Any Iowan will remind you that September is early in the bid for the Democratic Presidential nomination. At this time in the 2008 race, Barack Obama was trailing Hillary Clinton and running just a few points ahead of John Edwards. Pete Buttigieg, the thirty-seven-year-old mayor of South Bend, Indiana, is currently polling at around fifth place in the national race and in the first caucus state. On Labor Day, he made his eleventh trip to Iowa as a Presidential candidate, a quick swing that included attending a panel on climate change and the opening of two new campaign offices. Some of Buttigieg’s staffers have dubbed this month the next phase of the campaign, following the first, in which they taught the electorate how to pronounce his inscrutable last name, and the second, in which they raised enough money to insure that he’d last through the fall. Until this week, his team had set up just one office in Iowa. By the end of September—the third phase of the Buttigieg campaign—it plans to have opened twenty more.

If success in the first caucus state depended on the size of a candidate’s crowds, Buttigieg might have been able to overlook the fact that his poll numbers have slipped, perceptibly, since his breakout, last spring. In March, Buttigieg’s performance at a CNN town hall propelled him to sudden relevance in the national headlines. In June, a poll from the Des Moines Register showed him jockeying for second place with Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. In the most recent quarter, Buttigieg brought in more money than any of his Democratic rivals, relying on a network that includes both grassroots donors and high-dollar patrons from the coasts. But a meaningful distance still separates him from the race’s front-runners, most of whom established their operations in early-voting states months ago. The optimists in Buttigieg’s camp contend that his ample finances will allow him to survive a brief period of stagnancy. The pessimists suggest that time is running out, not simply for the country—as Buttigieg is fond of repeating in his stump speech and on the debate stage—but for his prospects in an overcrowded field.

On Labor Day, as Buttigieg toured a river in Cedar Rapids where flooding a decade ago had caused billions of dollars in property damage, he found himself fielding questions about more than a few national disasters. During the weekend, an armed man in Texas had murdered seven people. Hurricane Dorian, which had slammed the northern Bahamas, killing at least five, now crept toward south Florida. The news, as usual, was dispiriting, but gun control and climate change are issues that, perhaps more than any others, allow Buttigieg to cast his youth as an asset. (“We are never going to be able to fix what’s broken in Washington by recycling the same arguments and politicians,” he says, in a Spotify advertisement that was released last month. “We’ve got to do something completely different.”) Buttigieg was a junior in high school during the Columbine massacre; he likes to remind voters that he was part of the “first school-shooting generation”—and that adults had promised that there would never be a second—before cueing up perhaps his most reliable applause line: “Shame on us if we allow there to be a third.”

Buttigieg makes a similar appeal when discussing the perils of the climate crisis. At a roundtable discussion in Cedar Rapids, he assured two high-school seniors from the Sunrise Movement of his commitment to “generational justice.” “I’m concerned for you, for your generation,” he told one of the students. “I would like to say our generation, but I’m beginning to admit that I can’t claim to be from the same generation as somebody in high school.” Buttigieg grinned. The audience, mostly white and middle-aged, broke out in applause. He told the teen-ager, “I would love for us to be figuring out stuff we can’t even imagine by the time you’re ready to run for President.”

When Buttigieg hopped on a soapbox outside his new office, a converted single-story house on the southwest side of the city, he looked tanned and well-rested, in a white button-down shirt and a snug pair of jeans. “We are going to change the expectations for the American Presidency so that it’s an office that kids can look up to,” he told a few hundred locals. Kids, in fact, abound at Buttigieg’s campaign stops. Babies can often be heard wailing as the candidate takes the stage. One of his Labor Day speeches included a stirring litany of some of the children who have attended his events: a fifth grader in Cedar Rapids who asked him how the country would protect its schools from shooters; a twelve-year-old who brought up a detailed question about health-care policy, her precocity rivalled only by her urgent need for insulin; a black fourteen-year-old whose concerns about “racial tensions” in his school distract him from cultivating his passion for computer programming. “This is exactly the kind of kid we want concentrating on what he happens to be very good at,” Buttigieg said. “But he explains to me that in the halls of his high school he’s getting called racial slurs. And I’m thinking, That’s not racial tension. That’s abuse. It is on the rise in our country, and we’ve got to turn it around.”

