A 38-year-old former mayor who shot to prominence in the US Presidential race has dropped out after his momentum slowed.

Pete Buttigieg turned heads after claiming a shock victory in the Democratic Party's Iowa caucus – and coming a close second in New Hampshire.

But he will now leave democratic socialist Bernie Sanders and former Vice President Joe Biden to duke it out with other rivals for the Democratic nomination.

It comes barely 24 hours before the Democratic Party's biggest day of nominations for its candidacy, known as Super Tuesday. Whoever wins the final nomination will take on Donald Trump for the White House in November.

Buttigieg, the former two-term mayor of South Bend, Indiana, is an Afghanistan war veteran and was the first openly gay candidate to make a run for the White House.

But his early momentum from those rural, mostly white states did not translate into electoral success in the more diverse states of Nevada and South Carolina.

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After finishing a distant third in the Nevada caucuses, Buttigieg came in fourth on Saturday in South Carolina, where he won support from just 3% of African-American voters.

The centrist Democrat's withdrawal from the race could help former Vice President Joe Biden, a fellow moderate who got a much-needed victory on Saturday.

Biden is now looking to wrest momentum from liberal front-runner Bernie Sanders in this week's 14-state Super Tuesday nominating contests.

Speaking in South Bend, Buttigieg said his campaign began its "unlikely journey" with a staff of four, no big email lists and no personal fortune.

"We got into this race in order to defeat the current president and in order to usher in a new kind of politics," Buttigieg told a crowd of supporters.

Now, he said, it was time to "step aside and help bring our party and our country together."

Mr Buttigieg is a former Rhodes scholar, studying at both Harvard and Oxford, before serving in the Afghanistan War.

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He married his husband, Chasten, in 2017 after they met on dating app Hinge.

And he would have been the youngest person to become president, turning 39 the day before the next inauguration, on Jan. 20, 2021.

Theodore Roosevelt was 42 when he took office – while John F. Kennedy was 43 and Bill Clinton 46.

He was first elected mayor of South Bend, which has a population of about 100,000, back in 2011 when he was just 29.

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