BERLIN, N.H.– Standing on a bridge with the picturesque Androscoggin River churning behind him, Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg hoisted an oversized novelty check made out to the “City of Berlin” for $19,534,391. The memo line read: “Biden-Harris Administration RAISE Grant.”
It’s been nearly nine months since a $550 billion bipartisan infrastructure bill was signed into law by President Joe Biden. But that success in a policy area that Americans can literally see every day in their own communities hasn’t penetrated the electorate — a July poll showed that just 24 percent of voters even know that the long-promised bill to fix roads and bridges and improve broadband is actually now law.
Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg speaks about a $10 million grant to reopen West 51st Street under U.S. 75, Aug. 23, 2022, in Tulsa, Okla. In the background is Tulsa Mayor G.T. Bynum, Oklahoma Secretary of Transportation Tim Gatz and neighborhood resident Linda Fitzgerald.
APStefan Jeremiah/AP Photo
Buttigieg, 40, is the youngest Cabinet member and arguably the best-knownas a result of his own presidential campaign in 2020. His party’s success in November–and his own future ambitions for higher office–depend, in part, on him selling the sweeping infrastructure package.
The administration’s infrastructure coordinator, Mitch Landrieu, acknowledged that the administration’s push to sell their progress now isn’t unconnected to the upcoming midterms.
“A picture is worth a thousand words, and unless and until they see it, they don’t really know it,” Landrieu said in an interview. The photo ops “will remind them that the president made promises, and the president delivered on those promises in a way that other presidents have not been able to do.”
“As we get closer to the elections, and people are starting to put paid media on TV, they’ll start seeing these pictures,” Landrieu, who visited Pennsylvania on his own tour last week, said.
Buttigieg’s infrastructure sales pitch is both enhanced and hampered by his own political celebrity, particularly in New Hampshire — an early voting state where he finished second behind Sen. Bernie Sanders, and where he recently essentially tied Biden in a wildly hypothetical poll of a 2024 contested primary.
“If abortion is blocking out the sun in the national discourse on politics, underneath of that voters are still concerned about infrastructure and inflation and the work that we’re doing around the country, both delivering these projects to make life better for people, and also to explain the work of the administration to fixing supply chains,” said Martha McKenna, a national progressive ad maker who worked on Buttigieg’s two mayoral runs. “That’s a really powerful combination down the stretch here.”
Buttigieg is traveling a lot these days, in both his personal and official capacities. Far from D.C., when he travels for political reasons, Buttigieg has been spending more time making a broader sales pitch for Democrats up and down the ballot, boosting Democrats on the campaign trail in states across the country. Over just one late August weekend, he spent nearly four hours huddling with Indiana Democrats at a resort in southern Indiana, his home state, before jetting to California’s Napa Valley to join Nancy Pelosi for her annual donor confab. And in September, he will return to Manchester to headline the New Hampshire Democratic Party’s Eleanor Roosevelt Dinner.
He is “living like a member of Congress,” he said, shuttling around the country, to D.C. and back to his new home in Traverse City, Michigan, where his husband and in-laws help care for his two young children while he’s on business.
Buttigieg is one of only two of Biden’s former primary rivals to gain a perch in the Cabinet (Vice President Kamala Harris is the other), and that rarified status often invites speculation about his future presidential ambitions. When at official events, Buttigieg is assiduously careful about violating the Hatch Act, the 1939 law that forbids public officials from using their official jobs to campaign for themselves or others.
This can cause awkward moments: At a meet-and-greet with citizens inside Berlin’s City Hall, 68-year-old Keith Dempster, who supported Buttigieg in the 2020 primary, was asked by Buttigieg aides to cover up his blue and white “PETE” campaign t-shirt because the gathering was part of Buttigieg’s official duties, not a political event. About the same time he was shaking hands inside Berlin’s city hall, the Republican National Committee accused Buttigieg, without evidence, of “using taxpayer dollars to campaign for president in New Hampshire.” It was the kind of treatment that not every Cabinet member solicits.
Supporters hold placards for then-Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg as he speaks at a campaign rally, Feb. 22, 2020, in Denver.