Nowadays, it seems the question really should be, who is not running to be the Democratic candidate for the Presidency of the United States in 2020. By most recent counts the number of candidates looking to unseat President Donald J. Trump is more than 15, with about a half dozen more having launched exploratory committees.  

Of all the names, which include governors, senators, members of congress and businesspeople alike, one name garners little mention, and yet, most definitely should.  

Pete Buttigieg is the mayor of South Bend, Indiana or as the locals call him, “Mayor Pete”.? 

Buttigieg, 37, if elected, would be the youngest President in the history of the United States of America and its first openly gay one.  

Buttigieg’s resume is impressive. A bachelor’s degree from Harvard where he was on the Harvard Institute of Politics Student Advisory Committee, and a Master’s Degree from Pembroke College at Oxford in the United Kingdom as a Rhodes Scholar.  

Upon completing his distinguished education career, Buttigieg was commissioned as a naval intelligence officer in the Navy Reserve in 2009 where experienced active duty in Afghanistan in 2014. Despite completing his military service requirement upon enlistment, Buttigieg is still a lieutenant in the Naval Reserve. He is also a noted polyglot who speaks Spanish, Italian, Maltese, Arabic, Dari, French – and he taught himself how to speak Norwegian.  

With percentages of 78% and 80% of the vote respectively in his two runs as South Bend’s Mayor, Pete Buttigieg commanded the respect of his peers, and when he ran for mayor the first time, he ran and won at the age of 29, making him America’s youngest mayor in a city of 100,000 or more inhabitants. ? 

Buttigieg, in this week’s Emerson Polling survey, trailed only former Vice President Joe Biden and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders as the potential nominee to take on President Trump in November 2020.  

Of course, it’s far too early and anything can happen, but it seems that Mayor Buttigieg is having his moment in the sun.  

Mayor Pete is an individual who many Americans haven’t heard of yet, and even more have never heard speak. They will likely be struck by how to the point he is and the facility with which he is able to explain extraordinarily complicated issues in the simplest of terms. Buttigieg correctly identifies that an all-out war against President Trump is not the way to go. Instead, he believes one must pick apart the basic tenets of Trumpism and begin to change skeptical minds that way.  

Mayor Pete is the first millennial to ever be candidate for President of the United States, and as a city’s chief executive for two terms in the Midwest with youth and wit on his side, Mayor Pete Buttigieg seems poised to be a name that, while difficult to pronounce, will be more heard in the coming weeks and months.