Former Secretary of Transportation and likely 2028 presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg encouraged Democrats to reach out to disillusioned Trump voters and bring them into the Democratic coalition. “We have a moment like that on our hands, because there are so many people who, you know, frankly, believed the promises that the president made,” Buttigieg said in an interview with MS NOW host Jen Psaki. “Far too many voters were told by this president, I’m going to lower prices, were told, I’m going to keep us out of these dumb wars. And rather than being hostile to them as voters, I think we have a chance now to invite them in because they’re asking a lot of questions about how things ever got to this point.”

JEN PSAKI, MS NOW HOST: Part of the argument you’ve made, and I was reading your speech this morning from Iowa, and obviously I’ve seen a lot of the clips, is that it’s important to kind of — and we just — people just heard you say this too, invite people who voted for Trump in the past into the Democratic coalition. And that makes sense. I mean, more voters means you win elections. That’s kind of how the whole thing works. But how do you do that? Because right now, as you well know, there are so many people out there who are part of the Democratic coalition, who have long been who feel like their voices aren’t heard, nobody is speaking to them, nobody is speaking out for them, who feel alienated and that their very existence is under threat. So how do you do that while not alienating those — those groups of people who Democrats also need to vote for them? PETE BUTTIGIEG, FORMER SECRETARY OF TRANSPORTATION: Well, that’s why it’s so important to point to all of these things where we have this in common, where it’s not about triangulating some ideological middle. It’s about finding that most Americans the left, the center, and quite a few people who usually vote more right, are going to agree right now on health care, on all of the corruption that’s going on right now, but only if we do the work. And, you know, I don’t think there’s any contradiction between standing firm in our values and being there for people who have been part of our coalition for many years and many generations, and inviting people to come join that coalition and grow it. The most effective Democratic candidates and presidents in my lifetime did that. I think back to how it felt in, you know, supposedly deep red Indiana, the night that — that that state turned blue in 2008, as Barack Obama both consolidated that Democratic coalition and invited a lot of people who usually voted the other way to cross over. We have a moment like that on our hands, because there are so many people who, you know, frankly, believed the president’s — that the the promises that the president made. Far too many voters were told by this president, I’m going to lower prices, were told, I’m going to keep us out of these dumb wars. And rather than being hostile to them as voters, I think we have a chance now to invite them in because they’re asking a lot of questions about how things ever got to this point. PSAKI: In your speech today, you reiterated how Democrats can continue doing politics as usual, which I think the majority of people watching it was like, yeah, they can’t keep doing it because it’s not working. And we all see the polling numbers. What — what do you mean by that exactly? What — what specific things do you think Democrats should avoid repeating or continuing to do? BUTTIGIEG: Well, I think we’ve got to recognize that many of the institutions that are being destroyed right now by the Trump administration also cannot and should not be put back together just the way they looked in 2021 or 2012. I do think there is a risk that we might imagine that our job is to take power and just put everything back the way it was, but that’s not going to work either. If our economic and political and social systems were working just fine, we wouldn’t be here. So the old status quo can’t be the answer. We’ve got to have new answers. And we’ve got to take big swings at major political reform. Again, I think there’s a moment here, for example, on money in politics, you don’t have to be a Democrat and you don’t have to be in a blue state to be part of the majority that wants to change that, including, if necessary, a constitutional amendment to deal with Citizens United. And part of the message that I had in Iowa and that I’m taking everywhere I go is, our economic problems are related to the problems in our political system. You know, there is a conventional wisdom out there among some political strategists saying, don’t talk about what’s wrong with our democracy, because we should only be talking about the kitchen table. To me, those two things are intimately connected. The reason we are paying more at the pump, the reason our mortgages are unaffordable in this country, is directly related to the fact that there is no accountability in our government, and there won’t be until we fix Congress, fix the Supreme Court, fix money in politics. And we absolutely cannot be afraid to talk about those big reforms, as well as the ins and outs of health care, education, the things we want to do on day one.

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