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OELWEIN, Iowa — Two days before the Iowa caucuses, Pete Buttigieg stopped for a town hall event at the Oelwein Coliseum, a 92-year-old music venue that in its heyday hosted the likes of Lawrence Welk and Sammy Kaye.
Recent history suggested there weren’t many Democrats to win over in Oelwein: After President Barack Obama won surrounding Fayette County by 12 percentage points in 2012, Donald J. Trump carried it by 19 points four years later. During the event’s question period, one man described himself to Mr. Buttigieg as a fiscally responsible “lifelong Republican” and said that “if you don’t win, I’m probably not going to vote Democratic.”
“Well,” Mr. Buttigieg told the crowd of 250, about a third of the 2016 Fayette County caucus universe, “I better win, then.”
Mr. Buttigieg, the 38-year-old former mayor of South Bend, Ind., appears to have succeeded. His showing across Iowa’s rural counties on Monday propelled him to a dead heat with Senator Bernie Sanders for the lead in the state’s caucuses. Mr. Buttigieg carried Fayette County by 14 percentage points over former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., who placed second.
Now, as the focus turns to New Hampshire and its primary next Tuesday, Mr. Buttigieg has emerged as a formidable top-tier contender, harnessing the momentum from Iowa and campaigning with confidence and a large dose of swagger.
New polls this week have affirmed his strength as a moderate rivaling or even surpassing Mr. Biden: A Monmouth survey put him second in New Hampshire, 4 percentage points behind Mr. Sanders, and a Boston Globe/Suffolk University poll published on Friday showed him gaining momentum there and in a virtual tie with Mr. Sanders.
For a long time in this primary, Democrats seemed to be deciding between the progressive sizzle in Mr. Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, or the statesmanlike security blanket in Mr. Biden. In the end, Iowans fully chose neither, and instead embraced Mr. Buttigieg, a Midwestern neighbor with a compelling biography: Rhodes scholar, military veteran, potential history-maker as an openly gay candidate.
That he had run a city of 100,000 people did not seem to bother his supporters, who gravitated toward his soothing paeans to consensus-driven solutions and “the American experiment.”
Much of his success can be traced to geography and timing. While Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren focused their campaigns on Iowa’s cities and college towns and Mr. Biden never developed a strong organization, Mr. Buttigieg went everywhere. He held more events over more days in Iowa than his top three rivals, two of whom were sidelined by the Senate impeachment trial, and watched the investment pay off by running strong in the Des Moines suburbs and across rural Iowa.
Mr. Buttigieg campaigned in 27 of the 31 Iowa counties that backed Mr. Obama in 2012 before swinging to President Trump in 2016, many of them along the Mississippi River. With a message of bridging divisions in the party and the country, according to his campaign, he drew the largest crowds of any candidate in 20 Obama-Trump counties.
His margins across Republican-leaning rural Iowa helped propel him to a narrow delegate lead over Mr. Sanders, carrying to New Hampshire the argument that he is the candidate around whom moderate Democrats should coalesce in opposition to the democratic socialist from Vermont.
“We needed a new path forward, a path that welcomed people instead of pushing them away, brought them together instead of driving them apart, because this is our best and maybe our last shot,” Mr. Buttigieg told supporters at his caucus night party on Monday in Des Moines.
But even as he gained a shot of momentum from Iowa, he enters a new phase of the Democratic campaign as a potentially weak prospective nominee, unable so far to broaden his coalition to minority voters and young voters needed to confront Mr. Trump in November. With the lackluster showing in Iowa by Mr. Biden — the candidate with the most support from black voters in national polls — the race has grown increasingly unpredictable.
For Mr. Buttigieg, the journey from unknown small-city mayor — whose lone experience on the national political stage was in a contest to be Democratic National Committee chairman that netted him a single vote — to Iowa caucus victor ran through cornfields similar to the ones he says he can run to from his Indiana home.
He’s now a bona fide presidential contender, the only one of more than two dozen candidates in his party’s 2020 primary to vault from near anonymity into the race’s top tier.
After dropping nine points from November to mid-January in the Des Moines Register/CNN poll of the state — the most of any candidate, and a reversal that had pundits counting Mr. Buttigieg out — he offered Iowans a closing message of unity in an era so tumultuous many voters feel traumatic shock.
The turning point of his race appeared to come in the days after the Democratic debate on Jan. 14 in Des Moines, when rivals in the Senate had to return to Washington for the impeachment trial, and Mr. Buttigieg was free to roam widely.
In Council Bluffs, Wendy Rustad, a teacher at the Iowa School for the Deaf, said that she had voted for Mr. Trump, but intended to switch her registration to Democrat to caucus for Mr. Buttigieg after hearing him speak.
