Pete Buttigieg served as the 19th U.S. Secretary of Transportation from 2021 to 2025, becoming the first openly gay cabinet member to be confirmed by the Senate. As former mayor of South Bend, Indiana and 2020 presidential contender, Buttigieg has remained an active voice in Democratic politics, continuing to travel the country and engage with voters across the political spectrum. The HPR sat down for an exclusive interview with Buttigieg to discuss the affordability crisis facing American families, the Democratic Party’s struggle to reconnect with working-class voters of color, the generational disruption posed by artificial intelligence, and what it means to find yourself in an uncertain world.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Harvard Political Review: What do you think is the most important issue facing the American people today?
Pete Buttigieg: I think that the immediate issues people feel, which are mainly economic, especially around the ability to afford life in America, are deeply tied to the issue of how our country actually works. The foundational issue of whether our government can respond and deliver good policies and listen to people, I think, is the issue that connects to or unlocks all of the others. I think at the top for everybody is, of course, affordability. But beneath that is the issue of what it’s going to take for our democracy to function properly, and we have to be paying attention to both.
HPR: What does Pete Buttigieg stand for?
PB: One way that I try to shorthand it is freedom, security, and democracy, properly understood. That means freedom not just from, but freedom to. I think that in order to be free, you need a government that can provide basic services, and that can protect you from anyone who would make you unfree, including itself. I think security includes economic as well as physical security. And I think that a good democracy can deliver all of that.
What I care about is making sure that we get our government to do the things that it needs to do for us to live a better everyday life. The government can’t make you thrive, but it can tear down the barriers between you and living the life of your choosing. I got into public service because I think it matters who’s making those decisions and what their priorities are.
HPR: Where are you on your decision regarding a potential 2028 run? Have your travels across the country led you in one direction or another? Do you have a timeline on when you could expect to at least make that decision?
PB: When it comes to campaigns, I’m very focused on the campaigns that are currently underway, and the elections that are ahead of us, especially in November. What I know is, regardless of what my own next step will be, the best thing I can be doing this year is to make myself useful for campaigns and causes that I believe in.
That’s really what’s been driving my travel and my work. Some of that is physical travel to geographies that don’t see and hear enough from people in my party. Some of it is the online equivalent of that: being in digital spaces, podcasts, TV, wherever it might be, where I think not enough people with my values are going to talk to voters and to talk to people on the other side of some of these political questions.
That’s what I’m up to; the time will come for the rest of it. I know that no matter what, that’s the best way I can spend my time this year.
HPR: In 2024, Democrats struggled with non-college-educated voters, and underperformed with Black voters and Hispanic voters. In a recent national poll from Emerson, you were second nationally, but you were underperforming with these exact demographic groups. Why should the Democratic Party, in general, trust a candidate who’s underperforming with those groups in the primary to help win those individuals back?
PB: Well, I’m not running for anything right now. What I’ll say is that Black and Latino voters are so critically important to the Democratic coalition. Part of how I think many of those voters drifted away from us last time around was that our party was not paying enough attention to some of the economic concerns that were top of mind in their lives.
Part of how I earned a lot of Black and Latino support in my election and then reelection as mayor was by focusing on the things that affect people in their everyday lives. That was my focus as secretary, and I think that’s what anybody competing for office or holding office should have as their north stars: Is everyday life getting better, and how is it different for different kinds of communities, including communities of color? That has to be the center of gravity for anyone trying to build and expand our coalition. It’s certainly on my mind just as somebody practicing politics for the benefit of causes I care about.
HPR: We’re facing a generational challenge in terms of integrating AI into society. People are worried about jobs, whether it’s job stability or the availability of jobs for young individuals graduating. What’s your response to the issue we face with AI?
PB: I think the best responses are ones that will scale with the level of disruption that AI is going to cause. In other words, nobody truly knows exactly how much change is coming and how quickly, but we can expect that it’s going to lead to, at minimum, a level of job disruption comparable to what we saw in the industrial Midwest when I was growing up, and potentially much more than that. What that means is, the policy world needs to be paying attention to what happens when people face that kind of change in their lives, the possibility that it’ll come extremely quickly, like quickly enough to affect current college students by the time they graduate in terms of the jobs they can get.
I think that the best policies are ones that take the level of wealth that is going to be created and apply it in order to cushion what people are experiencing. So a good outcome is one where the end result of AI is a shorter work week and more money in your pocket. A bad outcome is one where the end result of AI is even higher concentrations of wealth and power in this country than what we already have. Which one of those two futures happens is not a technology puzzle; it’s a policy question. That’s what policymakers need to think about.
HPR: What advice do you have to young people searching for their identity?
PB: One of the most central facts of being young is the struggle to figure out who you are. In a way, that struggle never completely ends. The experiences you have and the choices you face when you’re young are the ones that really shape your understanding of who you are.
The most important thing, in my experience, is to surround yourself with people who will hold you accountable to your truest self. Good friends can do that; a good spouse does that. Chasten certainly does that for me.
This is a time when students can form those kinds of connections and make that possible. It’s really the most important thing for withstanding all of the confusions and distortions that the world throws at you, and that you can put in between who you are and who you think you are. The only thing I would say is that you have to make time for that process. That’s time with people you care about; it’s time with ideas. For students, it can be time with thinkers who you can be friends with even if they are long dead, or it can be time alone. All of that is part of the kind of process of formation that being a student is all about.
