Is U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg angling to replace Gov. Gretchen Whitmer? It’s a question the former mayor of South Bend, Ind., has repeatedly faced since moving to Michigan with his husband in 2020, two years before Democrats secured a government trifecta for the first time in 40 years.
So far, his silence is speaking louder than his words. “Pete Buttigieg refuses to rule out running for Michigan governor in 2026 – AP,” NewsWire recently posted to X. The move to Michigan transpired a year after Buttigieg and his husband Chasten adopted newborn twins, with a Buttigieg spokesperson telling the Detroit Free Press “moving to Chasten’s hometown of Traverse City allowed them to be closer to his parents, which became especially important to them after they adopted their twins, often relying on Chasten’s parents for help with child care.”
But there’s other political benefits in the battleground state of Michigan that simply aren’t available to a liberal Democrat in Indiana. After a failed presidential run in 2020, the Intelligencer noted Buttigieg had few options in The Hoosier State. “Whatever the personal benefits and the spousal connection, moving to Michigan also happens to place Buttigieg in a red-hot battleground state whose current Democratic governor and two U.S. senators may not stay in their current jobs forever,” the Intelligencer’s Ed Kilgore opined in 2022. “In deep-red Indiana, there was no obvious avenue for higher office for a guy like Buttigieg, which is probably a major reason he ran for president in 2020 instead of climbing a ladder that really wasn’t there.”
