Inside Pete Buttigieg's Tell City tour

Plus: Todd Young's + Tom McDermott's U.S. Senate hauls & Pence's HamCo fundraiser.

TELL CITY, Ind.—The shortest way back home for Pete Buttigieg, it turns out, runs through this city of 7,256 in a county that Trump won by 25 points in 2020.

On a rainy April day along the Ohio River, Joe Biden’s transportation secretary stopped here on the White House’s rural infrastructure tour to tout a $1.6 million grant to assemble a 40-foot diameter pier for a crane to help unload cargo.

“This is about as far as you can be from my hometown and still be in the state of Indiana, and we have a lot of things that are a little different from my part of the state,” Buttigieg said of Perry County, one of the four he won during his 2010 statewide treasurer campaign.

It was Buttigieg’s first official visit to Indiana since joining Biden’s Cabinet and his first time back in Perry County since he carried it during his 2010 bid for state treasurer.

“This community is an example of so many communities,” he told me in an interview, as we stood on the second-floor veranda of city hall. “As you know, it's very different from South Bend, but it is that same river city dynamic. It has me very nostalgic for when I was campaigning here back in 2010.”

His visit drew attacks from the Indiana Republican Party and the GOP—a sign he’s still a political threat. (“Pete Buttigieg may have used this trip to put on a façade that the Biden administration cares about rural communities, but rural Hoosiers know better,” Indiana Republican Party Chairman Kyle Hupfer said.) But Gov. Eric Holcomb’s INDOT Commissioner Mike Smith had only positive things to say when he spoke before Buttigieg.