MILWAUKEE — As the Democratic National Convention (DNC) gets underway in Chicago, party supporters in Madison spent their weekend getting ready to knock on doors for candidates up and down the November ballot.
To help fire up volunteers, Pete Buttigieg dropped by a local organizing office Sunday on the city’s west side.
While Republicans have called the energy around the Harris-Walz ticket a honeymoon phase, Buttigieg told Spectrum News in a one-on-one interview if that’s the case, it’s been a long one so the party might as well keep it going until November.
Alongside his husband, Chasten, and Sen. Tammy Baldwin, Buttigieg spoke to a room of more than a hundred volunteers ready to pound the pavement.
Asked to sum up the state of the Democratic Party in a single word, Buttigieg said “energized.”
“There’s just incredible energy. I’ve felt it in field offices. We feel it traveling the country, definitely going into this Democratic National Convention, just an extraordinary amount of momentum,” Buttigieg said.
Buttigieg called it “underdog energy,” which is a moniker that makes sense if you think about 2020 when Harris peaked at 15% in the national polls, at the time.
“Today’s Democratic Party is not known for quickly and easily coming to agreement on anything, so I think it really does say something that she consolidated our party in a matter of hours,” Buttigieg explained. “I think it speaks to her strength as a leader. I think it speaks to how she has used the vice presidency to develop her account of where our country needs to go.”
Unity and enthusiasm are things both political parties hope to achieve by the end of their nominating conventions. However, Democrats, including Buttigieg, have something different on their list.
“I think the other thing is to try to use the opportunity to reach out to people who are still thinking about how they are going to vote,” Buttigieg said. “Look, not everybody has got their minds made up right now, and I think a lot of people who usually vote Republican are deeply troubled by what they’ve seen out of their own party the last few years, especially with a guy like Donald Trump at the top of the ticket—even before he became a convicted criminal. We need to reach out to them and share how even if we don’t agree on every issue or every idea, we’re offering a vision of the future that they can feel welcome in.”