Perhaps the most defining date for the steady decline of the Indiana Democratic Party occurred when hardly anyone knew about it.
In July 2022, Pete Buttigieg officially moved his residence from Indiana to Michigan. “When I married Chasten, I married into Michigan at some level to begin with,” Buttigieg told the Detroit News. “But it was really the arrival of our children that cemented our relationship to Traverse City.”
Buttigieg is a generational political talent, joining Richard Lugar, Doc Bowen, Birch and Evan Bayh, and Mitch Daniels in that Hoosier pantheon. He went from being a two-term mayor of South Bend, to a serious presidential candidate, and then a White House cabinet secretary. Many believe he will run for president in 2028.
When he left Indiana, he did so because of a daunting political reality. Indiana has become, essentially, a one-party state, and “Mayor Pete” could be exhibit A. He ran for Indiana treasurer in 2010, losing to Republican incumbent Richard Mourdock by a landslide.
Buttigieg successfully ran for mayor of South Bend a year later. In the ensuing eight years, he joined the U.S. Navy Reserve; served a combat zone tour in Afghanistan; announced he is gay and married his husband, Chasten; won reelection with 80% of the vote; ran unsuccessfully for Democratic National Committee chair; then launched an improbable campaign for the presidency.
Buttigieg raised $100 million, won the tortured Iowa caucuses in January 2020 by concentrating on rural voters, finished second to U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders in the New Hampshire primary, and then as the COVID pandemic unfolded, endorsed Joe Biden for president as he folded his own campaign. In January 2021 he became President Biden’s Transportation secretary, serving four years.
U.S. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg meets with apprentices and union members during a tour of the IBEW Local 153 training facility on Wednesday, Dec. 4, in South Bend.
In a normal world, Mayor Pete would have run for Congress or Indiana governor. He persistently passed on seeking the Indiana 2nd Congressional District seat, saying at the time that he viewed himself more as an executive than a legislator.
But his 2010 statewide run produced this reality: A gay mayor could not win a statewide race in Indiana.
Buttigieg had been looking at a potential 2026 run for the U.S. Senate in Michigan after Sen. Gary Peters announced he would not seek reelection. He came to the same conclusion that Mitch Daniels did when he mulled a 2024 Senate run in Indiana.
“While my own plans don’t include running for office in 2026, I remain intensely focused on consolidating, communicating, and supporting a vision for this alternative,” Buttigieg posted on X Thursday. “The decisions made by elected leaders matter entirely because of how they shape our everyday lives – and the choices made in these years will decide the American people’s access to freedom, security, democracy, and prosperity for the rest of our lifetimes.”
When Daniels came to the same conclusion, he said, “I have never imagined that I would be well-suited to legislative office, particularly where seniority remains a significant factor in one’s effectiveness, and I saw nothing in my recent explorations that altered that view.”
A “Senator Buttigieg” would be a waste of talent in a vapid legislative body that is rapidly ceding its power to Donald Trump’s powerfully imperial presidency.
Instead, Buttigieg should become the Democratic Party’s daily point response man to President Trump and his human chainsaw, Elon Musk. He is the party’s most effective communicator, to the point where he was dispatched frequently to Fox News in 2024, talking directly to conservative voters.
I cannot think of a more vivid contrast to President Trump than Pete Buttigieg. Trump speaks in mob boss parlance; Buttigieg is a cerebral Rhodes Scholar. Trump embodies an aggressive masculinity; the mayor is softer spoken and gay. Trump had five military draft deferments; Buttigieg volunteered for the Navy and served in the Afghanistan war. Trump goes by the gut; Buttigieg is analytical by nature. Trump is skeptical of intelligence assessments; Buttigieg is a military intelligence analyst who devours information.
We saw this after a U.S. military helicopter collided with an commercial airliner at Washington’s Reagan National Airport in January. The following day, President Trump attempted to blame Buttigieg even before all of the victims had been recovered. “He’s a disaster. He was a disaster as a mayor,” Trump said. “He ran his city into the ground. And he’s a disaster now.”
Buttigieg responded on X, saying, “Despicable. As families grieve, Trump should be leading, not lying. We put safety first, drove down close calls, grew Air Traffic Control, and had zero commercial airline crash fatalities out of millions of flights on our watch.”
In April 2024, Buttigieg took on Trump’s criticism that America was facing a crime spree (it wasn’t). “When crime was down under President Biden, it was up under President Trump,” he said on Fox News Sunday. “Now I don’t know how often that gets reported on this network, so if you’re watching this at home, do yourself a favor and look up the data.”
Following President Trump’s State of the Union Address last week, Buttigieg told CBS Late Night With Stephen Colbert, “Let’s remember, despite what you heard tonight, Trump came in with just under 50% of the vote. He won, I’m not disputing that. But the smallest popular vote margin since Nixon.”
Then the zinger: “I wonder how he feels about something that important being that small in his case?”
Brian A. Howey is senior writer and columnist for Howey Politics Indiana/State Affairs. Find Howey on X @hwypol.
This article originally appeared on Evansville Courier & Press: OPINION | Howey: What should Buttigieg’s next role be for Democrats?
