to have a problem,” Buttigieg said. “… We can debate the technical features of my plan, but the real thing that will make the difference is whether the plan gets multiplied by zero or not in its effect, based on whether it actually happens.

“In order to make it happen, we have to get the entire American people enlisted with a sense of hope — and I would say a sense of pride — that this is a national project. Our country does better when it has a national project … We can’t solve it alone.”

Buttigieg, again, agreed with the guest’s worries that climate change is “the global security threat of our time.” He also related to a high school-aged attendee’s worries about “illegal substances,” saying that she had been offered them more times than she can count.

A “common sense approach” to drugs is what Buttigieg suggested. The first step may be recognizing that the strategies used in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s “did not work.” Incarceration may not be the answer anymore either. The candidate argued it can do more harm than the original offense.

“We have to move on from looking at incarceration as the answer, but it also doesn’t mean that it’s just open season,” Buttigieg said, noting that managing supplies, particularly synthetic marijuana, is something that needs addressed.

Some conditions, he argued, can be treated medically, such as opioid addictions. But difficulties arise when not enough doctors are eligible to prescribe treatment.

“Or, when they can, there’s often a cap. We have to lift these caps that don’t make any sense,” Buttigieg said. “And we gotta make sure that there is a human level of counseling and support for anybody who is facing these kinds of addictions.”

And then, he added, there is something behind that all that people should look at: figuring out what is making people want “to self-medicate in the first place.”

Buttigieg said, “There’s something behind that. To me it relates to a crisis of belonging that I think we’re experiencing in different ways in different forms for different people, but for so many of us a different form. And we gotta answer to that.”

Many of those answers come from the community, he said, that give people something better to turn to rather than substance.

“That takes a lot of work and I think it takes funding,” Buttigieg said. “So part of what I’m proposing in our mental health and addiction plan, in addition to all the medical and political things, some of which I just mentioned, is what we’re calling healing and belonging grants directed toward community-oriented solutions.”

Not all of the answers are going to come from Washington, D.C., Buttigieg said.

“But I think more of the money should, and that’s how we’re going to support communities like Newton and like my own hometown and everywhere else in order to make sure we’re ahead of the challenge that has so many people looking to fill that void.”

Contact Christopher Braunschweig at 641-792-3121 ext. 6560 or cbraunschweig@newtondailynews.com