He has blanketed the airwaves with half a billion dollars in ads and paid social media influencers to spread his message to their millions of followers. He has hired more than 2,400 people to fuel his campaign, paying them premiums and outfitting them in sweatshirts and fanny packs bearing his name. He has opened more than 200 offices from Maine to California, with more than 100 in states that will participate in Tuesday’s coast-to-coast Democratic primaries.

Michael R. Bloomberg’s bid for the White House is most often understood through the zeros and superlatives needed to describe the scope and scale of his operation — and for good reason. Never before has a presidential campaign had the virtually limitless resources of a multibillionaire candidate who has said he will spend whatever it takes to defeat the incumbent president.

But behind the numbers is a robust organization that looks like nothing else in politics today, having grown so large so fast, with the goal of shattering fundamental assumptions about how a presidential candidate can win the nomination.

What other campaigns took more than a year to build, with visits to fish frys in Iowa and cable news studios, the Bloomberg campaign did over the three months from Thanksgiving to Presidents’ Day.