Pete Buttigieg was perhaps President Joe Biden’s best surrogate during his time as Transportation Secretary, making his boss’s “Build Back Better” campaign very much his own, showing up in a hard hat wherever he could to highlight federally funded infrastructure projects.

Now, the once and maybe future presidential candidate, is back on the road, hard hat in hand again. But this time, he’s building a coalition.

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“I’m very focused on coalition right now, and that includes pillars of our Democratic coalition, like the building trades workers I was with in Toledo or in Nevada, and certainly Black voters who are so vital to the past, present, and future of the party,” Buttigieg told Politico this week, while on a campaign swing through his adopted home state of Michigan. He was stumping for 2026 candidates, and potential recruits to his new project.

“And they are all often very different from each other,” Buttigieg said of his chosen candidates, the very definition of a coalition.

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According to a close source, Buttigieg has spent half of 2026 on the road, hitting 10 states, five of them battlegrounds — no wonder he brought a helmet.

Buttigieg zeroed in on the current president’s success, cobbling together the disparate blocs of voters that unexpectedly sent him to the White House for a second term.

“It is really important that we understand what it means that this president stitched together this very unlikely crew that includes traditional Republicans, Libertarians, authoritarians, and white nationalists,” Buttigieg said. “We have to have a bigger, better, different coalition.”

Though he didn’t mention it, Buttigieg likely has in mind Barack Obama’s union of young people, Black and Latino voters, educated professionals, Independents, white working-class voters, and lot of LGBTQ+ people among them all, for a 2028 repeat, even as he listed many of the same issues that brought those voters together 20 years ago, despite their differences.

Democrats “should be able to build a supermajority coalition” based on the party’s platform, Buttigieg said, putting on his accountant’s visor to tick off the issues and numbers: paid family leave, a higher minimum wage, raising taxes on the wealthy, universal background checks, and what Buttigieg called a public health insurance option.

“If we can’t get those two-thirds supported positions over 50%, that means we’re missing something in terms of the coalition we built,” Buttigieg said, using that word again.

Unlike one of the candidates he was stumping for — Democrat Bob Brooks in Pennsylvania, who’s trying to unseat a MAGA Republican and is one of the new breed of “real guy” Democrats running for office this cycle (see Graham Platner in Maine) — former Mayor Pete is not a fan of Medicare for All.

But no matter: They’re just two Democratic candidates among the many in a hoped-for winning coalition.

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