He cast himself as a voice for marginalized communities, releasing detailed policies on immigration, policing, lead exposure, indigenous communities, people with disabilities and animals while also meeting with inmates and touring a Las Vegas flood tunnel where homeless people seek shelter.

“Some of the people we targeted are people who literally don’t ever vote and could never get included in the political process, people like homeless people,” said a former aide who was laid off when the campaign shuttered its staff in New Hampshire and South Carolina to prioritize Iowa and Nevada.

“It’s tough because in places like Nevada, they rarely poll,” the ex-aide added. “The other issue is polling has always historically underpolled people of color and poor people, people who don’t have landlines. So when you make that system, so when the DNC basically says, ‘Oh, all right, this is how people are gonna qualify,’ you’re setting people up for failure.”

Mayra Macías, executive director of Latino Victory Fund, a progressive PAC that seeks to increase Latino political power and that endorsed Castro in August, said in her experience dealing with media, Castro’s candidacy was often written off. In her estimation, Castro fell victim to an electability argument that rewarded poll leaders in Iowa and New Hampshire with even higher polling and additional media coverage.

Castro never got significant media attention or polled above 2 percent in the first two early states.

“The bulk of the interviews that we’ve had have felt like almost a moratorium since Day One — folks bringing up a million and one reasons why his campaign wasn’t gonna be viable,” Macías lamented. “The mainstream coverage — or lack thereof — that his campaign received was a big factor, particularly because the campaign doesn’t have the resources as other campaigns do to get their message out there to the American people, so a lot of the campaign’s ability to reach out to folks really did depend on this earned media.”

Colin Strother, a Texas Democratic strategist who once advised Castro, said the system seems like it was “engineered” to make the primary a three-person race between the “three white septuagenarians” in former Vice President Joe Biden and Sens. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Bernie Sanders of Vermont while preventing diverse candidates like Castro, Harris and Booker from reaching the goal line.

But Castro’s staff is also responsible for his demise, Strother said, blaming the candidate’s senior team for robbing their candidate of the opportunity “to get to Super Tuesday, when brown people and black people are finally gonna get a chance to vote.”

“They knew what the process was. At the end of the day, you’ve got to have a strategy to give your candidate a shot, and Julián’s staff didn’t,” he said. “They were spending money they shouldn’t have spent and pushing a strategy that they had to have a reasonable assumption wasn’t gonna work.”

Castro’s first campaign stop was Puerto Rico, instead of Iowa or New Hampshire, the traditional early states. And two days after the DNC announced its polling thresholds for the first two debates — thresholds that hinged on performance in the four early states — Castro’s campaign announced a 50-state tour.

The ploy may have been a creative effort to help him clinch 65,000 unique donors since 200 of them each needed to come from at least 20 different states. But the time and resources spent on trips to states like Idaho and Utah could have been used to campaign or advertise in Iowa, Nevada or Super Tuesday states.

After spending more than half a million dollars more than it raised in the third quarter, the campaign entered October with less than $700,000 cash on hand. Later that month, Castro warned his supporters that his campaign needed $800,000 to stay alive in the next 10 days to stay alive, emulating a strategy that helped extend the life of Booker’s campaign.