It’s impossible to call Bernie Sanders stealthy. He has been a national figure since running an acerbic challenge to Hillary Clinton in 2016. He possesses a singular, straight-out-of-Brooklyn rasp of a voice. Even when Sanders and his wife go on quiet walks through bucolic Iowa neighborhoods, he startles the locals.

But lately Sanders has been under the radar, as much as any top-tier contender for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination can be. The mainstream media loves a one-on-one fight, and so for the past few weeks there has been a great deal of attention on Joe Biden attacking Elizabeth Warren over her plan to pay for Medicare for All. The other dominant narrative has been Pete Buttigieg’s surge. Sanders, meanwhile, has been doing nearly as well as Biden—and better than Warren—in swing state poll matchups against President Donald Trump. Most Iowa polls show Sanders within a few points of the leaders.

All of which could hand Sanders an opening. “The media has been so focused on Buttigieg’s rise and Biden-versus-Warren that they have completely missed Bernie’s gains,” says Rebecca Katz, a progressive Democratic consultant who is unaffiliated with any of the current contenders. “Bernie’s support is deep, and it’s not just in one state. It would be foolish to think he is not viable just because no one in the D.C.–New York circuit thinks he’s viable. There’s a lot of time between now and February 3.”

That’s the date of the Iowa caucuses, and the target all the candidates have in mind. Faiz Shakir, Sanders’s campaign manager, told me in June that his campaign’s strategy depended on turning out new voters in “the ninth inning.” Now Shakir raises four fingers in the air and switches to a football metaphor. “We structured a lot of our financial allocations so we could expand down the homestretch,” he says. “We’re in the fourth quarter and we’re doubling our Iowa presence, opening field offices, and all of our fundraising indicates that people continue to support this guy.” Plus Sanders is launching a $30 million blitz of TV ads in the first four primary states and California.

His run is also getting a boost that is both glossy and sharp-elbowed. In early October, as the 78-year-old Sanders lay in a Las Vegas hospital bed recovering from a heart attack, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called to say Sanders had won her highly prized endorsement. AOC has already starred in four large rallies with Sanders—one near her Queens home district and three in Iowa—plus a Washington press conference announcing a Green New Deal housing proposal. Her presence has driven a spate of media coverage about a funnier, salad-eating Bernie, and an AOC aide says she will be a frequent opening act on the road with Sanders in the next two months—though she is also preparing to become an Iowa solo act if Sanders is stuck in D.C. for a Senate impeachment trial of Trump. “That could happen right before the caucus, so you’re going to need some strong surrogates on the ground in Iowa who can keep the energy up, turn people out, boost up fucking enthusiasm,” the AOC adviser says. “She is definitely capable of doing that.”

In the meantime, a key Ocasio-Cortez ally has been whacking at Buttigieg. On Tuesday, Waleed Shahid, the communications director for Justice Democrats, tweeted a detailed timeline of Buttigieg’s statements on health care, making a case that Mayor Pete had moved away from repeated endorsements of a single-payer Medicare for All system and toward advocating a plan that wouldn’t eliminate private insurance. Buttigieg, in October, also began attacking Warren’s Medicare for All plan. “I just think it’s disingenuous that he’s been able to get away with these attacks without anyone calling him out on the same thing that Beto O’Rourke and Kamala Harris were called out on, which is that at one point, they did support Medicare for All,” Shahid says. “The gracious reading is they got scared of the polls. The skeptical reading is they hired a bunch of consultants and started raising lots of money from high-dollar donors, including people from the insurance and pharmaceutical industries.”