Part of Buttigieg’s strategic charm is his ability to communicate even progressive stances with rhetoric that emphasizes seemingly nonpartisan American values. Matthew McGrane, who recently moved, with his husband, from Chicago to Cedar Rapids, told me that he appreciated Buttigieg’s “expansion of the term ‘freedom,’ ” which, during speeches, the candidate defines, in “its richest sense,” not simply as a “freedom from” societal ills—unjust working conditions, corrupt polling practices—but a freedom “to live a life of your choosing.” A caucusgoer who attended the same event drew a comparison between the candidate’s liberty to choose a life partner—Buttigieg, who came out in 2015, is married to a man—and her own liberty to select a health-care plan. “There’s nothing more essential to freedom than having those rights,” she said.

Ryan Brainard, a father of three, from Marion, who hosts a beloved country-radio show, attended Buttigieg’s event in Cedar Rapids, where he met the candidate for the first time. He compared supporting Buttigieg to “discovering a band, or a new music act.” “You get in on the ground floor,” he said, “and then you see other people come in.” Brainard grew up in a conservative family and voted for Clinton in 2016; he said that he admired Buttigieg’s reinvigoration of faith in politics. “The Republican Party has long incorrectly held that particular issue as hostage—as though, if you’re a Christian, you can’t vote for a Democrat,” Brainard told me. “I really appreciate the fact that he speaks to that.” Jeff Zoltowski, who brought his wife and three of his children to the same event, voted for Donald Trump in the last election. “I thought that he would shake up the establishment, which would create a new generation of political candidates,” Zoltowski said, adding that, four years later, “Pete’s the candidate for that. He’s got some conservative values that a lot of the other Democrats don’t.” On the other hand, he pointed out, “I think the fact that he’s young and gay will bring out the youth vote. I think he can energize the youth in a way that no other candidate can.”

Later that day, Buttigieg stopped by his new office in Iowa City, a few blocks from the University of Iowa. A team of volunteers, led by Chris Weckman, a local contractor and a Buttigieg diehard, had spent the previous week refurbishing the building. It used to be a “nasty little tanning salon,” Weckman told me. Now it was a veritable shrine—all blue and gold paint, with countdown calendars, American flags, and an entire wall reserved for a stencilled rendering of the candidate’s face. “Looks like I’ll always be looking on you,” Buttigieg told the crowd. The key now, he said, was “to go out there” and spread his message “across the way.” “This is how we’re gonna win Iowa. And Iowa is how we’re gonna win the nomination. And that’s how we’re going to win the Presidency—so I think we’ll be looking back very fondly on this day.”

As the volunteers made their way to College Green Park, where eight hundred people convened for Buttigieg’s final stop, I chatted with Izzi Teduits and Sean Murphy, two students who helm a campus organization at the University of Iowa called Hawkeyes for Pete. Like many of Buttigieg’s volunteers, the students plan to rely on what the campaign refers to as “relational organizing,” a strategy that prioritizes leveraging familial and social networks over cold-calling strangers. Earlier that day, in Cedar Rapids, a crowd member who works at the university described a “buzz” for the candidate on campus. “You’ll see the T-shirts,” he told me. “You’ll see the signs. I have not seen that with any other candidate.” On campus, students had just finished their first week of classes, but Murphy, a sophomore, described an already palpable sense of enthusiasm. “The university president hosts a block party at the start of school, and people were just ecstatic about Pete,” he said. “He’s young. He’s fresh. He has great ideas.”

For the last few months, Buttigieg has drawn crowds in Iowa that conjure the early energy of the Obama campaign. Last month, after five hundred people showed up to a rally in Fairfield, more than a few told me that, although Obama’s audience in the same town twelve years ago was slightly larger, no other candidate’s numbers have come as close. The campaign has not resisted leaning into these comparisons, in no small part, it seems, because Buttigieg will need to rely on a similar tactic to succeed. In 2008, Obama managed to activate political interest in under-engaged communities in Iowa, where an unprecedented turnout of first-time caucusgoers delivered him a surprising eight-point victory. The precedent for such a strategy might be rarefied, but it exists. The question is whether Buttigieg’s campaign has the power, and the patience, to repeat it.

If there was any lingering doubt that Donald Trump’s trade war with China is exerting a considerable cost on the American economy, it was erased on Tuesday, when a closely watched statistic indicated that factory output dropped in August. The news confirmed other recent suggestions that the manufacturing sector has entered a recession.

That doesn’t mean the over-all economy is slumping—not yet, anyway. These days, manufacturing is dwarfed by the giant service sector, which includes industries like health care, finance, and retailing. But it’s still a key part of the economy, and it plays an outsized role in Trump country, particularly the Midwest.

