An appearance by Pete Buttigieg on Friday morning on New Hampshire talk radio is fueling ongoing speculation that the U.S. Secretary of Transportation in President Biden's administration may be mulling another White House run in 2028.

Buttigieg, a 2020 Democratic presidential candidate who is considered a potential contender for the next nomination race, has made numerous radio appearances across the country during his four years steering the Department of Transportation, including a bunch in New Hampshire, which prides itself on being the first-in-the-nation presidential primary state.

But with President-elect Trump a month away from returning to the White House, and Democrats scrambling in the wake of November's election setbacks to find a path out of the political wilderness, Buttigieg's latest radio appearance in New Hampshire is grabbing increased attention as the extremely early preseason moves in the party's 2028 presidential primary race will soon start.

And the guest segment by Buttigieg on the statewide morning news-talk radio program "New Hampshire Today" is bound to spark more 2028 speculation.

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"The only thing I'm sure is next is a little vacation," Buttigieg said when asked by host Chris Ryan about his plans once his tenure as transportation secretary sunsets on Jan. 20.

Buttigieg said he and his spouse, Chasten, "are ready to spend a little time together. I'm ready to be around our three-year-old twins a little more, and I'm determined not to make any life decisions too quickly in the new year."

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"But I will find ways to make myself useful, and maybe that's running for office, and maybe that's not. I'll take the next few weeks and months to work through that," Buttigieg shared.

And he emphasized that "I know what I care about. I care about how communities, like the place where I grew up, find a better future. I care about how to make sure technology makes us all better off and not worse off. I care about how the infrastructure issues and opportunities I've worked on can develop. I care about public service. I care about our democracy, and I will find ways to work on that, whatever shape that might take."

Buttigieg, a former naval intelligence officer who deployed to the war in Afghanistan and who served eight years as mayor of South Bend, Indiana, was a longshot when he launched his 2020 presidential campaign. 

But his campaign caught fire, and he narrowly edged Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont to win the Iowa caucuses before coming in close second to Sanders in the New Hampshire presidential primary. But Buttigieg, along with the rest of the Democratic field, dropped out of the race and endorsed Biden as the former vice president won the South Carolina primary in a landslide, swept the Super Tuesday contests and eventually clinched the nomination before winning the White House.

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During his tenure as Secretary of Transportation, Buttigieg has made a handful of official visits to New Hampshire, most recently earlier this year. And two years ago, in a political trip, he headlined the New Hampshire Democratic Party's major autumn fundraising gala.

Asked in the interview whether he'll be returning to the Granite State in the near future, he quipped, "I'm sure I'll turn up before too long."

Buttigieg, in recent years, has also made regular appearances on the Fox News Channel to highlight the Biden administration's efforts. This year, he served as a high-profile surrogate on Fox News and elsewhere across the media landscape for Biden, and later for Vice President Kamala Harris, on the campaign trail.

After his 2020 presidential campaign, Buttiegieg moved from red-state Indiana to neighboring Michigan, which is a key battleground, and now calls Traverse City, Michigan, home.

In recent weeks, Buttigieg has fielded calls by some Michigan Democrats urging him to consider a 2026 run for governor, to succeed Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, who is term-limited.

"I haven’t made any decisions about, big decisions about my future," Buttigieg told reporters earlier this month in Detroit, in a line that he would repeat in this week's New Hampshire radio interview.

With former president and now President-elect Donald Trump unable to run again for the White House in 2028, Vice President-elect JD Vance appears to be the heir apparent to the America First movement and the Republican Party's powerful MAGA base.

But even though the 40-year-old Vance will be considered the front-runner in the next GOP presidential nomination race, the chair of the Republican National Committee says the party will hold to its traditional role of staying neutral in an open and contested presidential primary.

"We will," RNC chair Michael Whatley said in a Fox News Digital interview.

Vance, with Trump's support in a party firmly in the president-elect's grip, will be very hard to knock off in the 2028 Republican presidential primaries.

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"We are getting four more years of Trump and then eight years of JD Vance," Donald Trump Jr. said in October on the campaign trail. 

The younger Trump, who's a powerful ally of the vice president-elect, is extremely popular with the MAGA base.

"The vice president will be in the catbird seat. No question about it," longtime Republican consultant Dave Carney recently told Fox News Digital. 

Carney, a veteran of numerous Republican presidential campaigns over the past four decades, said that Vance "is the guy to beat."

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David Kochel, another longtime GOP strategist with plenty of presidential campaign experience, said that Vance is the front-runner due to "the size and the scope" of Trump's Electoral College and popular vote victories last month, "and the implied passing of the torch from Donald Trump."

"There will be no shortage of people looking at it. But most people looking at it are seeing the relative strength of the Trump victory and the movement," Kochel said.

However, Kochel noted that "nobody will completely defer to JD Vance. There will be a contest. There always is."

Whatley, who was interviewed a week after Trump asked him to continue as RNC chair moving forward, said he's "very excited about the bench that we have in the Republican Party right now."

