Californians know a thing or two about self-funded business moguls who attempt to spend their way to high political office in their state. And what they know is, those candidates almost always lose.

Michael Bloomberg, though, is betting he will be different from the Meg Whitmans and Carly Fiorinas of past elections and that California’s Democratic primary – along with 13 other contests being held on Super Tuesday, 3 March – will be the coming-out party that enshrines him as the national candidate most likely to beat Donald Trump.

Bloomberg is putting his money where his mouth is, spending unprecedented tens of millions of dollars on television advertising, opening offices in cities big and small across the state, hiring a full-time staff of 300 people and counting, and racking up high-profile endorsements. All of these efforts are designed to ram home the message that he is in it to win it and can outspend anybody, even the sizeable Republican money machine working at full tilt to keep Trump in the White House for another four years.

“This is the biggest presidential primary operation in California history,” Bloomberg’s state director, Chris Masami Myers, told the Guardian. “We’re literally doing everything you could possibly do.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Bloomberg holds a baby during the ‘Mike for Black America Launch Celebration’ at the Buffalo Soldiers National Museum in Houston, Texas. Photograph: Mark Felix/AFP/AFP via Getty Images

The one thing even Bloomberg’s millions can’t do is buy the support of a plurality of voters in one of the most diverse states in the nation. But his message is certainly starting to resonate, propelling him from the low single digits in opinion polls as recently as late January to 13% – ahead of the former vice-president Joe Biden – in a Capitol Weekly poll this week.

That boost in support has gone into overdrive since the chaotic Iowa caucus on 3 February, a New Hampshire race that left the central Democratic lane deeply divided, and the precipitous decline in Biden’s fortunes after months as the race’s presumptive frontrunner. Despite swirling controversies over Bloomberg’s support of discriminatory stop-and-frisk policing when he was mayor of New York, new controversies over his treatment of women and the role he believes black and Latino homeowners may have played in triggering the 2008 financial collapse, he has racked up strong polling numbers even among minority voters.

The achievement is all the more remarkable since he didn’t compete in the first primary and caucuses, aroused little voter excitement in California upon announcing his presidential bid, and was greeted with deep skepticism by many of the state’s more seasoned political professionals.

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What changed?

The short answer may be that Democratic voters are now thinking defensively. In other words, they are more interested in supporting a candidate capable of defeating Trump than in finding one who best represents their own worldview.

And it’s not just Bloomberg’s money that appeals to them – or even his trenchant Twitter battles with the president demonstrating that he refuses to be bullied.

He has a strong record on combatting gun violence and the climate crisis, two issues that play particularly well in the Golden State. He is genuinely revered by municipal leaders – including high-profile black mayors like San Francisco’s London Breed and the young rising star Michael Tubbs of Stockton – who have won grants and other forms of support from his foundation. And, unlike past plutocrats who have entered the electoral arena in California based on their business record alone, he has a solid record in public office to point to thanks to his three terms as mayor of New York.

Then there’s the rest of the Democratic field, which strikes many voters as underwhelming and is spurring many of them to think that the flaws of any given candidate may not be as important, in the end, as the imperative to win.

That’s especially true of minority voters who now have an all-white field to choose from even though they make up close to half of the Democratic primary electorate. “We don’t have an Obama. The expectation is different,” said Steve Phillips, a political fundraiser, podcaster and commentator who heads the San Francisco-based organization Democracy in Color. “Younger African Americans still want the right person, while older folks want any person that can get rid of Trump. That is the essential dynamic.”

Phillips questioned how much damage stop-and-frisk or other racial controversies could do to Bloomberg because he saw no other candidate still in the race with the moral authority to call him on it effectively. “All these people are flawed messengers,” he said. Phillips spoke before the Washington Post published a major expose of Bloomberg’s treatment of women going back decades and the legal settlements he and his company have repeatedly reached in an attempt to stop their complaints from becoming public.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Bloomberg speaks at a campaign event in Raleigh, North Carolina, on Thursday. Photograph: Gerald Herbert/AP

In California, Bloomberg may be helped by the fact that the electorate tends to be more centrist than progressive – Hillary Clinton beat Bernie Sanders by seven points in the 2016 Democratic primary. Only 6% of the electorate is African American, and Latinos, who make up 35%, have historically turned out in numbers well short of their demographic strength.

Bloomberg’s imperfections have not just been visible from a distance. On the day of the Iowa caucus, he tried to forge a pop culture connection with an audience in Compton, the birthplace of gangsta rap in the southern Los Angeles suburbs, by referring to the previous day’s Super Bowl halftime show. But he mangled the name Shakira – a singer he had in fact met in 2007 – and thus made himself seem more, not less, out of touch.

Such blunders, while small on their own, risk drawing attention to another potential liability – his age. If part of Biden’s slide has been due to the perception that he is past his prime, Bloomberg may not want to remind voters that at 78, he is in fact nine months older. His whole strategy, according to campaign insiders, has been to bet on Biden fading and to fill the resultant void.

Going by the rapidly shifting poll numbers, the bet seems to be paying off so far. But it remains to be seen if the Bloomberg surge continues, as voters take a closer look at him and, assuming he qualifies and participates, see him in his first candidates’ debate next week.

Since Bloomberg is not participating in either the Nevada caucus or the South Carolina primary, there is also a danger that former Biden supporters, and his black and Latino supporters in particular, could coalesce around a different Democrat in those races and thus steal Bloomberg’s momentum heading into Super Tuesday.

Bloomberg’s campaign team is confident, however, that they have given him such an organizational advantage in California and the other Super Tuesday states that the momentum will be with him when it matters.

Myers, his California state director, said he expected Bloomberg to return to the Golden State before 3 March and to continue to emphasize his interest in places that other candidates tend to ignore – the farm country of the Central Valley and some of the heavily Latino inland suburbs of LA.

“We are in these communities,” Myers said. “Not only do we have validators, we also have people the ground, listening to what people are saying and talking about what Mike’s record is. We are going to show our momentum there.”