AMHERST — Former presidential candidate and Joe Biden’s Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg stopped short of announcing a bid for the upcoming 2028 election on a stop at Amherst College Friday night, but he had a ton to say about how the Democratic Party can step up in the moment.
The former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, Navy Reservist and first openly gay presidential candidate to win a primary was greeted by an overflowing crowd at Johnson Chapel, where he came as a guest speaker for LitFest, the college’s annual literary festival.
On the topic of politics, he diagnosed a crucial weakness of his party: a catastrophic inability to communicate.
“It’s very important that Democrats not allow our message, either explicitly or implicitly, to amount to the following: Put us in charge, we’ll end the nightmare of Trump, we’ll reverse the damage and we’ll find all the little shards of all the things that he smashed to bits, and we’ll tape them back together, and we’ll give you the world just like it looked in 2023,” he said.
The night’s moderator, Cullen Murphy, former managing editor for The Atlantic, noted that James Joyce, the 20th-century Irish novelist and poet, is quoted at least three times in Buttigieg’s 2020 book, “Trust: America’s Best Chance.”
Joyce’s human approach, focused on encounter and persuasion, is a pillar of Buttigieg’s philosophy toward communicating in the political arena. He said he feels the need to “penetrate bubbles,” exemplified by his “unexpected specialty I have of going on Fox News.” The encounter approach also brought him onto a golf podcast recently.
He confessed he knows nothing about golf, but he knew he could find a more white, male audience that beats “preaching to the choir” on outlets like MSNBC.
He was introduced to Joyce at his childhood dinner table by his scholar parents. Even now, when he addresses audiences that disagree with his world view, he thinks of people back home to humanize those audiences, something he learned being a left-leaning kid in Indiana.
Buttigieg said he isn’t confident that Democrats have been able to do this effectively, and asked the crowd to consider a riddle to make the point of how weak Democratic messaging has been. If you take the top 10% of issues, which usually goes something like affordability, the economy, immigration and the right to choose, two-thirds of Americans tend to agree with Democratic policy approaches, he said.
But that isn’t translating to 50% of voters during election time. And part of the problem is that there needs to be a real vision for a “new and different reality,” and not simply an agenda to go in and clean up after Trump, Buttigieg said.
He said it is just as unrealistic for Democrats to push this kind of message as it is for Republicans thinking they can revive the 1950s.
He drew parallels between today and another turbulent era, the 1960s, where there was violence, the Vietnam War and social uncertainty.
“When I think of the moment we’re in, one way to think about it is that it is another one of those moments that is so tough, so uncertain … that later on it will be romanticized by future generations.” But, he added, “only if we get through this moment.”
A 2028 run?
Despite all the 2028 talk, Buttigieg wouldn’t say whether he’s plotting to run again.
“I don’t know what 2028 will bring for me, but I know that people like me need to be very busy in 2026 making ourselves useful for candidates that cause a new movement. So that’s what I’m doing,” he said.
Regardless of the rugged political climate today, one where, “lots of people will care loudly,” Buttigieg egged on the room of undergrads to embrace a life of public service and to stand up for what matters.
Outside of politics, Buttigieg touched on some more personal topics — coming out as gay, his military service, his views on the role of religion, and even being one of the first 200 people to have a Facebook account.
He shared how a deployment and a promise to find love culminated in him coming out. It was first written into a letter for his family if he were to die in combat.
“When you deploy, you write the things you want your mom to know, just in case you don’t make it back — and it’s, by the way — everybody should probably do this every few years. You shouldn’t have to go to war to do that,” he said.
During this time, Buttigieg was the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, a position he held for two terms from 2012 to 2020. He also was a Navy Reservist and had been deployed to Afghanistan in 2014.
“I was mayor of my city, homeowner, adult. I had no idea what it was like to be in love. And I promised myself that I wouldn’t let that continue when I got back,” he said.
Fully aware it may cost him votes in Mike Pence’s Indiana, he said coming out was a leap of faith that people would judge him based on his work — on snow removal, fixing potholes, attracting jobs and making the community a good place to live.
“And what wound up happening was I got 80% of the vote on my reelection,” he said.
But he added that one struggle after coming out was that his stances on equity and equal rights soon developed a flavor of self interest for some people.
“Any time that I wanted to say anything about issues of equality and certainly issues facing the LGBTQ community now, was kind of viewed as a self-interest, which is fine,” he said. “I think all of us come into the public square with some combination of interests and background and bias, and we should be clear about who we are.”
On the role of religion in America, he said, “God does not belong to a political party,” which drew applause.
He referenced several biblical passages that speak about welcoming foreigners and taking care of the oppressed, and shared an example of what he sees as striking biblical imagery.
“The imagery for me — that God incarnate winds up washing feet. Feet are gross … washing the feet of other people? This is imagery that is meant, I think, to remind us of the importance of humility as one of the attributes that we should seek out.”
Buttigieg took a trip down memory lane, to a time when a young Mark Zuckerberg was developing TheFacebook in his Harvard dorm room. The concept was simple: it would be like a college yearbook online. Now we know it as Facebook.
Buttigieg was attending Harvard at the time and said that while he was one of the first 200 to sign up, “I was sadly not the 200th investor,” he said.
This turned to a deeper conversation about the impacts of social media. He asked all the undergrads in the room to raise their hand. Some 200 hands went up. He then asked them to lower their hands if they get their news from TV. Every hand immediately went down.
This experiment, he said, shows the power of social media as an engine for ideas. Feeds now supply younger generations with their news.
“Most of our information now comes not through an editorial process that leads to a television program, but rather a feed,” he said. And the problem with this is that instead of being open to ideas and digging further into them, algorithms lead to group thinking.
“They make you feel what you already felt with greater sophistication,” he said, encouraging the audience to encounter people with diverging viewpoints.