A Politico Magazine article published earlier this week says South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg is considering running for president in 2020, but experts say it's a long shot.
The article says Buttigieg's Political Action Committee is spending money across the country, and he's working with political strategists who've helped propel candidates to national office in the past.
The analysis says that's evidence Buttigieg is listening to those who are calling on him to make a bid for the White House.
A grassroots movement started by a Washington, D.C. resident earlier this year is encouraging Buttigieg to run for president.
Q&A: Does Mayor Buttigieg have a chance?
Andy Downs runs the Mike Downs Center for Politics in Fort Wayne. He says Buttigieg making a serious run for president in 2020 would be unusual.
Q: What are Buttigieg's chances of being elected president?
Downs: Clearly it's a long-shot. If you look at the list of presidents and even candidates who are mayors, you don't see a lot of them. The idea that someone could be mayor of a Midwestern city, and we're not talking Chicago, and run from there to president is, for a lot of people, a stretch.
Having said that, there are ways that you might be able to think about something coming from this. He is mayor now, that doesn't mean that something else couldn't come along before, say, 2024 as opposed to 2020.
Q: Is there precedent for a mayor making a run for president?
Downs: Making a run is a little different than actually getting there. Grover Cleveland was the mayor of Buffalo, but held other offices, Calvin Coolidge was the mayor of a town in Massachusetts. But usually we're talking about mayors from larger places. Rudy Giuliani was a candidate a few years ago. And, today, people are talking about some of the current crop of mayors who might be able to do it, but they are typically mayors from much larger cities.
Pete is a bit of a surprise, in part because South Bend is relatively small. It's not one that makes you think about international issues, and that's one of the knocks against mayors, they don't have a lot of exposure to international issues.
But, in the end, mayors are pragmatic. They have to make services work and they can make an argument about how they are able to make government work in a way that meets people's needs. The problem is people are looking for more than that, quite often, in a presidential candidate.
Q: How does the current political climate hurt or help his chances?
Downs: The timing is important in politics, as everybody knows, and the pendulum sometimes doesn't swing the way you're hoping it will within your window of opportunity, so to speak.
There certainly is an acceptance at this moment that someone did not have to be a particular type of elected official before they became president. I mean, Donald Trump held no elected office before he got elected.
However, whether that can happen again in 2020, or even 2024 or 2028, remains to be seen. There could, theoretically, be a backlash in that people will say, ‘what we want is somebody who actually has experience in government,' depending on how Trump's performance as president is viewed.
If there is a backlash then that may not be very good for the mayor because his experience is fairly limited. If, however, people continue to be open minded and think about alternatives as mayor, then it could work out pretty well for him.
Q: Why are people getting behind Buttigieg as a candidate?
Downs: He has an interesting story, and remember he made a run for chair of the Democratic National Committee. A lot of people would say he stepped out at a wise moment as opposed to actually being beaten. The argument could be made that he withdrew his name before he could be beaten in that race, so he doesn't have a loss in that column.
The military experience, the fact that he's gay, he's young, but incredibly educated...he's an interesting collection of things that people find attractive.
But the military experience, the fact that he's gay, he's young, but incredibly educated, in terms of going to very good schools. Yet he's able to meet people in a really comfortable way. He's a nice guy, he meets people well. He's an interesting collection of things that people find attractive.
But we don't know if they want all of them in one person, or if that's enough to put him over the top. He still has a very, some would argue, thin resume to be the president. Donald Trump, for all the criticisms people want to make about him, for decades had been a real estate developer as well as a business person. So you could argue that he never had large staff to deal with and all the other complaints that we heard about him, but he still had a long track record that he could point to.
The mayor does not have that long track record, yet. I think some people might expect him, if a Democrat manages to win in 2020, to look for something like maybe Secretary of HUD or some other position that would move him out of Indiana and then into a position from which he might be able to seek a higher office.
But, he has shown himself to be willing to take a risk that other people would not. He made a run for statewide office in Indiana before a lot of people would have said he should have, he made a run for mayor before he "should have." One of those worked out really well for him. And then he made the run for DNC chair before people would have expected him to do that.
So he takes risks and they, in general, work out pretty well for him because he performs well when doing those things. No one looked at him and said, ‘You're a ridiculous candidate for statewide office or for DNC chair.'"
Q: What else could Buttigieg look at in the future?
Downs: He is somebody who has aspirations, he is somebody who wants to make contributions and believes he has larger contributions to make. He loves South Bend, but he's looking for other things. And because he's looking, I think it's safe to say it could be just about anything.
He's a smart guy, he'll make some sort of a choice in the not-so-distant future that will show us his hand to a degree, but I don't think he's tied down to any one thing.
