But while Maryland’s governor looks perfectly presidential on paper, Democratic voters outside the state have proved staunchly resistant to forming an impression of him. This is not for lack of media attention. A political press corps preemptively bored by the prospect of another airless Hillary Clinton campaign has dutifully floated O’Malley as an alternative, noting his hypothetical ability to run to Clinton’s left and his appeal as a practical progressive—he’s more liberal than Clinton or New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, but less of a firebrand than Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren. And yet he has fluctuated between 1 and 2 percent in recent polls of prospective primary voters, languishing behind not only Clinton and Vice President Joe Biden but also Warren and Cuomo. He’s even polling behind Bernie Sanders, the socialist senator from Vermont. As far back as June 2013, a National Journal headline asked, “Is It Time to Take Martin O’Malley Seriously?” Not yet, apparently. In September, Politico’s daily “Playbook” newsletter, noting that O’Malley had already placed 11 staffers in Iowa, mockingly headlined the news “A for Effort!”

O’Malley refuses to pout about his negligible public image. “My process doesn’t involve polling; it involves listening,” he told me sunnily, leaning back in his chair. We had moved to one of the Light House’s back rooms, which smelled faintly of disinfectant. I wondered aloud whether it might heighten O’Malley’s profile if he were to pick fights from time to time, particularly with Clinton, whose every sneeze launches a thousand cable-news segments. But O’Malley claimed he did not resent Clinton’s prominence: “She’s an iconic figure, and someone who has so many accomplishments in public service, that it doesn’t surprise me at all.” Asked whether he had something to offer that Clinton did not, O’Malley said, “I do.” I pressed him as to what that might be. Finally, after praising Clinton and Biden, he said, “The thing I believe presents something of value to my country, especially in these times, is my experience as an executive, and as somebody that was able to bring people together in order to get things done.”

In his travels around the country, O’Malley said, he had discovered that people were looking for a new kind of leadership. It was this realization that convinced him that the polls don’t matter. “History’s full of all sorts of instances where candidates at various levels, whether mayor or governor or president, have begun a race at 1 or 2 percent,” he said. He wasn’t wrong: both Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton were considered long shots before beginning their primary campaigns, and Barack Obama trailed in early primary polling. O’Malley emphasized that he had himself gone from single digits to victory when he ran for mayor of Baltimore in 1999. Underdogs have historically succeeded, O’Malley said, when “they knew what they were about, they knew what they had to offer, and they offered it at a time when the people most needed that way of leadership.”

O’Malley’s own trademark has been a data-based approach to just about everything, starting with Baltimore’s crime epidemic, which was the focus of his mayoral campaign. David Simon, the creator of HBO’s The Wire, was a police reporter for The Baltimore Sun when O’Malley was on the city council, and he has said that the character of Tommy Carcetti—the ambitious white-ethnic councilman who rises to the mayoralty, and then the governorship, based on manipulated crime-reduction statistics—is a composite inspired partly by O’Malley. (Although O’Malley was similarly accused of fudging crime stats, he denies it, and the allegation has never been proved.)