Meanwhile, New York City’s Bill de Blasio, the mayor of the nation’s largest city, is having difficulty persuading anyone — the media, his own constituents — to take his own potential run for president seriously.

“Everybody’s going to laugh at him” if he runs, said Doug Herman, a Democratic strategist. “The irony is that the South Bend mayor is being taken seriously, and the New York mayor’s not.”

And it isn’t just de Blasio. Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti, who considered running for president before demurring earlier this year, has been asked more than once if Buttigieg’s success didn’t make him reconsider his own choices.

“Mayor Pete, somebody that is a veteran like you, is a mayor like you, is a Rhodes scholar like you, is a pianist like you,” a reporter asked Garcetti in Los Angeles recently, where he appeared alongside Buttigieg. “Do you think, ‘That could have been me?’”