South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg Pete ButtigiegButtigieg stands in as Pence for Harris's debate practice Hillicon Valley: FBI, DHS warn that foreign hackers will likely spread disinformation around election results | Social media platforms put muscle into National Voter Registration Day | Trump to meet with Republican state officials on tech liability shield Facebook takes down Chinese network targeting Philippines, Southeast Asia and the US MORE said in an interview published Monday that he's unsure why his as-yet unannounced campaign for the presidency is "doing so well."

“Candidly, I don’t even know all the reasons why this is going so well,” he told New York Magazine.

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“I think everything about this is as improbable as it is well aligned. There’s that line about me being a laboratory concoction of what a politician might be," he added. "I get where that comes from, but then again, in what laboratory would you have cooked up as your entry in a presidential contest ‘mid-size-city midwestern mayor who’s not even 40 yet,’ you know?”

Buttigieg, who earlier this year launched an exploratory committee for president, is expected to formally launch his campaign Sunday.

He raised more than $7 million in the first quarter of 2019 and in recent weeks Buttigieg has placed third in multiple polls of Democratic voters in Iowa. He also came in third in a recent poll of Democratic voters in New Hampshire.

Buttigieg also told New York Magazine that there is "a kind of whiplash to" the success.

"But it’s a good thing. The speedup of it, the trajectory of it, has definitely been more dramatic than we had expected. But we also prepared by putting together a good team, knowing that, sooner or later, if our theory of the case was right, we were going to grow," he said.

"We didn’t know that we’d explode onto the scene this early in the year, and that creates the challenge of making sure that we can sustain that energy. But I think the way you outlive the flavor-of-the-month period is through substance. We’re gonna have a substantive process," Buttigieg added.