If Pete Buttigieg wins the 2020 election, he would be the youngest US president ever
elected.
He’s also the first openly gay candidate to run a major presidential campaign.
But other than that, I don’t know that much about him.
Maybe you feel the same way.
Until recently, his claim to fame was as mayor of Indiana’s fourth-biggest city.
My spell check doesn’t even recognize his name yet.
But here he is, rising in national polls, riding around with Mark Zuckerberg, inspiring
boomers to make complete fools of themselves, and hauling in cash from wealthy donors.
Suddenly, he’s a serious contender for the Democratic nomination.
So who is Pete Buttigieg?
Could he win?
And what would he do if he did?
What is the case for a President Mayor Pete?
Pete is a very classic kind of Democratic rising star,
Much like Bill Clinton, he went to an elite college and got a Rhodes scholarship.
And then went back home to the not-traditionally liberal state that he grew up in and tried
to make a name for himself there.
Obama also wasn't a super experienced candidate.
If you look at the Democrats who have actually gotten elected president in the last 60 years,
they’re among the youngest presidents ever.
And Buttigieg would fit into that group.
Not just because of his age, but because of how he talks.
If you look at polling in the US, more people identify as conservatives than identify as
liberal.
People are really uncomfortable with the idea of like identifying with liberalism as an
ideology
But there’s lots of support for liberal ideas.
Like stronger regulation of the financial industry, higher taxes on the wealthy, and
paid parental leave.
And reconciling that conflict, between what people want to call themselves, and what they
actually believe, is a big part of how Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama all
became president.
What people have connected to about Buttigieg is that he has a rhetorical ability to cast
BUTTIGIEG: Disarm domestic abusers.
This is common sense.
BUTTIGIEG: We’ve already decided that this is within the second amendment.
And that’s not unconstitutional, it’s common sense.
That's a skill that has traditionally been rewarded and has turned out well for Democrats.
That’s one way Pete has set himself apart from his rivals.
They're not just saying we need to reduce drug prices.
They're saying the CEOs of the drug companies are selfish sons of bitches and we need to
take them down.
SANDERS: If somebody runs a pharmaceutical industry, and artificially jacks up the price...
And I think Pete, for better or worse, does not name enemies.
He is not interested in naming enemies.
It seems like Mayor Pete has really been marketed in terms of pundits as this like
moderate centrist candidate.
PUNDIT: Buttigieg is a moderate running as a moderate.
PUNDIT: Does Buttigieg’s rise show that Democrats want a centrist candidate?
What do we know about what Mayor Pete administration would look like, and would it be significantly
different from any of these other candidates?
This is not a moderate.
BUTTIGIEG: Raise the minimum wage to 15 dollars and up.
He's talked about tax rates up to 49.9 percent.
BUTTIGIEG: We’re going to have to contemplate a carbon tax.
Pete wants to institute sectoral bargaining, which would mean if somehow Chiptole got unionized
and they got a really good contract, the government could extend that to all fast food workers.
That would be the most dramatic increase in union power in the United States since at
least the Great Depression.
To make these changes, Buttigieg has proposed changing the political system itself.
He’s proposed growing the Supreme Court from 9 justices to 15.
He wants to give statehood to Washington DC and Puerto Rico, both of which have more U.S.
citizens than a whole bunch of current states.
And, he wants to change a big part of how Congress works.
A Senate practice called the filibuster means that no bills can pass unless they have the
support of 60 out of 100 Senators.
And that’s really difficult.
Obama very briefly had 60 votes in the US Senate.
I doubt that any president of either party is going to have that for a very long time
hereafter.
So realistically, if you want to pass something like expanded Medicare or a $15 an hour minimum
wage, you're going to want to lower the vote threshold from 60 to 51.
And Pete was one of the first candidates talking about that.
BUTTIGIEG: We should consider doing away with the filibuster so the next president can get
something done.
Even Bernie hasn't said he wants to get rid of the filibuster entirely.
So yeah, I think one of the better cases for Buttigieg is that he has
than someone like Biden.
You read interviews with Biden and he'll literally say, “I expect Republicans to have an epiphany
once I'm elected and move past all this Trump stuff and they'll work with me.”
Which just isn't reflected in how the Trump administration has gone, or in how the eight
years that he was vice president went.
What does the political science tell us about the way that perceptions of being “moderate”
or being “liberal” play out in terms of turnout?
So the best studies on this have been done by a guy named Andrew Hall at Stanford
And what he does is he looks at primaries for congressional seats where the election
was really, really close.
Hall’s study found a pattern that might not surprise you.
Candidates who voters perceive to be more ideologically extreme are less likely to go
on and win in the general election.
But the reason that happens is a little less obvious:
It does that not by doing anything to your voters or by turning off swing voters, but
because it terrifies the other party and leads their people to turn out really aggressively.
I mean, this is a study about Congress, so there are a million caveats.
But one thing it might tell us is that while Bernie Sanders might like amp up the Democratic
base, it's possible he'll amp up Trump's base even more.
You know, there's no sure things with electability.
But Pete is probably not going to panic the Republican base in the same way that Bernie
is.
This is a guy who has done what you need to win in a small city in Indiana.
But who also, I think, has really sincere progressive values.
This is someone who believes that better things are possible, but has a different strategy
for how to get there.