TUCSON — Next to the campaign buttons depicting a dog pooping on the president’s name, a vendor at the merchandise booth in this battleground House district also hawked gear test-driving an alternative White House occupant: “Buttigieg 2028.”
Pete Buttigieg occupies no official position within the Democratic Party. But the former transportation secretary and presidential candidate has become one of the most sought-after surrogates in the midterms. He has emerged as a skilled communicator for a party still searching for its message in a post-Trump era.
“I want to hear what Pete has to say about where the Democrats are going to go,” Terry Miers, 76, said from a spot near the back of the line at a rally for Democratic House candidate JoAnna Mendoza at the Pima County Fairgrounds earlier this month. “We need to do something. It seems like lately, Democrats are throwing a lot against the wall, trying to see what sticks.”
In some ways, that’s what Buttigieg is doing.
He’s hit nearly three dozen states since his Cabinet job ended when President Donald Trump retook the White House. He’s picking up the pace through November, delivering a new stump speech that weaves endearing questions asked by his 5-year-old twins with tough questions Democrats need to answer if they want a party built on more than opposing Trump.
His pitch, set against the backdrop of being “more inclined than not”to run for president again and some Democrats’ skepticism that he could win, is aimed primarily at front-line districts critical to the party’s ambition to capture control of Congress.
But he’s also popped into low-stakes locales to raise money for incumbents, rallied support for an obscure ballot initiative in Montana and boosted candidates running for local offices, both in early presidential primary statesand in Republican strongholds like Arkansas.
Candidates ask for Buttigieg primarily because of his cross-party appeal and ability to explain issues clearly and authentically, according to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.
Mendoza, a former Marine drill instructor, said she wanted Buttigieg “to energize folks” because the former Navy intelligence officer is a fellow veteran and Tucson is home to more than 34,000 veterans. Few national figures offered to help the way Buttigieg did when he called to congratulate her on her primary win, Mendoza said.
“A lot of folks will go into Phoenix and never hit southern Arizona,” she said. “He’s very relatable. He’s easy to talk to. And my God, he is smart.”
Buttigieg’s itinerary reflects the same go-everywhere, talk-to-everyone strategy that boosted him from a small-town Indiana mayor into a credible 2020 presidential contender. At a time Democrats lack a de facto leader, Buttigieg, 44, has been honing his brand as a thoughtful, earnest Democrat who is just as nimble with Fox News hosts and rural voters as he is inside the D.C. bubble.
“I’ve developed kind of a specialty in the more purple and red areas,” Buttigieg said in an interview from a football coach’s office in a southern New Mexico high school. “To me, it feels like the geographic equivalent of what I do on Fox News.”
While his appearances primarily reach Democratic audiences willing to burn a weekend afternoon at a political rally, Buttigieg says the media coverage reaches Republicans and middle-of-the-road voters. “We can reach people who might not otherwise be paying attention, and try to find a vocabulary that can get through,” he said.
Buttigieg declined to be on the ballot himself for either the open Senate or gubernatorial race in his adopted home state of Michigan this year. (Buttigieg earns his living at ticketed speaker series events around the country, not political work.)
He said he is traveling more for the midterms than he traveled as a member of President Joe Biden’s cabinet. The local infrastructure projects he oversaw then are part of his stump speech now, and his trips offer a chance to read voters’ moods.
“I’m gauging what people want out of their politics after this exhausting 11 years of the way politics has felt in the Trump era,” he said. “People are going to want something different just in terms of what it feels like to engage in the political process.”
On the trail, voters hand Buttigieg a warm reception and occasional tough love about whether he could win the White House.
At the Tucson rally, Fred Scott, 74, wore a freshly bought “Buttigieg 2028” T-shirt. But he said he looked at the slogan as something of a pipe dream because he believes America’s electorate is too prejudiced.
“I prefer if he gets selected as a VP right now. I think this country still has trouble with him being gay and having a family,” said Scott, a retired engineer and triathlon coach.
