The veteran Iowa Democratic strategist is unaffiliated with any of the 2020 presidential campaigns, but he’s paying close attention. Such close attention that he sat through speeches from 13 candidates, stretching across six hours, last Friday night at the state party’s annual dinner, if you can call something held in a basketball arena and attended by more than 13,000 people a dinner. One image from the long night stunned him. “There were sections of seats designated for each of the campaigns, and Joe Biden’s was nearly empty,” the strategist says. “It felt like watching the end of the Biden campaign.”

Just as we hung up the phone, a tweet arrived, delivering the results of a New York Times/Siena College poll of six swing states, showing that the Democrat with the best chance to defeat President Donald Trump is currently…Joe Biden. Sure, there are big differences between anecdote and the quasi-science of polling. But the coincidence of timing neatly captured the strangeness of Biden’s standing, slightly less than one year from the general election.

On the ground his campaign is scuffling, with modest crowds at rallies and mediocre fundraising. He has been losing altitude over the past several months, and some analysts are pessimistic. “The big thing people aren’t playing out is how it’s going to feel if Biden comes in third or fourth in Iowa,” says Jennifer Palmieri, a top adviser to Hillary Clinton in 2016. “His people argue Biden can lose Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada, and win South Carolina and be fine. Okay—don’t kid a kidder. I worked on the John Edwards campaign.”

Yet right now, more voters still favor Biden as the best option against Trump. He remains the best-known Democrat in the field, and the other contenders have significant flaws. There is also a gap between political-class opinions of Biden and how he’s viewed by rank-and-file voters. And Trump, recently and perversely, has boosted Biden as much as he’s damaged him, by attacking Biden and his son Hunter over their dealings with Ukraine. “It reminds people that Trump is obsessed with Biden and is worried about him,” says Jeff Link, an Iowa Democratic strategist.

But the contradiction between Biden’s underwhelming campaign and his fairly resilient poll numbers is not easily explained or tackled, much to the frustration of a 2020 strategist who tried for months to gain ground against the former vice president. “Voters across the country are looking for the most viable candidate to beat Trump. That’s clear,” the adviser to an ex-candidate says. “And there’s this aura around Biden that has been ingrained in people for years: that he’s someone who can compete in the Midwest and be strong in those places where Trump beat Hillary by relatively small margins. At the same time, Iowa takes its responsibility really seriously, and Biden is not impressing the really attentive caucusgoers. That’s where the disparity can happen.”

Elizabeth Warren has edged ahead of Biden in some Iowa polls. When it comes to her “electability” against Trump, though, Warren lagged both Biden and Bernie Sanders in four of the six states in the Times poll. Now her attempt to explain how she would pay for Medicare for All without raising taxes on the middle class has given Warren’s competitors a new line of attack. Biden has begun taking borderline-desperate swings at her as a “socialist.”

“Under Medicare for All, every person in America will have full health coverage; everybody gets the doctors and the treatments they need,” says Alexis Krieg, a Warren spokeswoman. “Leading experts have laid out how Elizabeth’s plan will do this without raising taxes on the middle class by one penny. The $11 trillion families are projected to pay in out-of-pocket expenses will go right back into their pockets—substantially larger than the largest tax cut in American history.”