Pete Buttigieg Cryptically Hints At 2028 Presidential Run In Exchange With Al Sharpton: ‘I’ll Be There’

Former Biden Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg gave a cryptic response when Rev. Al Sharpton asked if he planned to run for president in 2028.

Buttigieg appeared at the National Action Network convention on Friday to discuss civil rights, justice, and equality, as the organization has for the past 35 years.

“Let me ask you this,” Sharpton said toward the end of the exchange. “When you ran for president, you met me, and we went up to a well-publicized lunch at Sylvia’s restaurant in Harlem. Just so my calendar is clear, should I be reserving a table at Sylvia’s?” Sharpton asked for laughter and applause.

“Are you going to run again?” he added.

“You save me a seat, I’ll be there,” Buttigieg answered.

Earlier in the interview, Shapton asked, “What do you think, given the grave circumstances that we both agree that we’re facing in some areas, what does the Democratic party need to do to be able to be successful? Yes, we’re angry, but anger does not mean everybody’s going to the polls. And it doesn’t mean that we’re going to sustain it until November. And I always say that you’ve got to turn people on before you can turn them out.”

“I think it is vitally important that we fight back the temptation to be about restoring everything to the old way,” Buttigieg said, “because the reality is, if our economic and our political and our social systems were serving us well, we wouldn’t be here, right? All of that is what led to all of this.”

Buttigieg continued:

And so, we have to make clear, of course, we want to see an end to the current regime, but what we really need to make clear is what we would be doing instead. That it doesn’t have to be this way, and your everyday life could be better.

When you get up in the morning, you can have a glass of clean, safe, drinking water and get in a vehicle and go on a road that’s in a good condition to go to a job where one job is enough, and on the way there, drop your kids off at quality public education that is well-funded, and come home knowing that you have health care that you can actually afford, and get to a house that you can actually afford to live in. We could have those nice things. Nothing is stopping us but ourselves and our leadership.

Before Buttigieg, Sharpton interviewed former Vice President Kamala Harris, who said she was “thinking about” running for president again in 2028.

Watch the clip above via C-SPAN.

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