“There are a few things to consider,” Buttigieg told me, addressing the machine. “First of all, it matters how it’s stacked. This is pretty favorable, because there’s more than one way to win. You always want to go for the obvious way to win, which is to pick it up and drop it off. Equal, and arguably more, potential lies in when you can tip it in.” He pointed to a pink-and-purple monkey, which teetered on the edge of the bin. “Look at this guy. All you gotta do is get a piece of it—or drag something along, and tip it in. You can even get a twofer. Anytime something is above the plane, you got potential. That Tigger there? Probably out of reach, because it’s farther than the claws can go, but if you can get a piece of it, you can bring it over.”

As he studied the machine, Buttigieg was interrupted again by one of his constituents. “Mayor Pete, how are you doing, sir?” Marc Hyde, a 27-year-old dad and pastor in South Bend, asked him. Hyde told him he grew up in South Bend and never wanted to spend time downtown. That is, until Buttigieg transformed the Rust Belt town dubbed one of “America’s Dying Cities” by Newsweek in 2011, less than two weeks before a 29-year-old Buttigieg declared his candidacy to become mayor of his hometown, the youngest mayor of an American city of at least 100,000 at that time. “Now we find ourselves downtown all the time,” Hyde told him. “Thanks for all you’ve done.”

Just as Buttigieg finished studying the game’s field, a blonde girl who looked to be maybe 4 or 5 years old sidled up to Buttigieg. “You’re too big to do that,” she told him. “Oh, hi,” he responded, smiling. By this point, a few of the moms had noticed the mayor in the playcafé. “This is not usually how I spend my working hours,” he told one, a grin spreading across his face. The lady smiled politely, pretending not to be confused by the presence of two 30-something men in an arcade–slash–children’s play area.

Buttigieg refocused on the game. One can also control the orientation of the three fingers of the claw, he explained, by swirling the joystick around before an attempt, thereby making it possible to get a more fulsome grip on an object. “The key question is, do you have any control of it?” he said. “Or is it just the game?”

Sort of like a presidential campaign, something Buttigieg was thinking a lot about over the few days I spent with him last fall.

“When I first ran, there was a lot of chatter about whether I’d even finish my first term,” Buttigieg says.

Pete Buttigieg is running. Today, it’s along the St. Joseph River on a crisp and gray October morning in South Bend, as the mayor tried to clear his mind in the middle of a packed day. A meeting with the NAACP. A meeting with staff to discuss the city’s $368 million budget, which is scheduled to go in front of the City Council in a few days. And some political time. He’s trying to get back into shape. He’s working his way up from 5 miles a day to 9. That’s what he ran when he was deployed with the Navy as a counterterrorism intelligence officer in Afghanistan, where he set his half-marathon personal record of 1:42 back in Bagram, a pace of about 7:46 per mile. “It’s actually a hauntingly beautiful place, and the daylight started to come up over the mountains and it was March or April so it was still snow-capped peaks,” Buttigieg says. “The best race of my life.”

In the very near future, Buttigieg might be running less literally, on the campaign trail in Iowa or New Hampshire. Right? I asked him, as his slim 5-foot-9 frame was bounding over still-green grass yet to turn brown ahead of another unforgiving Northern Indiana winter.

“I don’t know,” Buttigieg answered. It’s a question he’s been getting a lot lately. These are heady times for the South Bend mayor and possible 2020 Democratic presidential contender. You’ll be forgiven if the juxtaposition of those two makes you scoff. Buttigieg has become a dark horse for the Democratic nomination, one who trades calls with former Vice President Joe Biden, lands plaudits as the future of the Democratic Party from former President Barack Obama, emails with Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, keeps counsel with former Obama strategist Axelrod, and has Lis Smith, the New York City–based, celebrity Democrat-communications guru, on a five-figure retainer.

Axelrod is the one who, upon seeing the mayor’s campaign for Democratic National Committee chair in 2017, thought Smith could help bring his message to the masses. “He speaks the language of the heartland,” Axelrod says. “He is a very gifted guy in a very understated way.” At the same time, Martin O’Malley, the 2016 presidential contender and former mayor of Baltimore, was also playing matchmaker between the mayor and the consultant. Smith had worked on O’Malley’s ultimately unsuccessful presidential bid. “He was just a total breath of fresh air and struck me as exactly what we needed in our party after the worst election cycle of my lifetime,” Smith says. “He had a different type of profile—young Midwestern mayor, a unique bio, and a really compelling message that should’ve been more front-and-center in 2016. I remember reading up on him and thinking, Where the heck has this guy been all my life?”

