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“PLEASE DON’T judge my state by our former governor,” Pete Buttigieg said.

It was March, and the South Bend mayor and dark horse of the 2020 Democratic primary was standing on a stage at a CNN town hall in Austin, Texas, in the midst of what would later be widely acknowledged as his breakout performance. At the time, he was polling in the single digits and hadn’t yet reached the 65,000 individual-donor threshold he needed to qualify for the Democratic National Committee’s first presidential debate this month.

Then it happened. Audience member James Doty, a gray-haired professor of neurosurgery at Stanford, stood to ask Buttigieg a question about the nature of the Indiana electorate, specifically whether socially conservative Mike Pence, now vice president, was an accurate reflection of what the former governor himself liked to call Hoosier Values. “Among the average voter in Indiana