Pete Buttigieg, the 34-year-old mayor of South Bend, Ind., is threatening to shake up the race for Democratic National Committee chairmanship precisely because he isn’t linked to either of the factions warring for control of the party.
He joins a contest that has turned into a proxy battle between the populist progressives, a group led by Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., that favors Rep. Keith Ellison, D-Minn., and the establishment wing of Democratic Party that is tied to President Obama and is lining up behind his labor secretary, Tom Perez.
Buttigieg is considered a rising Democratic star, and the openly gay Navy veteran of Afghanistan enters the race without the baggage of entrenched associations or scars from recent battles. Democrats say that gives him an opening to make the race for DNC chairman about which direction the party goes in the post-Obama era, now just days away.
“He changes the DNC race because he takes it out of the context of being a proxy war and shifts it to be a conversation about the future,” said Ed Espinoza, a Democratic operative in Austin, Texas, who previously worked for the national party committee.
In a telephone interview with the Washington Examiner on Friday, Buttigieg agreed with Espinoza’s assessment. The mayor said his approach could help him win over a majority of the 447 voting members of the DNC even though he lacks the higher profile of Ellison and Perez.
“The framework of a proxy war is not helpful to the party,” Buttigieg said. “We have to do an after-action report, and learn from what happened last year, but we can’t get stuck in it.”
President-elect Trump defeated Democrat Hillary Clinton by winning over white working class and middle class voters in the industrial Midwest that have long formed the bulwark of the Democratic Party’s political foundation.
For Democrats that want to win back those voters, Buttigieg could be the tonic. His politics were formed in South Bend, home of the University of Notre Dame, a mostly white city of 100,000 people nearly 100 miles east of Chicago and almost 150 miles north of Indianapolis.
Of the candidates running for DNC chairman, Buttigieg has the closest connection, and most direct political experience, with the voters that have defected to Trump and that they are intent on wooing back. The DNC is expected to elect a new chairman in February or March, following a series of candidate forums set for Baltimore, Detroit, Houston and Phoenix.
In his interview, Buttigieg chose to focus on his executive experience as a mayor and business background working as a consultant for McKinsey & Company. He emphasized that the party needs to value all communities, white and non-white, that have been instrumental to the Democratic Party’s past success.
“When you’re the mayor, your fulltime job is to keep a community united,” Buttigieg said. “If we really want to run and win elections, we have to get back to basics and focus on that.”
Buttigieg said he was prepared to roll out the support of influential Democratic operatives and activists soon, but that the focus of his campaign since its launch Thursday was phoning all the DNC members who will decide the race. Buttigieg said he connected with “dozens” so far, and has only taken breaks to do media interviews.
Buttigieg said the focus of his campaign would be to set the tone for Democratic Party values and how the party should communicate with voters to achieve success in election. But he said he understood the financial and organizational undertaking involved in running the DNC with the Republicans in full control of the government in Washington, and that he is prepared and equipped to handle those responsibilities.
“Until we’re really strong on our message on fairness, economic and political, we’re going to struggle,” Buttigieg said.
