Mayor Pete lands TIME magazine cover, gets described as man some say could 'vanquish America's demons'

Mayor Pete Buttigieg is on the latest TIME magazine cover, under the headline: "First Family"

Mayor Pete has picked up another impressive media endorsement.

Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Ind., has been rising in the polls in recent weeks and has now landed on the cover of TIME magazine.

Buttigieg and his husband, Chasten, appear on the cover of the prestigious magazine, along with the headline and sub-headline: “First Family -- The unlikely, untested and unprecedented campaign of Mayor Pete Buttigieg.”

“To some Americans, Buttigieg may just be the man to vanquish America’s demons,” the piece states early on, after describing the scene when Buttigieg was confronted by a heckler dressed as the Devil.

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“Buttigieg is a gay Episcopalian veteran in a party torn between identity politics and heartland appeals. He’s also a fresh face in a year when millennials are poised to become the largest eligible voting bloc. Many Democrats are hungry for generational change, and the two front-runners are more than twice his age.”

The piece continues: “‘If the substance of your ideas is progressive, but there’s mistrust about them among conservatives, you have three choices,’ Buttigieg tells TIME, sitting on his living-room couch in South Bend.

“‘One is to just change your ideas and make them more conservative. The second is to sort of be sneaky and try to make it seem like your ideas are more conservative than they are. And the third, the approach that I favor, is to stick to your ideas, but explain why conservatives shouldn’t be afraid of them.’”

TIME’s story then compares Buttigieg to the man he would ultimately have to topple if he succeeds in winning the Democratic nomination -- President Trump, who won the 2016 election by defeating Hillary Clinton and currently has an approval rating of 45 percent in the most recent Fox News poll.

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“In many ways, Buttigieg is Trump’s polar opposite: younger, dorkier, shorter, calmer and married to a man. His success may depend on whether Democrats want a fighter to match Trump, or whether Americans want to ‘change the channel,’ as Buttigieg puts it.

“‘People already have a leader who screams and yells,” he says. “How do you think that’s working out for us?’”

TIME’s detailed, nearly 4,100-word piece goes on to discuss Buttigieg’s relationship, his military experience and his childhood.

Mayor Pete has become something of a media darling as he has surged in the polls, so much so that the Afghanistan war veteran grabbed the support of just under 12 percent of those questioned in a New Hampshire poll. Taking into account the survey’s sampling error of plus or minus 4.7 percentage points for likely Democratic primary voters, Sanders and Buttigieg were all knotted up.

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“Buttigieg has become the new young force in the New Hampshire Democratic Primary as he positions himself in the top tier against better known Democrats like Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders,” Suffolk University Political Research Center Director David Paleologos told Fox News.

“Buttigieg leads Biden, Sanders, and every other Democrat among LGBTQ households -- an important demographic for grassroots support and a network of generous and loyal donors,” the pollster said.