The Presidential candidate wants to win over disaffected Republicans. But can he unite Democrats?

By Benjamin Wallace-Wells @ NewYorker.com, Dec. 16 for the Dec. 23 print issue.

This is a significant long-form backgrounder which reminded me of Ryan Lizza's famous article on Obama in 2008. Notable excerpts as regards the present:

.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.

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.”

... 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.

....There were twenty-one hundred people, and when a microphone malfunctioned during the warmup speeches they broke into a coördinated chant: “I! O! W! A! Mayor Pete, all the way!”

Onstage, Buttigieg was looser. The left shoulder slouched lower, more casually, and he occasionally broke into a toothy grin. The stump speech, usually a tightly wound twelve minutes, unfurled past fifteen. The jokes were the same, but he gave them an extra beat. The mood in the gym was a little giddy. Buttigieg welcomed “future former Republicans” and urged them to “join our movement,” a phrase that I hadn’t heard from him before. It was a somewhat surprising term for such a middle-of-the-road campaign, but it carried Buttigieg’s unusual note of dissent: his notion that, despite the populist tide, Democrats might still prefer a Presidential candidate who looks a lot like the ones they’ve chosen in the past.