. . . Buttigieg told me that his father had left a subtler imprint on him. “He was somebody who was impatient with some of the self-indulgence that had happened in the humanities as it drifted away from a connection to reality,” he said. “One of the books he loved was Edmund Wilson’s ‘To the Finland Station,’ right? Where you start off with, I think it’s Herder figuring out Vico”—the German philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder and the Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico—“and by the end you’ve got Lenin showing up. The point is that you see how something that starts out really esoteric and academic ends up changing history.” He thought about it a little more. “But, also, there were times where I would push off from it, too, because he was so furious with what the right has done that you could—you could spoil the taste of a wine for him by telling him it came from a right-wing vineyard.” Buttigieg smiled. “He was so deep in it.”

Buttigieg’s Democratic opponents sometimes accuse him of overcalculation. “He’s going by the old playbook of following the focus groups, going by what political consultants tell you,” the candidate Julián Castro told the Times. But consultants, who have been the popular villains of politics for a generation, have less influence on this Presidential campaign than they have had in decades. Trump does not listen to his, and Warren does not even have a pollster. Buttigieg’s strategist only joined the campaign in May, when its character was already established. The language of strategy and messaging has shifted to the voters, who show up at events talking about grassroots donor strength and margins in purple counties. It now seems as if every informed voter has a position on what other people want.

Buttigieg’s increasing strength is not yet the story of the Democratic primary, but it has been an unexpected element, and it suggests that the calculations of the amateurs, in a time of stress, may not be so different from those of the pros: they favor a candidate with appeal to white swing voters over one who can draw out the African-American base, and for polish over populist fervor. And yet, as Buttigieg fairly noted, the race has hardly begun. “I suspect January will be its own, whole other level,” he said. We were riding in a black S.U.V. headed west through Iowa at dusk, on the Monday before Thanksgiving. “I think that those voters who still haven’t really dialled in will start paying attention. The folks who are just too busy, too overwhelmed with the sheer number of candidates, will get into this,” he said.

During the day, three people had told Buttigieg that they were Republicans, active or former, who were considering his candidacy. In the S.U.V., he said to me, “You can tell a lot of Republicans ready to cross over didn’t suddenly become liberal. They just feel that exhaustion from fighting. Which is why we’ve got to make sure that our answer is not some kind of equal-and-opposite meanness.” Buttigieg posited that the economic alienation that was central to the 2016 Presidential election was now matched by a powerful political alienation—a sense, he said, that “has people feeling like elections aren’t fair, and having reason to feel that way when they see how districts are drawn, for example. I think it’s that question of how some policies can command so much support and get nowhere.”
. . .
It was dark enough outside the S.U.V. that we could not see past the road, creating a serene atmosphere inside. The four campaign aides travelling with us were quiet, perhaps in deference to the general demeanor of a politician whose way to relax on the road is, as he pointed out later that evening, to play board games with his husband. (He recommended Risk.) I asked about an aspect of his pitch that had always been opaque to me. If Trump was the President who ended the Reagan era, then what, exactly, was the era that would follow—the one he was campaigning to begin? . . . “I think there needs to be an emphasis on political reform, the likes of which we probably haven’t seen since—maybe since the first Progressive Era.”

He mentioned a familiar trope, that there is a “new American majority” for ideas that a few years ago would have been considered too liberal for the mainstream—for broad action on guns and climate change, for much steeper taxation of the rich, and for expanded health care. Warren and Sanders have built their campaigns around these issues, arguing that the main obstacle to progressive policies is the billionaire class—who, they say, must pay for those policies through new wealth taxes and higher estate taxes. . . . Unlike many Democrats, Buttigieg suggests that the traumas of the past decade are as much political as economic. What gives his campaign its peculiar mood, of optimism in the midst of an emergency, is his conviction that a progressive consensus is already present in the country, and that the way to spoil it is to be too partisan or unwelcoming—that the change has already come.

Buttigieg came out to his parents in early 2015, and to the public that summer, during his reëlection campaign. He went on to win with more than eighty per cent of the vote, and he married Chasten in 2018, in the Episcopal cathedral downtown. Anne Mannix, a doyenne of housing activists in South Bend, told me with some amazement about accompanying Buttigieg this year to the West Side Democratic and Civic Club’s Dyngus Day celebration, an all-day drinking fest in honor of Polish heritage. “And here are all these old Polish guys toasting Pete and Chasten—the Mayor and his husband.”