On the eve of the first-ever presidential primary debate of the 2020 election, Washington Governor Jay Inslee wasn’t holed up in a hotel room preparing talking points with his team. He was at the Frost Science Museum in Miami, practicing them on me. “We’re the last generation that can do something about this,” he tells me—and by this he means the climate crisis. It’s the only thing Inslee’s ever really interested in talking about.

If you don’t live in a forest on a mountain in the West, Washington state’s Democratic governor may be unfamiliar to you. And you wouldn’t be alone: According to one CNN poll, 73 percent of Democratic voters haven’t yet heard of Inslee, making him one of the most unrecognizable candidates in the crowded field of 20.

But Inslee’s laser-focus on slowing catastrophic global warming has been both widely covered and widely praised. New York magazine’s Eric Levitz, for example, has called him “the sanest (if not only sane) presidential candidate we’ve got.” And Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has called Inslee’s climate plan—the fourth and final part of which he released on Monday—the “gold standard.” So what’s preventing Inslee from breaking through?

Personality could be a factor. To put it in Washingtonian terms, he’s a bit Northface on the outside, Patagonia on the inside—seemingly far more comfortable in a flannel shirt than in a suit. Or perhaps, as some have speculated, it’s the simple fact that he’s just another white man trying to be president. And who wants another one of those?

But when he sat down with me on Tuesday night, Inslee seemed to admit that his candidacy isn’t actually about becoming president. It’s about bringing his ideas to solve the climate crisis into a broader view. “Right now it’s only mine,” he said of his comprehensive, 110-page plan to mobilize $9 trillion in climate-related spending in the next decade, require “zero-emission” electricity generation across the U.S. by 2035, and end America’s reliance on fossil fuels. “But I hope all of my competitors will embrace it soon and just say, ‘Hey, Jay’s got a good plan here, let’s do it.’ And then we’ll get a great nominee, and [we’ll] all get behind ‘em and get this thing done.”