Pete Buttigieg is, at thirty-eight, the youngest candidate in this year’s Democratic primary, and the first openly gay candidate for President. His boldest rhetoric tends to be about the need for “generational change” in Washington, D.C., but he is running what amounts to a moderate campaign in the current field. He supports a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, without decriminalizing illegal border crossings, and proposes an option for universal health care that would leave the private-insurance industry in place.
After finishing either first or second in the chaotic Iowa caucuses, Buttigieg hopes to accomplish something similar in New Hampshire. There are reasons for him to be optimistic in the first primary state, where ninety per cent of the population is white, and nearly half of registered voters are undeclared and can vote in the Democratic or the Republican primaries. Joe Biden, as the middle-of-the-road stalwart, should be competitive here, but, as with Iowa, he isn’t. The most recent New Hampshire poll shows Buttigieg in second place, just a point behind Bernie Sanders.
Beyond this basic political calculus of ideology and demographics, Buttigieg also might have a particular advantage in appealing to many voters in New Hampshire. There is no state income tax, or sales tax, the median age is the second oldest in the country, and the state motto is, famously, “Live Free or Die.” But there is also, in small doses, a new sense of hipness—farm-to-table restaurants, cocktail bars, and art galleries—in areas that, for decades, seemed to conspicuously cling to their Colonial roots. At Buttigieg’s campaign events, he is frequently the youngest person in the room. His campaign projects an image that, like New Hampshire, feels at once radical and safe.
Around noon on Tuesday, Buttigieg was at Community Oven, a wood-fired pizza restaurant, in Hampton. Inside, chalkboards celebrated locally grown produce, and a mural behind the cook’s station read, “LOVIN’ THE OVEN.” Near a row of booths, Robert Saltmarsh was standing with his arms crossed, in a leather jacket and jeans. Saltmarsh, who is sixty-five, worked in high-tech finance in California for almost thirty years before retiring to New Hampshire. For the past two months, he has been donating money to the Buttigieg campaign. “Right away, this guy stood out as being different than the rest,” Saltmarsh told me. “Smart and honest. A lot of integrity.” Buttigieg’s relatively young age didn’t concern him, he said, because “the seventy-year-old crowds really screwed it up, so why are you voting for them? It’s time for a new generation.”
Buttigieg, wearing a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up, a blue tie, and charcoal-gray slacks, opened with a now familiar thought experiment “of what it’s going to be like the first time the sun comes up over New Hampshire, and Donald Trump is no longer the President of the United States.” He describes a historic coalition that can bring that day about, because “I’m meeting so many independents who are frustrated and furious with what’s going on in this White House, and a remarkable number of what I like to call ‘future former Republicans’ who come to our events.” In the face of the “generation-defining” challenge of defeating Trump, he frames his lack of experience as an advantage. “Every time my party has won the White House in the last half century, we’ve done it with a candidate who is focussed on the future and hadn’t been in Washington very long, or not at all, and was opening the door to a new generation of leadership,” he said.
In the course of five campaign stops on Tuesday, Buttigieg went on to make broad appeals to the possibility of national consensus. “God does not belong to a political party in the United States of America,” he said, but, in a state with the motto “Live Free or Die,” everyone should support “insuring that the government stays out of the business of dictating to women what their reproductive health-care choices ought to be.” When it comes to gun violence, he said, “there is a powerful American majority that spreads across both parties insisting that we no longer allow the Second Amendment to be transformed into an excuse to do nothing at all.” Perhaps his most charming line, which comes at the close of his stump speech, is also willfully cloying. “This is no time to walk away,” he said, suddenly serious. “This is no time to let the cynics win by stepping away from the process.” But, while Sanders promises a political revolution, Buttigieg assured his audience that he is running for President “as an expression of hope.” In fact, it’s perhaps not an accident, he said, that the word “hopeful” has become a synonym for “candidate.” He flashes a star-pupil grin, grabs his lapel, and bounces on his heels as he said, “I’m a 2020 hopeful.”
In Hampton, he had only begun to run through the issues when Lisa Demaine, a twenty-five-year-old climate activist, stood on her chair and started shouting at him. She had come to the event planning to disrupt it with a small group organized by 350.org. This was the second time in the span of a few weeks that the group had turned up at a Buttigieg event, calling attention to the fact that he signed a pledge not to accept money from the fossil-fuel industry but held a fund-raiser at a vineyard owned by Craig Hall, a real-estate investor who has backed oil-and-gas projects. (The Buttigieg campaign has argued that, because Hall is principally in real estate, taking money from him doesn’t break the pledge.)
Before the event, I had spoken to Lila Kohrman-Glaser, another volunteer from 350.org. If the nomination goes to Buttigieg, she said, “I think we’re going to have a really tough time getting young people to vote in New Hampshire, and that’s going to mean that we might lose.” As she and the other demonstrators, all of whom were under the age of thirty, were escorted out to the parking lot, Buttigieg said, “Thank you for your climate activism.”
None of this seemed to concern the rest of the crowd, some of whom had shouted “Down in front!” and “You’re being rude!” during the protest. After the event, Sue Jones, a bookkeeper for a boutique art gallery, told me that she had liked what she’d seen from Buttigieg. “I think he is very moderate in what he wants to accomplish,” she said. “I do like Medicare for All, as long as you want to sign up for it, but you keep your insurance going.” More important, though, she said, is the sense that Buttigieg could be a transformational figure. “I think our leaders should be moral beacons,” she told me. “I think what comes from the top filters down and influences everybody down below.” She added, “He’s young, which makes a difference. I think he’s enthusiastic. He is hopeful. He says all the right things.”
Buttigieg has every right to be hopeful. A competitive showing in New Hampshire could establish him as the moderate alternative to Sanders. On Tuesday evening, he spoke to about eight hundred people at Concord’s City Hall Auditorium. John Jezak, a thirty-four-year-old pharmacist, had decided to come after seeing the news out of Iowa. “I thought it would be super cool to be here tonight, being a supporter, and kind of seeing that energy,” he said. “I thought he’d be third.” Jezak, who lives in Bow with his wife and two kids, voted for Barack Obama in the 2008 Democratic primary, and John Kasich, a Republican, in 2016. “I was trying to get the anti-Trump,” he explained. “That failed.” He first saw Buttigieg at an event in October and “it clicked.” “I’m truly a moderate,” he told me. “It’s been harder and harder to be a moderate in current times.”
