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A US woman who initially voted for Pete Buttigieg in the Iowa caucus asked to change her vote after learning the Democratic candidate is gay.

Footage of the incident, shared on social media, shows the voter’s shock at discovering Mr Buttigieg, 38, is married to a man.

"Are you saying he has a same-sex partner? Pete?" the unnamed woman asks a polling station representative. "Are you kidding?"

The staff member Nikki van den Heever, responds that, yes, he is married to his partner Chasten.

At that point the woman replies: "I don't want anybody like that in the White House,” adding: “So, can I have my card back?" in reference to her caucus voting slip.

Ms Van den Heever says she doesn’t know if the rules will allow the woman to rescind her vote, which she has already signed and submitted.

She then urges the woman to “look inside her heart” and reconsider her request, saying: "He's a human being, right? Just like you and me, and it shouldn't really matter.”

When the voter replies: “Well he’d better read the Bible,” Ms den Heever explains that he does. But the woman interrupts with: “Why does it say in the Bible that a man should marry a woman then?”

The debate continues with the woman asking why the candidate’s sexual orientation “has never been brought about before.”

Mr van den Heever and another voter standing next to her explain: “It’s common knowledge.”

Mr Butteigieg, a military veteran and former South Bend mayor, has touted himself throughout his campaign as the candidate for change.

During a rally in Iowa on Thursday night, he alluded to the state’s legalisation of gay marriage in 2009, and how it gave him hope that he might someday “be a happily married man.”

And in the first paragraph of his bio on his Pete For America campaign website, it states that he lives in the same neighbourhood where he was raised “with his husband, Chasten, and their rescue dogs, Buddy and Truman.”

Still, the voter remains unswayed by Ms Van den Heever’s call to “dig deep inside and think, should it matter if it's a woman or if it's a man, or if they're homosexual or heterosexual, if you believe what they say?"

Instead the woman responds: “It all just went down the toilet."

The video, shared on Twitter by filmmaker Annabel Park, has been viewed more than 2.3 million times in 24 hours, with users praising Ms Van den Heever for how she handled the situation.

Ms Park dubbed her reaction a "masterclass in patience, persistence, and love."

Partial results from the Iowa Democratic caucuses show Pete Buttigieg with a narrow lead over Bernie Sanders.

Whichever candidate wins the Democratic primaries will go to challenge President Donald Trump in November's White House election.