On the Tuesday when I am to meet Mayor Pete Buttigieg, the South Bend Tribune, his hometown paper, runs a headline with staggering news: An Emerson poll of likely Iowa Caucus voters has put the mayor third among Democratic prospects, ahead of everybody except the grizzled veterans of the race, Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden. The surge is just the latest in a series of ascents that began when Buttigieg, the 37-year-old mayor of a small Rust Belt city, announced his exploratory committee for the presidency in January. Since then, his unlikely climb has energized a scattered race, and has come as a shock to no one more than to the candidate himself. “All these events that we set up as, basically, meet-and-greet events end up being rallies,” he tells me when I arrive at the riverside white colonnaded house he owns with his husband, Chasten. “So I’m learning how to adapt my style.”

In person, Buttigieg’s style is amiable and controlled. He speaks, like a newscaster, in lucid paragraphs, with a solid baritone and boxed-in decorum. He seems to live in white shirts and pressed slacks—it’s his dress even now, around the house—and wears his hair in the same tame coif as Mike Pence, who was elected Indiana’s governor the year he was sworn in as mayor. Showing me into a living room where books on display range from Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century to Peanuts: A Golden Celebration, he takes a seat in front of a huge resource-and-mineral map of Afghanistan. A burl-wood chessboard sits beside a folded-over copy of The New Yorker; most other surfaces, including the dining-room table in the other room, are piled with work papers and the castoffs of a busy life. The home is one of the nicest in the city and serves as a reminder of South Bend’s distance from the coasts: The mortgage payment, according to Buttigieg, is about $450 a month.

Since being elected in 2011, at 29, the mayor has focused his attentions on renewing a city that has not regained its footing since the Studebaker company, which once drove the local economy, shuttered in the sixties. He has distinguished himself by refusing to look backward, instead clearing abandoned properties and promoting downtown development, tech, and public art—often under scrutiny and worry that his policies were not benefiting all residents equally. To those who question his age and experience (the mayorship is the only public office he has ever won), Buttigieg likes to point out that he has been a government executive longer than President Trump. He defaults toward a wonky interiority (he’s at his most animated talking about policy reform) and lives with a longtime wunderkind’s self- minimizing streak: a habit of demurely absorbing admiration as a matter of course. His air is one of quiet, recessive confidence. “I’m actually more comfortable in front of a large crowd than in front of a medium-size crowd,” he tells me. “I’m not sure why—it’s an instinct.”

Happily, large crowds have come to be the norm. On April 14, Buttigieg formally announced his candidacy before thousands assembled in a vaulted former Studebaker factory being pelted by spring rain. “I ran for mayor in 2011 knowing that nothing like Studebaker would ever come back, but that we would, our city would, if we had the courage to reimagine our future,” the mayor said. “That’s why I’m here today: to tell a different story than ‘Make America Great Again.’ ” Earlier that week, on Ellen, Buttigieg had sharpened his language against the LGBTQ stances of Pence, whom he had previously called “cheerleader of the porn-star presidency.” (“I’m not feuding with the vice president, but if he wanted to clear this up, he could come out today and say he’s changed his mind, that it shouldn’t be legal to discriminate against anybody in this country for who they are,” the mayor told DeGeneres.) Of President Trump he has said, “It is hard to look at this president’s actions and believe that they are the actions of somebody who believes in God.” Swarmed with political reporters at his rally, Buttigieg elaborated his themes. “It is time to walk away from the politics of the past, and toward something totally different,” he said. “I’m here to join you to make a little news,” he continued as a chant rose (“Pete! Pete! Pete!”). “I’m a proud son of South Bend, Indiana, and I am running for president of the United States.”