Pete and Amy Surge in New Hampshire

That’s how you could describe me as I skidded along a narrow two-lane highway in New Hampshire. The 56 miles from Salem to Manchester were, to say the least, a worrisome experience. There’s not much snow in Tel Aviv.

Once I arrived, I encountered about 650 people gathered in a high school gym in Salem, a quaint town of about 30,000 people. On a bitterly cold night, they had gathered to hear Pete Buttigieg — the 38-year-old former mayor of South Bend, Indiana’s fourth-largest city — who has improbably catapulted to the top of the Democratic ticket with a narrow win in the Iowa caucuses.

“Mayor Pete,” as he is fond of calling himself, is running neck and neck with front-runner Senator Bernie Sanders in New Hampshire, and it feels like momentum is on his side. Buttigieg has managed to spin his chief weakness — youth and inexperience — to his advantage. Many of the people I spoke to at his rally repeated the youth mantra again and again. Biden and Sanders are past their prime, they said. They want fresh blood.

Even his lack of experience in politics is seen as an advantage among his supporters. Unlike Sanders and former vice president Joe Biden, Buttigieg has never been tarnished by Washington, D.C. — primarily because he’s never been elected to serve at the federal level. He’s perceived as a promise. Again, his liability has turned into an asset.