The idea of a “referendum president” has three parts:

First, it is focused on the need to fix our democracy first—to take it back from the billionaires and corporations, so we’d have a chance of addressing sensibly the host of critical problems that we face as a nation.

Second, it would be led by a political outsider, someone we could trust who was not tied to the system, and was thus free to change it.

And third, it would be self-limiting: Once the reform was enacted, the referendum president would step down.

On August 11, I launched an exploratory committee, promising I’d enter the race if we raised $1 million in commitments in less than 30 days. We crossed that line early, with more than 10,000 donations. On September 9, I entered the race at an event in Claremont, New Hampshire. Immediately after, I began campaigning across New Hampshire and the country.

But from the start, the idea hit a wall—or at least part of the idea did. People understood the corruption bit; they were willing to assume the reform would fix it. But they didn’t get the resigning bit. It caught people’s attention, and the attention of hundreds of media outlets. But it weakened the credibility of the campaign. Was I really trying to be president? Or was I just trying to make a point?

The Democratic Party took advantage of this skepticism. And fueled it. It refused to acknowledge me as a candidate in the way it had with the other five. That led pollsters to exclude me from their polls. That led the media to drop me from their stories. Granted, it was a busy news month, with All Donald All The Time. But the result was almost no national media focused on a campaign that was actually more viable than that of at least two of the other Democratic candidates, and which featured a platform that was different from those of every other candidate.

The resignation idea was mine, so naturally, I resisted the skepticism. But I was wrong to resist it. And just how wrong was shown to me in the first poll we could run after our campaign was funded.

In a 1,008-person survey about the idea of a referendum presidency, Drew Westen, perhaps the Democrats’ most influential messaging guru, tested both the idea of a campaign focused on fixing our democracy first, and the idea of a president resigning once that work was done.

The resignation idea was a total bust. No one liked it. At all.

But the idea of an outsider making fundamental reform the central issue of the campaign blew the race apart.

After a careful description of the idea, and me, the poll found that my support didn’t just increase. It dominated the field. And while the survey was not designed to test the ultimate strength of one candidate against the other—so the (insanely high) numbers it found supporting me can’t be read as a measure of actual predicted support—the survey did show the astonishing potential for such a campaign in America today. This fundamental issue, properly presented, totally changed the race.