Read: The moderate men waiting for Biden to fall

There are differences between the two men: Clinton built himself up in national politics for years before his 1992 run in a way Bullock has not. But their similarities range from the biographical—both are former state attorneys general—to the political process-related: Both started their race late. (Bullock declared in May, the second-to-last Democrat to enter, and Clinton didn’t announce until October 1991, just four months before primary voting started.) “I think there is a governing and a win-over-tough-votes similarity with then-Governor Clinton,” says Nick Baldick, who arrived at Clinton headquarters in November 1991 and is now a senior adviser to Bullock’s campaign.

One of the most popular themes among Democratic presidential candidates over the past few months has been calling on people to think not just about Donald Trump, but about how America reached the point where Trump’s win was possible. That’s a regular part of the stump speech for, among others: Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts; South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg; and Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey.

Bullock doesn’t invoke Clinton on the stump or in private, though he does enjoy talking about the larger history of come-from-behind candidacies. “I don’t think it’s stubbornness when you’re four months into this, where you really want to make sure that at some point, not only can you beat him, but government can work again,” Bullock said.

Clinton was the last Democratic nominee who won in many states that are now far out of reach for the party—West Virginia, Tennessee, and Georgia, to name a few—and the only Democrat in 100 years to beat an incumbent Republican, who didn’t have the Great Depression or the Watergate scandal to thank for it. He was also the last Democratic president who regularly got Republican votes for any significant legislation he supported (almost everything that Barack Obama accomplished legislatively happened within the first two years of his presidency, when Democrats controlled both the House and Senate). Bullock likes to note that he passed, among other things, dark-money restrictions and a major Medicaid expansion with a heavily Republican state legislature.

“What’s going on is people understood how Bill Clinton could get things done, understood how to work with both sides,” Kantor, who had breakfast recently with Bullock, told me. “I think that comes from having to work with a Republican legislature.”

“Is this cycle different from other cycles? Could it be that it’s impossible to make a comeback if you’re not on the debate stage, given this set of rules? Maybe, maybe even probably,” said Matt Bennett, the vice president of the Clinton-inspired Third Way think tank and a veteran of the Clinton campaigns. “Then again, if you look at the people who became the nominee, a whole bunch of them were way, way back in fields that were smaller than this one.” Both in person and over the phone, Bennett has urged Bullock to keep at it, especially after the August dropouts of Washington Governor Jay Inslee and former Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper. “He’s the only governor still in the race, he found a way to win in a red state—he’s the only person who could say that,” Bennett said.