The world was different more than four months ago when Carly Fiorina launched her 2016 presidential campaign by saying, “it’s time to declare the end of identity politics.” Back then, there were only six Republican candidates running for president, Rick Perry had high hopes of a political comeback, and pundits still regarded rumors of Donald Trump entering the race as an elaborate reality-TV ploy.

Since everything else has turned upside down in the interval, you’ll have to forgive the ex-Hewlett Packard CEO for adopting a new campaign tactic over the last couple of weeks. Fiorina is already doing better than anyone but herself might have expected: She’s tied for sixth place, and is the only candidate to graduate from the undercard debate in August to the primetime slot at the second GOP presidential debate. Now comes her moment on a national stage to try out that new strategy she has for standing out amid a sea of men in ties: Fiorina has taken to speaking directly to conservative women, asking them to join her if they can’t stand sexism from the likes of Donald Trump.

As is usual these days, Trump himself was the catalyst for Fiorina’s new strategy, when he remarked on Fiorina’s appearance in a Rolling Stone article published on Sept. 9: “Look at that face! Would anybody vote for that?” While more seasoned candidates have tried and failed to troll Trump to gain attention—Bobby Jindal is still trying and failing—Fiorina’s response to the provocation has been spot-on. In remarks last week, which were highlighted in an ad created by her super PAC on Monday, Fiorina said, “Ladies, look at this face. And look at all your faces. The face of all leadership.” The ad ends, “This is the face of a 61-year-old woman. I am proud of every year and every wrinkle."

For Fiorina, this is surprisingly feminist talk. She is, after all, a candidate whose book describes modern-day feminism as “an orthodoxy that seeks to portray all men as the enemy and women as requiring the constant assistance of government.” And unlike Hillary Clinton, notes GOP pollster Kellyanne Conway, Fiorina has “never said I’m running to be the first woman president of the United States.”

From the start, Fiorina’s pitch has been that she is the antidote to Clinton’s “playing the gender card.” But all along, Fiorina has played it subtly herself, gladly exploiting some of the GOP’s image problems among women voters while denying that those problems actually exist. She's touted her advantages as the only woman running for president, while obliquely discussing the challenges Republican nominees have faced in the past with women voters: "I think that if Hillary Clinton were to face a female nominee, there are a whole set of things that she won’t be able to talk about," Fiorina has been saying in her standard stump speech. "She won’t be able to talk about being the first woman president. She won’t be able to talk about a war on women without being challenged." Last week, while Fiorina was encouraging other GOP women to look around them at "the face of leadership in our party, the party of woman’s suffrage,” she still said precious little about the current state of said party.