Buttigieg politely dismisses questions from local media about his 2028 plans, billing his appearances as helping Democrats. But his extensive travel also builds his national profile and helps cultivate relationships in politically important states.
As he spent more than eight hours in the car recently campaigning across the Southwest, Buttigieg traversed Arizona — a presidential swing state — and New Mexico, which will be one of the first states to vote in the 2028 Democratic presidential primary.
He rallied in two of the most competitive battlegrounds in the country, both along the southern border: a Republican-held seat won by a narrow margin in a Tucson district, and a Democratic-held seat in a New Mexico congressional district that also voted for Trump in 2024.
He also raised cash for the Arizona Democratic Party, then met with community leaders in Deming, New Mexico, population 15,000, and had dinner with a state senator in El Paso, where the waitresses posed for a photo and then asked his staff who he was and how to spell his name.
Buttigieg said he prioritizes campaigning for Democrats who represent how he wants to take the party forward: fellow veterans or others who have some form of service in their backgrounds, people who can compete in tough territory and people whose identities seem rooted in their districts. Mendoza grew up the daughter of farm laborers and returned to her district after serving in the military. Rep. Gabe Vasquez, who represents the New Mexico borderlands, grew up on both sides of the border and is the first in his family to be born an American citizen.
By a doughnut truck outside the Tucson rally, Christoph Heinzer, 47, said he doesn’t think too much about Buttigieg one way or another, but he’ll be watching to see whether Buttigieg’s barnstorming actually helps flip any Republican voters.
“If someone like Pete can get through, maybe there’s hope,” Heinzer said.
Several Democrats eager to see Buttigieg succeed weighed strategy more than personal appeal.
“I’m a fan of Pete, but I would not support him for president,” said Percy Childs, an 81-year-old retired Army reservist and former military intelligence officer in Tucson. Childs said he supports “all progressives,” though he particularly loves Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York), who is also considering a White House bid. But he wouldn’t put her on the top of a presidential ticket with the current electorate either.
“They’re worse with gay people than they are with women, and they’ve pushed women down two times,” Childs said, referring to the two Democratic women who lost to Trump, former secretary of state Hillary Clinton and former vice president Kamala Harris.
Buttigieg gets their argument. But he also has a rebuttal.
“The stakes of the election feel existential. We always care a lot about who wins, but it does feel like the weight of making sure that our candidates are winners is different now,” he said. “At the same time, I’ve also found that Democrats sometimes psych ourselves out, sometimes go through a self-defeating process of trying to be tactical instead of just voting for the person we think will do the best job.”
He returned to South Carolina last month to give his first political speech there since his fourth-place finish in the 2020 primary ended his presidential campaign, the embodiment of his campaign’s struggle to connect with Black voters. This time, he got two standing ovations in a Black church as keynote speaker for the NAACP Freedom Fund Dinner.
In Las Cruces, Morgan Sites, a 20-year-old preschool teacher, said she vaguely remembered Buttigieg’s first run for president when she was a teenager. But now she knows him from viral Fox News clips of him sparring with conservative talk show hosts.
She came to listen to her local Democratic candidates — Vasquez and Deb Haaland, the former Biden interior secretary who is running for governor. But she left impressed with how Buttigieg introduced himself as a “dirt road Democrat” willing to campaign outside cities and how he unspooled his New Mexico ties: His parents met on the nearby campus of New Mexico State University, he learned the fine distinctions between red and green chile, and he first learned highway driving on the interstate up to Truth or Consequences, the iconic desert town named after a game show.
Sites had thought more of Sen. Jon Ossoff of Georgia and California Gov. Gavin Newsom as top presidential choices than Buttigieg, but “I have a lot more respect for him now.”
As Buttigieg took the stage in this newly minted early presidential primary state, someone yelled “We love you, Pete!”
“Thank you,” he replied with a smile. “Maybe I’ll come out here more often.”
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