The mayor of South Bend, Indiana, is 37, gay and has made a strong start in the race to 2020

Democratic hopeful Pete Buttigieg is having a moment in his long shot quest to become the nation’s youngest and first openly gay president – 317 days before the Iowa caucuses.

Shortest Way Home review: Pete Buttigieg as president in waiting Read more

The little-known mayor of South Bend, Indiana, has drawn attention after a widely-praised performance during a CNN town hall and a string of media interviews – a sign of how fluid and unpredictable the Democratic presidential primary is nearly a year before voting begins.

“He’ll be a little less of a long shot tomorrow,” David Axelrod, the prominent Democratic strategist and former adviser to Barack Obama, said after the town hall.

Sign up for the US morning briefing

Days later, after an appearance on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, co-hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski said they were “overwhelmed” by the positive reaction to Buttigieg.

“The only other time in 12 years that we heard from as many people about a guest was after Barack Obama appeared on Morning Joe,” Scarborough said.

The traction should not be overstated: Buttigieg has just barely started to register in public polls. But the early buzz has helped propel his yet undeclared campaign.

Last week he surpassed the donor threshold to qualify for the Democratic primary debates, earning support from more than 65,000 individual contributors. His exploratory committee announced it was hiring nearly 20 more staffers – enough to almost double the size of his team now. And a meet-and-greet in Rock Hill, South Carolina, on Saturday, was moved from a room in the college library to its gymnasium thanks to a spike in interest.

Finding oxygen in a Democratic field that numbers close to 20 candidates and includes senators, members of Congress, governors, a famous author and possibly a former vice-president is no easy feat. But Buttigieg – who is known to his constituents as “Mayor Pete” – believes there is a case for electing a 37-year-old mayor from a mid-sized city in the industrial midwest.

“My face is my message,” Buttigieg said on Morning Joe, making a JFK-style appeal for “generational change”.

At 39 he would be the youngest president in American history if elected, and the first millennial. He would also make history on another front: Buttigieg would be the first openly gay president and his husband, Chasten Glezman, would be the “first gentleman”.

Like many of his rivals, he offers a stark contrast to the president in style and substance. Buttigieg is the son of a Maltese immigrant; a navy veteran who took leave from his civic day job to serve in Afghanistan; a Harvard-educated Rhodes scholar; a devout Christian and a polyglot and bibliophile who learned Norwegian to read books by an author in Norway whose work had not yet been translated to English.

Anand Giridharadas (@AnandWrites) A true story about @PeteButtigieg. pic.twitter.com/ojFXa8IguU

Democrats have applauded his answers to key questions. Is a two-term mayor of a city with just over 100,000 really qualified to be president? “I have more experience in government than the president of the United States.” And how will he stand up to Trump? “I’m a gay man from Indiana,” Buttigieg likes to say. “I know how to deal with a bully.”

In response to a question during the CNN town hall about the former governor of his home state, Mike Pence, Buttigieg asked how a man who describes himself as a religious conservative became “the cheerleader of the porn star presidency”.

“Is it that he stopped believing in scripture when he started believing in Donald Trump?” the mayor asked.

Too much, too young? Mayor could become the first millennial president Read more

Buttigieg’s youth and optimism are advantages in a crowded field led, at least in polling, by two septuagenarians, said Howard Dean, a former chairman of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) who endorsed Buttigieg when the mayor ran for that job in 2017.

But Dean is also impressed by his artful attacks on the president.

“He’s able to say Trump is a jerk without using that word,” he said. “That’s going to be an essential quality of the nominee – to not get trapped by Trump’s ‘me, me, me, everybody look at me’ problem.”

As Buttigieg’s profile rises, some Democrats see evidence of a double standard in the positive reception he is receiving compared with his female rivals.

Jill Filipovic, the author of The H-Spot: The Feminist Pursuit of Happiness and a Guardian contributor, said: “I really like Pete Buttigieg. He is intelligent. He is decent. He is curious.

“He says ‘I think that policy matters, I’m a policy guy,’ but all of his policies are basically [Senator Elizabeth] Warren’s (except less specific and less progressive). I wonder why he’s not working for her.”

Buttigieg has not yet formally launched a presidential campaign. In a Fox interview, he explained that he established an exploratory committee in January as a way to gauge responses “to the idea of a midwestern millennial mayor entering the conversation for president”. He added that he still hasn’t made a decision “but all of the signs are pointing in the right direction”.

If the mayor is looking for a sign, his debut visit to Iowa last month left Democrats eager to hear more, said Jan Bauer, who was in the audience when he spoke at a local coffee shop in Ames.

Bauer, a former chair of the Story County Democrats, said the Friday morning event was memorably cold but he still drew a crowd of roughly 75 people.

“They came not really knowing who they were going to see and left, I think it’s fair to say, very, very impressed,” she said. Bauer hasn’t decided who she will support in the primary – but she believes at this early stage, Buttigieg has a shot at the nomination – just like anyone else running.

“Back in February of 2007, no one knew who Barack Obama was either,” she said.