"You think about all the Republican governors, you think about all the Republican senators, the members of the House that we have, the leaders across the country that have been engaged in this campaign are going to be part of the president's cabinet," he added.

Whatley argued that the president-elect's "America First movement is bigger than Donald Trump. He is the tip of the spear. He is the vanguard of this movement. But. It is a very big movement right now."

The chairman on Thursday also emphasized that "Donald Trump has completely remade the Republican Party. We're now the working-class party. We're now a party that is communicating and working with every single voter, speaking to every single voter about the issues that they care about. So, as we go into 2028, we are in a great position to be able to continue the momentum of this agenda and this movement."

Unlike the rival Democratic National Committee, which in the 2024 cycle upended the traditional presidential nominating calendar, the RNC made no major changes to their primary lineup, and kept the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary as their first two contests.

Asked about the 2028 calendar, Whatley said "I've not had any conversations with anybody who wants to change the calendar on our side. I know the Democrats did during the course of this election cycle, not sure that it really helped them all that much."

"We're very comfortable with the calendar as it is. But as we move towards 2028, we'll have those conversations," he added.

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Republicans enjoyed major victories in last month's elections, with Trump defeating Vice President Kamala Harris to win the White House, the GOP flipping control of the Senate from the Democrats, and holding on to their razor-thin majority in the House.

Whatley argued that "as we go forward into this next election cycle, the fundamentals are going to remain the same" during an exclusive interview with Fox News Digital.

"We need to make sure that we are building our state parties, that we're building our ground game, we're building our election integrity apparatus to be in place to make sure that when we get those candidates through those primaries in ‘26, that we're going to be in a position to take them all the way to the finish line," he emphasized.

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But the party in power traditionally suffers setbacks in the following midterm elections. And Trump, who was a magnate for voter turnout, won't be on the ballot in 2026.

Whatley said that even though he won't be a candidate, "President Trump is going to be a very significant part of this because at the end of the day, what we need to do is hold on to the House, hold on to the Senate so that we can finish his term and his agenda."

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And Whatley predicted that "Donald Trump will be very active on the campaign trail for Republicans. And his agenda is the agenda that we're going to be running on."

The Harris campaign and the Democratic National Committee outraised the Trump campaign and the RNC this past cycle, but Whatley is confident that with the party soon to control the White House, Republicans will be even more competitive in the campaign cash race in the midterms.

"We're pretty excited about where we are in terms of the fundraising that we did throughout the course of this cycle and what we're going to do going forward," he said.

Whatley said that his message to donors will be "we were successful in putting Donald Trump into the White House, and we need to carry forward with his agenda by keeping these House majorities and Senate majorities."

He also pushed back on the persistent questioning of the RNC and Trump campaign's ground game efforts during the general election.

"We focused very hard on low propensity voters. This was an entirely new system that we put in place over the course of this election cycle. It worked very, very well," he touted. 

And looking ahead, he said "in a midterm election cycle, low propensity voters are going to, again, be very, very important for us. So, we're going to continue to focus on building that type of a program."

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Whatley spotlighted that 'we also focused on outreach to communities that the Republican Party has traditionally not reached out to - Black voters, Hispanic voters, Asian American voters. That's why we were able to see such seismic shifts towards Donald Trump versus where those blocks had been in 2016 and 2020. We also saw seismic shifts among young voters and women voters because we were talking to every single American voter. Our ground game was very significant."

Whatley was interviewed a week after Trump asked him to continue as RNC chair moving forward.

In March, as he clinched the 2024 GOP presidential nomination, Trump named Whatley to succeed Ronna McDaniel as RNC chair. Whatley, a longtime ally of the former president and a major supporter of Trump's election integrity efforts, had served as RNC general counsel and chair of the North Carolina Republican Party. 

Trump is term-limited and won't be able to seek election again in 2028. Vice President-elect Sen. JD Vance will likely be considered the front-runner for the 2028 GOP nomination.

But asked if the RNC will hold to its traditional role of staying neutral in an open and contested presidential primary, Whatley said "we will."

And he added that "I'm very excited about the bench that we have in the Republican Party right now. You think about all the Republican governors, you think about all the Republican senators, the members of the House that we have, the leaders across the country that have been engaged in this campaign are going to be part of the president's cabinet."

Whatley argued that the president-elect's "America First movement is bigger than Donald Trump. He is the tip of the spear. He is the vanguard of this movement. But. It is a very big movement right now."

The chairman also emphasized that "Donald Trump has completely remade the Republican Party. We're now the working-class party. We're now a party that is communicating and working with every single voter, speaking to every single voter about the issues that they care about. So, as we go into 2028, we are in a great position to be able to continue the momentum of this agenda and this movement."

Unlike the DNC, which in the 2024 cycle upended the traditional presidential nominating calendar, the RNC made no major changes to their primary lineup, and kept the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary as their first two contests.

Asked about the 2028 calendar, Whatley said "I've not had any conversations with anybody who wants to change the calendar on our side. I know the Democrats did during the course of this election cycle, not sure that it really helped them all that much."

"We're very comfortable with the calendar as it is. But as we move towards 2028, we'll have those conversations," he added.