Former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg is sending increasingly clear signals that he’s pursuing a 2028 presidential bid, but his tenure in the Biden administration, difficulty connecting with black voters, and lack of experience could complicate his path forward.
The 44-year-old former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, cleared his calendar for a national contest after deciding not to run in 2026 for governor or U.S. Senate. He has held town halls in politically symbolic states such as Iowa, spoken at the Michigan Democratic Party’s “Best of the West” event in October — a high-profile stop in a pivotal swing state for presidential hopefuls — written a book, and intensified his criticism of President Donald Trump and his administration. Buttigieg also avoided giving a direct answer when asked about running in 2028, but did not rule it out.
Taken together, these actions indicate that Buttigieg is positioning himself for another White House run.
“I think the advantage that he has is that he’s a first-class communicator, a strong fundraiser, and enjoys a relatively high name ID among party activists,” Joe Caiazzo, the former New Hampshire state director for Sen. Bernie Sanders’s (I-VT) 2020 presidential campaign, told the Washington Examiner. He added, “I think we’re in this period right now where nobody knows exactly what is going to work, and that’s why you see so many people test-ballooning several different strategies.”
Biden backlash
Caiazzo, now an adjunct professor at Endicott College in Massachusetts, said the looming question for Buttigieg will likely center on his time in the White House.
“I think the No. 1 question for anybody coming out of the Biden administration, as they weigh running in 2028, is whether the voters have an appetite to give anybody in that administration a shot,” he said.
As a Cabinet member, Buttigieg frequently defended former President Joe Biden’s mental acuity during his term in office, rejecting accusations of a decline, particularly during critical moments such as the Baltimore bridge collapse. In May of 2025, Buttigieg finally raised concerns about Biden running for a second term.
Republican strategist Erin Maguire told the Washington Examiner that the structural tension in Buttigieg’s candidacy is that he will want to “argue his Cabinet experience makes him prepared to run the country, but the more he leans into that experience, the more he ties himself to the turbulence of the Biden years.”
“To mitigate that baggage, he has to create daylight from the Biden administration while still claiming it as proof he can run a massive federal agency,” she said. “That’s a hard needle to thread in a polarized electorate.”
Polling highlights weak spots
While some early polls for Buttigieg show favorable results, others highlight areas of deep concern.
A recent state poll showed Buttigieg leading the Democratic field with about 28% support, ahead of Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) at 24%. National polls have been mixed for Buttigieg. In an August 2025 Emerson College poll, Newsom led his Democratic rivals, with Buttigieg in second place at 16% in a hypothetical primary.
A bigger problem for Buttigieg is black voters, a group he has struggled to connect with. An Emerson College poll in June showed that a stark zero percent of black respondents supported him when asked whom they’d back in the 2028 presidential primary.
Jeff Le, managing principal for 100 Mile Strategies, called it “a data point revealing a potentially challenging climb to win early state primaries such as South Carolina.”
Thin resume and red tape
Despite some early flashes of promise, political analysts argue Buttigieg’s resume remains too thin and vulnerable to sustained attacks from rivals eager to test its depth.
Garry South, a longtime political expert, believes Buttigieg doesn’t have much of a chance in 2028.
“It’s not because he isn’t a gifted communicator and real political talent,” he told the Washington Examiner. “In my view, the 2028 presidential campaign on the Democratic side will be about governors, candidates who have had the experience of actually governing a state, of being a buck-stops-here chief executive, to replace the retired reality-show host who’s now running the federal government into the ground. Buttigieg was mayor of the fourth-largest city in the 17th-largest state. With all due respect, that’s a little too low down the totem pole to be credible experience for running for president of the United States.”
South added that Cabinet positions have not historically been good launching pads for a presidential run, except for Hillary Clinton, who was the first lady and a U.S. Senator for New York before becoming secretary of state under President Barack Obama. And even then, she lost to Trump in 2016.
Buttigieg will also have to answer some tough questions about his inability to navigate the federal bureaucracy to build billions of dollars’ worth of infrastructure projects quickly.