“I feel like he has embarrassed America on the global stage,” she said of the president. She praised Mr. Buttigieg for “not focusing as much on what’s going on with the stock market to indicate the economic health of the country, but to look at the lives of real people.”
In Cedar Rapids, Mr. Buttigieg said it was time to force Mr. Trump to stand on a debate stage “with an American war veteran and explain exactly why bone spurs prevented him from serving this country.”
Afterward, Christine Salter said that he had nudged her off the fence as an undecided voter. “His message was the first I’ve heard that really excited me,” said Ms. Salter, a human resources manager. “I’m finally looking forward to the caucus instead of ‘who am I going to pick?”
But as Mr. Buttigieg sprints into New Hampshire, he is that much closer to a looming existential threat to his candidacy: a lack of support from black voters.
Senior campaign officials have repeatedly told donors — and Mr. Buttigieg echoes the pitch on the stump speaking to voters — that in the immediate aftermath of Barack Obama’s surprise Iowa caucus victory in 2008, he gathered newfound black support and a gusher of donations. The Obama campaign raised nearly as much money immediately after Iowa as it did in the preceding year.
Iowa, Mr. Buttigieg said repeatedly while campaigning, gave America “permission to believe” in Mr. Obama and could do the same for him.
The comparison, however, cannot stand much scrutiny. Unlike Mr. Obama, who swept through the South with huge support from African-Americans, Mr. Buttigieg is struggling mightily with voters of color. His campaign has spent more than $1 million on television advertising in South Carolina since early December, with little movement to show for it in polling there.
While Mr. Buttigieg spent the final 10 days in Iowa holding more than 50 forums and giving tens of thousands of voters a chance to become acquainted, his political identity is still steeped in controversies from his time as mayor, in particular his relationship with black residents of South Bend.
Early in 2019, he had sought to introduce himself to the country as a Midwest mayor who restored pride and the economy to a Rust Belt city — much of which was true. Sitting at 1 percent in Iowa polls in March, he broke through with hyper-articulate responses to questions at an hourlong town-hall-style broadcast on CNN. He contrasted his faith with that of Vice President Mike Pence, a former Indiana governor, whom Mr. Buttigieg called “the cheerleader for the porn star presidency.”
Days before the Iowa caucuses, Lis Smith, Mr. Buttigieg’s senior communications adviser, called the CNN town hall “the single most important moment of this campaign.” Other 2020 candidates — Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York — had also done CNN’s town halls. “Who was the only person that took that opportunity, took that one hour and owned that one hour and used it to launch an entire campaign?” Ms. Smith said. “That was Pete.”
Mr. Buttigieg raised a field-leading $24.8 million in the three months that ended June 30, a figure that shocked Democratic politics and announced him as a contender. The cash infusion, combined with a proclivity to agree to almost every interview request, helped give Mr. Buttigieg a sort of star power that often enraged rivals, while branding him as the “fresh and new” candidate — an invaluable trait for Iowa Democrats in search of the next Obama.
Mr. Buttigieg is the youngest candidate in the field, yet he has built his strength in Iowa on an appeal to older Democrats. His young and energetic organizers were frequently surrounded by white-haired crowds at his stops in the state. Mr. Buttigieg told audiences he wanted to be known as “the Social Security candidate” and cultivated the idea that he was the nice young man his older supporters envisioned.
But Mr. Buttigieg’s candidacy became shadowed by episodes that had angered black residents in South Bend. That in turn fed a narrative that Mr. Buttigieg had little support from black voters nationally, which lingered over Iowa’s heavily white constituency.
In June, a white police officer in South Bend fatally shot a black resident, and Mr. Buttigieg stepped off the campaign trail to try to calm his city. In the glare of the national spotlight, other stories about South Bend surfaced: a longstanding distrust between the police and some black residents; Mr. Buttigieg’s dismissal in 2012 of a black police chief; and the unequal economic revival of downtown businesses and poor, predominantly nonwhite neighborhoods.
A narrative, in some cases pushed by supporters of rival presidential candidates, arose that Mr. Buttigieg had not done enough for black residents. And within his own campaign, employees of color said they were marginalized and felt compelled to hold meetings in December and January to air their grievances.
When African-American leaders in South Bend held a public meeting to rebut this impression and express support for Mr. Buttigieg, it was interrupted by Black Lives Matter activists, some of whom were supporters of Mr. Sanders.
But by the end of his Iowa campaign, Mr. Buttigieg was campaigning with a host of prominent African-American supporters: Quentin Hart, the mayor of Waterloo, Iowa; Representative Anthony G. Brown of Maryland; Bruce Teague, the mayor of Iowa City; and Sean Shaw, a former Florida state representative. Each of them, along with Ryann Richardson, the reigning Miss Black America, joined Mr. Buttigieg onstage on his final day of campaigning Sunday.
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