“I’ve been following him since he announced (his candidacy) and his platform matches a lot of my values, a lot of the things I want to accomplish for our community and our city,” Bemrich said following the endorsement. “I think his leadership skills, as he’s shown as mayor, have been phenomenal. … He’s really in-tuned into what’s going on nationally and internationally. I just think that the type of leadership he could bring to the presidency is the kind I’m looking for.”

Bemrich welcomed Buttigieg on stage in front of 426 audience members from Fort Dodge and the surrounding areas.

Buttigieg opened by asking the crowd to imagine the day “the sun comes up over Fort Dodge and Donald Trump is no longer president of the United States.”

“The reason I’m asking voters everywhere I go to picture that moment is not just to give us something to look forward to, but to ask us to think about what we’re going to need from our president and what we’re going to need from our presidency in that moment,” the candidate said. “Because if you think about it, that’s not going to be the day that all our problems go away.”

-Messenger photo by Kelby Wingert
More than 400 people attended Democratic presidential candidate hopeful Pete Buttigieg’s town hall campaign stop at Fort Dodge Middle School on Sunday evening.

The country will be even more divided and polarized after the 2020 election, he said.

“In that moment, our country will be even more exhausted from fighting and torn up by politics than we are right now,” Buttigieg said.

The next president will have to be ready to address those divisions and face those issues when that day comes, he continued.

“I’m running because that’s what I think the presidency is for,” he said. “Not for glorifying the president, but for unifying and empowering the American people and leading us to a better tomorrow.”

Buttigieg ran through his key policy points he has been campaigning on — his “Medicare for all who want it” plan, the climate crisis, the economy and others.

-Messenger photo by Kelby Wingert
 Fort Dodge Mayor Matt Bemrich officially endorsed South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg for the 2020 presidential election, on Sunday evening at Fort Dodge MIddle School.

“I am compelled by the hope that tells me that we can get this done and the determination to go beyond the fight,” he concluded. “I know fighting is part of politics; I get it. But never let us get so caught up in the fighting that fighting’s all we got. The point is not the fight. The point is to get to the other side to what is waiting for us is an American experience that is defined not by exclusion, but by belonging.”

-Messenger photo by Kelby Wingert
Selden Spencer, of Huxley, holds a “Make Racism Wrong Again” hat while listening to Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg at Fort Dodge MIddle School on Sunday evening.

-Messenger photo by Kelby Wingert
South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg hosted a town hall campaign stop at Fort Dodge Middle School on Sunday evening.