About Mayor Pete Afghanistan veteran, runner, musician, businessman, husband to Chasten and South Bend's "Mayor Pete" since 2012.

Pete Buttigieg is the Mayor of South Bend, Indiana. He was first elected mayor in 2011 at only 29 years old, and re-elected in 2015 with 80 percent of the vote. Over the seven years that he has been mayor, South Bend went from being called one of America’s ten dying communities by Newsweek to seeing its fastest pace of population and investment growth in recent memory.

Mayor Pete served as a lieutenant in the Navy Reserve, and took an unpaid seven months leave during his mayoral term in 2014 for a deployment to Afghanistan. For his counterterrorism work, he earned the Joint Service Commendation Medal.

In 2017, he ran for Democratic National Committee chair, earning national praise for his clear message and emphasis on rebuilding the Democratic Party from the ground up in every community. He currently serves as the chair of “Automation and the Impacts on America’s Cities” task force at the United States Conference of Mayors. The task force is examining how automation is shaping the economies of communities across America.

The Washington Post has called him “the most interesting Mayor you’ve never heard of” and The New York Times ran a column saying that he could be the nation’s “first gay President.” Additionally, President Obama named him one of four Democrats who represented the future of the Democratic Party.

A Rhodes Scholar, Mayor Pete studied Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at Oxford and holds a bachelor’s degree in History and Literature from Harvard. The son of educators, he was born in South Bend and grew up in the Northwest Side and North Shore Triangle. He graduated from St. Joseph High School in South Bend.

An active musician, Mayor Pete plays piano and guitar, and has performed with the South Bend Symphony Orchestra. He lives with his husband Chasten in the same South Bend neighborhood where he grew up and is restoring a once-vacant home there.