As Democrats in Washington and beyond absorb the chaotic dawn of a new Trump administration, one of the party’s ambitious, young leaders is cautioning them to remain calm.
Speaking on Thursday to a group of young, Democratic elected officials, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg made a case for reorienting how the party communicates with voters, even as he warned that expressing outrage at President-elect Donald J. Trump would not be enough to lead Democrats to victory.
Mr. Buttigieg’s speech — part of a conference about how to “advance center-left policies despite the challenging national political landscape” — was the latest in a set of public remarks from prominent Democrats jockeying to try to lead the party back to power. But unlike Govs. Gavin Newsom of California and JB Pritzker of Illinois, Mr. Buttigieg will soon be unemployed and without the bully pulpit of a state to vocally fight back against Mr. Trump’s policies.
Instead, he suggested, he would spend time defending President Biden’s legacy by reminding the public of the administration’s accomplishments, which he said he expected Mr. Trump to try to claim credit for.
Mr. Buttigieg’s most direct admonition to the gathered Democrats, at a Washington hotel, was for them to not allow themselves to be so outraged by the Trump administration that they would neglect working for their constituents.
“We cannot be mesmerized by the worst things that we see happening,” Mr. Buttigieg said. “We will be inclined to react with shock by some things that are done precisely with the intent of shocking us, we need to move very quickly through the shock.”
Though he has been a national political figure essentially since he ran to be chairman of the Democratic National Committee, in 2017, Mr. Buttigieg is still just 42 years old, nearly half the age of Mr. Biden and significantly younger than most of the other would-be party leaders.
On Thursday, Mr. Buttigieg suggested that Democrats spent too much time online at the expense of the sort of human interactions that defined campaigns before social media and influencers became central ways to communicate political messages.
“We’ve got to figure out how to take online conversations offline at scale,” he said. “While it is not obvious how to do that, that is something that through human history until about 15 years ago, we all did. And so we’re going to have ways to do that that might on some level be a return to form but on other levels, entail information environment work that is unfamiliar to people who have taken a free press in a democratic society for granted.”
In a subsequent conversation with Symone D. Sanders-Townsend, a former aide to Vice President Kamala Harris who now hosts a weekend show on MSNBC, Mr. Buttigieg predicted that Republicans would be quick to take credit when factories that will produce batteries for electric vehicles opened during Mr. Trump’s presidency. Those factories, he noted, were funded in part by legislation Mr. Biden signed.
“Mark my words,” Mr. Buttigieg said. “I will be there to remind folks who made sure these projects happened.”
Mr. Buttigieg did not specify how he would go about delivering those reminders, and was coy about his future plans.
“I know that I will make myself useful again later,” he said. “I just don’t know how.”
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