“Fix the damn roads!” Gretchen Whitmer repeated during her ultimately successful effort to recapture Michigan’s governorship for the Democrats after eight years of Republican Rick Snyder. Now, as term limits force Whitmer toward the end of her tenure, Democrats may be looking to Pete Buttigieg as her successor — a man Joe Biden once belittled for having “revitalized the sidewalks of downtown South Bend by laying out decorative brick” during his time as mayor of the fourth-largest city in Indiana.

Yes: Indiana. Buttigieg, born in South Bend, apparently views Hoosier as a false karass. He has moved to Traverse City, Mich., ostensibly for personal reasons. One personal reason for this deeply ambitious man perhaps being that Michigan is far likelier to elect Democrats statewide than deep-red Indiana is. Though even that is no guarantee: Donald Trump has now won the state twice. And in 2024, Michigan Republicans — who earlier this year were so riven by factional infighting that they had dueling conventions — recaptured the state house.

But to hear Democrats and the media (the joke is too obvious now) tell it, Buttigieg is exactly the sort of person to navigate the party through this new, unexpectedly conservative terrain. “Buttigieg, who vaulted to prominence with his 2020 presidential run and deftly engaged with conservative audiences on behalf of President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, could have the appeal” to win Republican-leaning voters back, an Associated Press report on Buttigieg’s prospective candidacy claims. Still secretary of transportation after Biden changed his mind about him, Buttigieg has remained coy, but is nonetheless being recruited, and isn’t ruling out a run.

That Democrats may turn to Pete Buttigieg as a Republican-whisperer is a striking indicator of the challenges their party now faces. If the best they can do is someone who, by the standard of left-wing government omnipotence, deserves blame (if he also gets complete credit for the good) for the various transportation-related mishaps his department suffered during his tenure; who positively oozes with a top-down, bloodless, technocratic contempt (born of his time at McKinsey) for processes and people with which he cannot tinker; who seems defined by nothing other than a soullessly meritocratic and amoral box-checking striverism by which he somehow vaulted himself to national prominence from deserved obscurity — if this is the best Democrats can do, then they are up a creek (or perhaps a lake), indeed.

Complications arise, however. Other candidates may run. And though Buttigieg claims longtime knowledge of Michigan from the fact that he “grew up a few miles from the state line” and “was getting the news from Michigan and from both sides” of it, he will have to convince voters that he actually belongs. And in a recent visit to a Detroit union hall, he failed a key test: He was unable to answer when one autoworker asked him who the Lions play on Sunday. There are many roads from Indiana to Michigan. But Pete Buttgieg’s may prove politically rocky.