Pete Buttigieg in the Wilderness
Read more about the Democrats who might run for president in 2028 here. Updated at 2:41 p.m. ET on March 3, 2026 In May 2001, at Harvard’s Institute of Politics, a 19-year-old freshman named Peter Buttigieg asked David Gergen, a Harvard professor and horse whisperer to five presidents, a question that he might have reserved for himself, a couple of decades later. Peter (he had not yet transformed into “Pete,” let alone “Mayor Pete”) said he loved The West Wing but could feel the idealism reflected in the show slipping away from politics in real life. “The presidency has now devolved into what’s called ‘the MBA White House,’ or ‘the corporate model,’” he said, with the plaintive tone of a child asking about the spirit of Christmas. “Is that magic really gone forever?” Last summer, by the shore of the Grand Traverse Bay in northern Michigan, I told Buttigieg that I remembered that kind of fresh-faced idealism from my own time as a Harvard student. It was earnest; it was ambitious; it kind of made me want to barf. Lust for power—that, I understood, and I recognized it in many of our classmates. (We overlapped briefly, but I didn’t know Buttigieg.) But the combination of naked ambition, absence of cynicism, and a sunny disposition seemed awfully suspicious. I always felt there was something odd about the undergraduates who haunted the IOP, Harvard’s convalescent home for politicians recently defeated in politics or retired from it. How could you trust students who, rather than getting laid or drunk with their peers, spent their free time at office hours with former Secretary of Agriculture Dan Glickman? Buttigieg said he knew what I was talking about. “It could be a Puritan, self-effacing thing,” he told me, “where you’re not supposed to admit that you view yourself as the person who would want to do that.” (Even the phrasing—do that—made politics sound like an unnatural act.) The students with aspirations to high office knew that idealism and ambition put off a lot of people. The Harvard Crimson, he remembered, called all of the IOP kids and asked why they wanted to be president someday. “Almost all the IOPers were savvy enough not to respond,” he said. “You’re supposed to act as if you never even dimly suspected that you might run for office, until the moment you announce your campaign.” (Of the students who answered the reporter’s call, only one has held elected office—a term on the Montana Public Service Commission.) Friends who knew Buttigieg then told me they didn’t imagine him as a candidate—maybe a wonk or policy nerd, but not the guy on the ballot. He went back to the IOP in 2015, after he had become a rising Democratic star. He told the students that he knew just how torn they were, because he had felt the same way only a decade before. “Part of you is very anxious about how you could ever measure up” to the great politicians of history. “And then there’s another part of you,” he remembered saying. This other part “has had it at least cross your mind that, if by some catastrophic sequence of events, you were forced to immediately assume the presidency, you could somehow do it. And you know exactly what you would do first.” Whoever said that long-term planning is impossible in politics has never looked at the résumé of Peter Paul Montgomery Buttigieg. One of the lessons a budding young would-be politician can learn at the IOP is that if you want to run for higher office, then there are steps you have to take. The Roman republic had a cursus honorum, a defined track that led an aspirant from low office to high. If America and the meritocracy that ruled it for much of the past century has a similar path, Buttigieg has followed it with uncanny fidelity. Born in 1982, he grew up in South Bend, Indiana, where his mother taught linguistics and his father, a native of Malta and an expert on the Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci, taught critical theory at Notre Dame. As a high-school student, he entered an essay contest sponsored by the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, and wrote an ode to the courage of Bernie Sanders. Sanders’s calling himself socialist, Buttigieg wrote, was the political equivalent of “a self-inflicted gunshot wound,” and wearing the label showed the senator’s integrity. But part of what made Sanders “courageous,” he wrote (and not a “crazy” radical), was that he had been willing to endorse Bill Clinton—to offer his grudging support to a centrist. It was a peculiar argumentative turn, and perhaps a preview of Buttigieg’s later pragmatism. Be principled, he seemed to be saying. But don’t get carried away. This type of pragmatism will take a bright young man far in the meritocracy. He was admitted to Harvard, and four years later he was a Rhodes Scholar. Another member of his Rhodes class, Senator Andy Kim of New Jersey, told me he and Buttigieg often talked politics late at night in Oxford pubs, “but one thing he never did was talk about running for office.” Mario Tama / Getty Senator Bernie Sanders addresses Buttigieg during a presidential-primary debate on February 19, 2020. As a high-school student, Buttigieg had written an essay praising Sanders’s courage and integrity. After Oxford, Buttigieg spent three years in Chicago, during a money-earning interlude as a consultant at McKinsey & Company. McKinsey was, at the time, the default apprenticeship for Rhodes Scholars who wished to learn the ways of the private sector. He said that he did not expect to do the job forever (“I couldn’t really do a great job on something that I was just paid to care about”), but that it taught him “how people and money and goods move around the world.” Management consulting has since suffered in reputation, especially among progressives, who view Buttigieg’s lubrication of the mechanisms of global capital as a major turnoff. In 2009, he