Pete Buttigieg announced on Tuesday that he planned to release a new book, checking off a box that likely signals a 2028 presidential run.
Buttigieg, the former U.S. Transportation secretary and mayor of South Bend, Indiana, announced Tuesday that his new book, “Next,” will outline his policy platform and hit bookstores on Jan. 26.
“In this divided country of ours, there is a surprisingly broad consensus on how things must change — that our system is broken and action is needed to fix it,” Buttigieg said in a Substack post.
The announcement comes a week after the midterm elections, which saw many Republican strongholds swing blue for the first time in a generation.
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Presidential candidates have long released books just before announcing their campaigns, a tradition that dates back to at least the 1950s. President John F. Kennedy’s 1956 bestseller “Profiles in Courage,” widely held to be the genesis of this tradition, was written before Kennedy launched his successful 1960 bid for the presidency. The book ultimately won a Pulitzer Prize.
A number of other Democrats with presidential ambitions have released books this year, including Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Connecticut), California Gov. Gavin Newsom, Sen. Cory Booker (D-New Jersey) and Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro.
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In a video announcement for the book, Buttigieg said, “This book is an argument about how we can build something better. It’s not a policy manual; it’s an account of how we got to this point and the principles that could shape where we go from here.”
Buttigieg, a presidential candidate in 2020, also used the book’s title to tease a possible run in 2028.
“A lot of people have been asking me about what’s next and, as chance would have it, I have been thinking about exactly that subject for about a year,” he said.
Buttigieg said many of the changes Democrats need are beyond party politics and require more than winning an election.
“We can’t just return to the old status quo,” he wrote.
In August, while campaigning for the midterm election, Buttigieg told reporters he’d not made a decision as to whether he’d run for president, saying he was focused on the upcoming election.
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