In Buttigieg, Smith and others see an ideas candidate who is everything Donald Trump isn’t. Quiet. Substantive. Thoughtful. He’s a progressive Democrat who doesn’t shy away from talking about issues like universal basic income. “People want to hear some new ideas,” Buttigieg says. “If not new ideas, at least commit to certain things.”

Over coffee in November, Mike Schmuhl, his first campaign manager, and the guy tasked with managing his federal PAC, outlined a platform that would include planks of democracy, security, and freedom, including voting by mail, and statehood for D.C. and Puerto Rico. Schmuhl, an operative who splits his time between Brooklyn and South Bend, and was actually a year behind the mayor at Saint Joseph High School, moved back to Indiana in November, a sign that he could be central to a 2020 Buttigieg run, which would be headquartered here. A Buttigieg campaign would also seek to do more than just be a referendum on Trump by outlining benefits to would-be Democratic voters. That universal basic income, for example. It would be a positive campaign that wouldn’t be framed by Trump, who Buttigieg wrote in a December 2016 Medium essay was a “thin-skinned authoritarian who is not liberal, nor conservative, nor moderate.” The suffocating Trump news cycle, he says, “is like a computer virus. It ties up all the processing power of the national psyche and the press and people like me.”

Jim Banks, the 3rd District Republican Congressman from Columbia City who deployed in the Navy Reserves to Afghanistan seven months after Buttigieg did, told me his party dodged a bullet when Buttigieg lost his 2017 bid to become chair of the Democratic National Committee (Buttigieg and Banks are friends and exchanged emails leading up to Banks’s deployment). Banks says Buttigieg’s brilliance comes in the way he frames progressive policy goals in a language that doesn’t scare off red-state voters. “We couldn’t be anymore different when it comes to politics, but I have a lot of admiration for him, and believe that the Democratic party would be wise to look to leaders like him and believe that he has a lot to offer,” Banks says. “I’ve seen him portray himself as mayor in more of a moderate approach, but now that he’s talking about national politics, it’s more ideological, further to the left.”

In February, Buttigieg will release his first book, Shortest Way Home: One Mayor’s Challenge and a Model for America’s Future. It’s the kind of tome that typically presages a presidential campaign—a decision that aides expect he’ll make this month.

Buttigieg eschewed the common practice of farming the book out to a ghostwriter and sweated the process. “I usually write in the style of whatever I’ve been reading lately,” he told me in October over bacon and eggs at L Street Kitchen, a diner steps away from the County-City Building. “When I was reading Joyce, I feel like I was writing like Joyce, or trying to. When I was reading Hemingway, I’d write these short, masculine sentences. You think like, What do I read now? The answer, for the most part, is email. Which is terrible for your prose, right?”

Buttigieg scoured his schedule for blocks of time to write portions of the book, beginning nearly four years ago with an essay about his time in Afghanistan—a way, he says, “to process my deployment.” He struggled with the writing. His staff would find 30 minutes here, 45 minutes there. “It turns out, you need 90 minutes just to warm up,” Buttigieg realized. He disappeared for large stretches of time to an attic in his Colonial Revival, a fixer-upper with a monthly mortgage payment of $450 and located on the same block as his parents. As he wrote, he mined his Midwestern upbringing, his tour in Afghanistan, coming out as the first openly gay elected executive in Indiana, and leading the Rust Belt city back from the brink.

The work paid off. In Shortest Way Home, Buttigieg tells his own story and that of South Bend’s in a way that is reminiscent of Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father. It’s a meditation on what it means to be Midwestern as much as it is a story of how to revive a down-on-its-luck city in the industrial heartland—the kind of story any Democrat who thinks it’s important to win Trump voters in red states such as Indiana should study. The first time Axelrod heard Buttigieg speak, he “was blown away by him. He gave this seamless and elegant talk. He told his own story, and South Bend’s, but he didn’t make it all about himself. This is a guy I should watch.”

Home is more literary nonfiction than a traditional campaign book. It’s short on policy prescriptions, and long on keen social observation. His thesis: “Resentment and nostalgia are not the only formula for the industrial Midwest,” he told me, “or for struggling communities in general.” To show that Democrats can succeed in states like Indiana, he points to the records of progressive figures such as Terre Haute’s Eugene V. Debs, the labor leader who showed that “a century ago, the left was arguably being led from the Midwest. Treating the middle of the country like unshakably Republican territory would serve us poorly in the long run.”

Over the course of the last four years it took him to write Home, Buttigieg has also authored another narrative: darkhorse presidential candidate.