Buttigieg boasted in 2021 that electric vehicle charging stations would be up and running “very quickly around the country,” with the goal of half a million stations by 2030. In December of 2023, zero had been built. In March 2024, only seven were operational. Eight months later, the number grew to only 25.
The big infrastructure law Biden signed in November 2021 allocated $551 billion to Buttigieg’s department for distribution to state and local governments. Three years later, nearly 30% of the department’s money had not been awarded. The Government Accountability Office also wrote last year that 82% of the funds’ recipients found the environmental review process the DOT added under Buttigieg to be “moderately or very challenging.”
When contacted by the Washington Examiner, Buttigieg’s spokesman sent bullet points of accomplishments from his time in office. They included improving roadway safety, investing in tribal nations, spurring growth in clean energy manufacturing, and investigating airline rewards programs.
“His real vulnerability isn’t that he’s too liberal because the Democratic base will want that,” Maguire said. “It’s whether persuadable voters believe he can manage something big. Democrats would be asking the country to hand him the presidency after years when Americans experienced very visible breakdowns on his watch. In a general election, Republicans will nationalize his record immediately. They’ll argue that elevating a Biden Cabinet secretary is doubling down on the very era voters rejected when they elected Donald Trump.”
Spotlight fight
Buttigieg faces another challenge: he does not have the same name recognition as some of his likely rivals, who have spent the past two years raising their profiles while Trump has been in office. Newsom, Gov. Josh Shapiro (D-PA), Gov. JB Pritzker (D-IL), former Vice President Kamala Harris, Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ), and several others have written books, sought national attention, and often criticized Trump and his administration. Although Buttigieg has taken some similar steps, it may not be enough.
“It will be critical for him to differentiate himself from other presidential aspirants, in particular sitting governors and senators who have current offices to amplify their voice and actions in opposition to the Trump administration,” Le said.
The truth is, people don’t know a lot about Buttigieg. He is an only child who was born in the same place he’d later become mayor.
His parents were professors at the University of Notre Dame. His father, an immigrant from Malta, taught literature while his mother taught linguistics. Buttigieg’s path traces from Harvard University, where he graduated with a bachelor’s in history and literature in 2004, to Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar. After earning a degree in philosophy, politics, and economics from Oxford’s Pembroke College in 2007, he returned to the United States. He joined the Navy Reserve as an intelligence officer, rising to the rank of lieutenant and serving for seven months in Afghanistan in 2014.
He cut his teeth on Democratic campaigns before his own failed bid for Indiana treasurer in 2010 and his subsequent election as South Bend mayor in 2011. He chose not to run for a third mayoral term, but in April 2019, Buttigieg joined the presidential race.
He won Iowa but was edged out of first place in New Hampshire. Even though he garnered headlines as the first openly gay winner of a presidential primary and seemed to be gaining traction among voters, he was unable to keep up with then-candidate Biden’s campaign machine. Buttigieg exited the race on March 1, 2020, and endorsed Biden.
In December 2020, Biden tapped Buttigieg to head the Transportation Department, making him the nation’s youngest Cabinet secretary.
When Harris ran for president in 2024, there were rumors that Buttigieg would be picked for the ticket, but ultimately, the vice president chose Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN). The $1 billion presidential campaign ended in disaster for Democrats, a ballot-box rejection so severe that the party spent the past year and a half trying to figure out what went wrong. Buttigieg is betting that he can convince voters he is the one to turn things around.
Political commentator and marketing analyst Barry Maher believes it.
“If you’re looking for management expertise, find the guy in charge of the world’s best-run Taco Bell,” he told the Washington Examiner. “The presidency isn’t about management. The presidential chief of staff is about management. The presidency is about setting policy and selling it to the American people. No one on the horizon is better at that than Pete Buttigieg.”
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Mike Hahn, president of digital at Frontline Strategies, isn’t so sure.
“Pete Buttigieg oversaw a Transportation Department under an unpopular administration that delivered zero infrastructure and higher inflation,” he said. “That’s not a presidential record, that’s a warning label.”
