Former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg used a Sunday television appearance to reaffirm his support for adding seats to the Supreme Court, a position that fits neatly into a broader Democratic push to reshape the judiciary ahead of the 2028 presidential race.

Buttigieg told NBC's Kristen Welker on Meet the Press that he still backs expanding the bench, years after first floating the idea during his own presidential campaign. He once supported raising the number of justices from nine to fifteen. On Sunday, he declined to say how many seats he now wants to add, but left no doubt about his view of the institution itself.

Welker put the question directly, noting that former Vice President Kamala Harris has also called for expanding the court. Buttigieg did not flinch.

"Yes, I talked about this years ago when I was running for president. At the time, it was a pretty lonely position. People were looking at me funny when I was talking about reforming the Supreme Court."

He went further, calling the court "a nakedly partisan institution" and framing expansion not as raw power politics but as structural reform.

"And I want to be clear: the idea is not to just add justices for its own sake. The idea is to reform the institution to make it less partisan."

Strip away the careful language and the proposal is straightforward: add enough justices to dilute the current conservative majority. Buttigieg can dress it up as good-government reform, but the math runs in only one direction. No one in Democratic politics is proposing to expand the court and then fill the new seats with originalists.

Democrats have been building toward this for years

Buttigieg is not an outlier. He is joining a growing chorus. Former Vice President Kamala Harris raised the issue at a CNN town hall in October 2024, when an attendee asked whether she would support increasing the court to twelve justices. Harris stopped short of endorsing a specific number but signaled openness.

"I do believe that there should be some kind of reform of the court, and we can study what that actually looks like."

Harris has continued to position herself for a possible 2028 run, and her willingness to entertain court-packing tracks with the party's leftward drift on judicial matters. She has publicly called for expanding the court as part of her broader 2028 positioning.

Former Attorney General Eric Holder has gone even further. He called the Supreme Court a "broken institution" and said that if Democrats secured a governing trifecta in 2028, the White House plus both chambers of Congress, reforms including court expansion should be on the table. In 2020 and 2021, Holder supported adding seats and advocated for eighteen-year term limits for justices.

President Trump highlighted Holder's comments in December 2025, responding that such a move would "destroy our Constitution." Trump also called for eliminating the Senate filibuster, a move that would, among other things, make it harder for a future Democratic majority to ram through court-packing legislation without a supermajority.

The president's own relationship with the Supreme Court has been far from simple. Trump has publicly rebuked his own Supreme Court picks when they ruled against his administration's positions, a reminder that the court's conservative justices have not functioned as a rubber stamp for any president.

Buttigieg eyes 2028, and the polls show it

Buttigieg's Sunday appearance was not just about the judiciary. It was a campaign audition. The former Transportation Secretary has been steadily raising his national profile, and early polling suggests Democratic voters are paying attention.

A University of New Hampshire poll released in July showed Buttigieg at twenty-one percent among Democratic primary voters, just one point behind Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, who led at twenty-two percent. Sen. Mark Kelly of Arizona registered nine percent. California Governor Gavin Newsom came in at eight. Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont drew six percent. Harris trailed at five percent. Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro and Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker rounded out the field at two and one percent, respectively.

A separate Public Sentiment Institute poll conducted in Michigan and released in August put Buttigieg even further ahead, at 24.2 percent among likely Democratic primary voters. The undecided share sat at 21.7 percent, while Harris drew just 5.1 percent.

Those numbers suggest Buttigieg sees a real opening. And his willingness to embrace court-packing, a position that once made him an outlier, signals he believes the Democratic primary electorate has moved far enough left to reward it.

Electoral College abolition fits the same pattern

Court expansion is not the only structural change Buttigieg has endorsed. At a town hall in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in May 2026, he called for replacing the Electoral College with a national popular vote. He argued such a system would force candidates from both parties to campaign everywhere, that Democrats would show up in Oklahoma and Republicans would campaign in Brooklyn.

That argument sounds appealing in the abstract, but it conveniently ignores recent history. Trump won both the Electoral College and the national popular vote in 2024. The push to scrap the system gained momentum among Democrats only after it produced outcomes they did not like.

The Supreme Court itself has been at the center of multiple high-profile disputes in recent months, with cases touching everything from election rules to executive authority. Republican officials have also engaged directly with the court on contested issues, including mail-in ballot regulations ahead of the 2026 midterms.

Buttigieg's combined platform, pack the court, abolish the Electoral College, amounts to a proposal to revise the rules of American governance because the existing rules have not delivered the results his party wanted. He frames both ideas as nonpartisan reform. The timing and the targets tell a different story.

Calling the court 'partisan' does not make it so

Buttigieg's central claim, that the Supreme Court has become "a nakedly partisan institution", deserves scrutiny on its own terms. The current conservative majority was built through constitutionally prescribed means: presidents nominated justices, and the Senate confirmed them. Democrats may dislike the outcomes, but the process followed the rules.

Labeling the court "partisan" because it reaches conclusions progressives oppose is itself a partisan act. It redefines any institution that does not align with the left's preferred outcomes as broken and in need of fixing. And the proposed fix, adding seats until the ideological balance tips, is the most nakedly partisan move available under the Constitution.

Buttigieg acknowledged that his position was once lonely within his own party. He now says "a lot more people are onto that idea." That shift does not reflect a change in the court's conduct. It reflects a change in Democratic strategy. The court did not become partisan. Democrats decided to treat it as one more institution to capture.

When a politician calls an independent branch of government "nakedly partisan" and proposes to restructure it with new appointees of his own choosing, the word for that is not reform. It is consolidation.