Pete Buttigieg speaks at Page Auditorium on the Duke University campus Thursday, Sept. 25, 2025. (Photo courtesy of Duke Sanford School of Public Policy)
First, the big question. Is former U.S. Transportation Secretary and Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg going to run for president again?
Buttigieg told a Duke University audience Thursday that he doesn’t know.
“I’m not just saying that because we’re supposed to be cagey,” he said during the question and answer portion of his appearance on campus sponsored by the Sanford School of Public Policy.
When considering whether to run for an office, Buttigieg said he asks himself what the office calls for at the moment, what he offers, and whether those two things fit.
His somber assessment of the state of the country and the world started with an acknowledgement of the “season of political violence” and the shooting deaths of state lawmaker Melissa Hortman and her husband in Minnesota and conservative activist Charlie Kirk in Utah.
He continued with a summary of the upending of modern political norms.
“Big picture, we are in the middle of witnessing an energetic and largely successful attempt by people running our government not only to take full control of the levers of official policy and power in this country, but also to wield unprecedented levels of government control over the pillars of our civil society, including law, science, technology, medicine, entertainment, press, and academia,” he said.
Buttigieg said he wasn’t discouraged despite all this, and told audience members they shouldn’t be either.
Three principles
He offered three principles to “fashion something dramatically better.”
Don’t be wedded to the status quo and be willing to rethink and refashion aging organizations. “Good things are being destroyed right now,” he said. “Useless things are being destroyed alongside them. It is time to be rigorous and thoughtful about which is which and to think creatively about what to put in their place.”
Get back to basics. “We need to find ways to explain everything we believe in in terms of concrete results, and hold ourselves accountable for those results.”
Work across boundaries, which requires getting offline. “We’ve got to be connected in ways in which the algorithm simply will not support.”
Asked what he would do if he had 100 days to reform government, Buttigieg said he would get rid of Citizens United, a Supreme Court ruling that allows unlimited political spending by corporations, unions, and other outside groups. Buttigieg added that he’s not convinced the Supreme Court has the right number of justices or that the House of Representatives has the right number of members.
Expectations for a gay presidential candidate
There was no mention of former presidential candidate Kamala Harris’s new book, where she wrote he was her first choice for a running mate and would have picked him if she thought the country was ready for a Black woman and gay man on a presidential ticket.
In answer to a question, he described running as a gay presidential candidate in 2020.
“You’re carrying the expectation of a community, but that’s not all you set out to do,” he said. “I wasn’t running to be a gay president. I ran for president because I thought the presidency was a way to achieve the things that I believe in. And I was gay.
“Being able to be who you are. Being able to be as much or as little defined by that as you wanted to be. And just being able to live life and not get fired, or beat up, or worse. I just thought I’d be who I am. There were some people who thought I wasn’t being gay enough.”
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