Lis Left Standing

Win or lose, Pete Buttigieg’s senior adviser Lis Smith has turned an unknown mayor into a serious contender.

- By Clare Malone. Photograph by Rob Strong

A COUPLE OF MONTHS BACK , I was in New Hampshire, bumping along on a tricked-out campaign bus stocked with SkinnyPop and White Claw hard seltzer (snacks befitting the first millennial presidential candidate), when Lis Smith, Pete Buttigieg’s senior communications adviser, told me something that caught me off guard. She loves the New York Post, she said, and gets it delivered to her home. The Post is the same paper that once called Smith a “bimbo” and wrote a story, among many others, claiming that her then-boyfriend, former New York governor Eliot Spitzer, had spent part of a Jamaican vacation sucking her toes in a hot tub.

That she could still love a paper that had so publicly abused her stayed on my mind while I shivered in an uninsulated barn, a brewery, a theater, and a middle school watching Buttigieg stump along with the other reporters Smith had invited for an on-the-record ride through the state. She mostly stayed on the warm bus. At night, during an off-the-record ride back to the hotel, with the candidate safely cocooned away in some reporterless SUV, Smith drove the conversation, peppering the members of the press with questions about their thoughts on the day’s events, the bus tour, and the state of the race. While campaign manager Mike Schmuhl and press secretary Chris Meagher sipped their drinks wearily, Smith answered questions and needled the assembled crowd of reporters. She was the uncontested center of attention.