During the 2016 campaign, Trump promised to restore manufacturing to its former glory, and during the first two years of his Presidency he boasted frequently about how well it was going. On Tuesday, he didn’t comment on the new report, which coincided with another drop on Wall Street. Last week, stock prices rose as traders seized upon hopeful statements from U.S. and Chinese officials about restarting the stalled trade talks. Now the reality of the situation has set in.

This past Sunday, a raft of new tariffs on Chinese goods entering the United States went into effect. So did some new duties on American goods entering China, which Beijing imposed as a retaliatory move. Unlike the initial Trump tariffs, which were levied mainly on “intermediate products” made in China, such as parts for computers and autos, the new levies, of fifteen per cent, apply to many consumer goods, including clothes and sports equipment. That means their effects—higher prices—will be more visible to ordinary Americans.

As recently as March, Trump claimed that “trade wars are good, and easy to win.” That statement ignored history and the business environment facing American manufacturing companies. Many U.S. businesses, facing a steep price hike for the Chinese-made components they rely on to assemble finished goods, were forced to try to source from other countries. Meanwhile, the entire manufacturing sector was faced with rising uncertainty about when, or whether, the trade war would be resolved. With Trump issuing dire threats one moment and making nice with Xi Jinping the next, it was hard for anyone to figure out how things would play out.

The net results of all of this were cuts in production and postponements to capital investments. Back in April, just one month after Trump issued his idle boast, the manufacturing index maintained by the Institute for Supply Management, a nonprofit trade group, started to drop. Tuesday’s announcement confirmed that the index, which is based on a survey of purchasing managers at large and small firms, slid again in August. That means it has fallen for five months in a row, and the chain of causation isn’t in dispute. For the respondents to the monthly I.S.M. survey, when it comes to lost manufacturing power, “trade remains the most significant issue,” Timothy Fiore, who compiles the index, told National Public Radio on Tuesday.

In spite of Trump’s bluster, he is looking more and more boxed in. All along, his thinking has been that export-dependent China simply couldn’t withstand a lengthy trade war with its largest trading partner. But the government in Beijing has held firm, despite a sharp slowdown in the Chinese economy. Rather than acceding to Trump’s demands for extensive changes in how it organizes its economy and treats American firms, China has responded to each of his escalations with retaliatory measures. On Sunday, the Chinese government filed a complaint over Trump’s latest tariffs with the World Trade Organization, the intergovernmental ruling body that it joined in 2001. In a statement, the Chinese Ministry of Commerce said that China would “firmly safeguard its legitimate rights and interests” and “firmly defend the multilateral trading system and international trade order in accordance with relevant WTO rules.”

With the Communist Party of China gearing up for a big celebration at the start of next month, marking the seventieth anniversary of the establishment of the People’s Republic, it seems unlikely that Chinese trade negotiators will make any big concessions during the next few weeks. Will Trump? Unlike Xi and other Chinese leaders, he has an election to worry about. The conflicting signals he sent during August—escalating his tariff threats and then talking up the possibility of a resolution after the Dow dived—demonstrated that he is at least intermittently aware of the political constraints he faces.

As part of his strategy of escalation, he has threatened to further expand his tariffs on October 1st and December 15th. If these changes went into effect, virtually all imports from China would be facing some sort of a levy, and the average rate would be 24.3 per cent, according to Chad Bown, of the Peterson Institute for International Economics. China would retaliate again, and, entering an election year, Trump would be in an all-out trade war. It can only be guessed how the stock market would react to this prospect. Despite the prospect of more interest-rate cuts from the Federal Reserve, it may be ugly.

The alternative could be for Trump to accept some sort of a face-saving deal, in which China agreed to increase its imports of American goods, particularly agricultural goods, and the United States agreed to roll back some of its tariffs and ease the restrictions it has imposed on Huawei, the Chinese technology company. Such a deal would involve the Trump Administration setting aside, at least for now, its demands for structural changes to China’s model of state-led capitalism. But it might calm the nerves of investors and help prevent the troubles of the manufacturing sector from spreading into the broader economy. (Over-all spending by consumers has held up pretty well so far, but a report, released on Friday, showed consumer confidence taking a dive in August.)

On Tuesday, Tariff Man was back in Twitter-attack mode, warning China not to try and wait out his Administration, saying that the terms of a deal in his second term would be “MUCH TOUGHER.” China’s supply chain, Trump said, would “crumble” in the meantime. Words are cheap. Over the next few weeks, his actions will be the thing to watch.