Watts is no longer with the campaign, having quit in frustration in December, but Carson’s year-end FEC report, released Sunday, suggests that far from decreasing its reliance on these methods, the campaign has only become more reliant on them. The campaign raised $22.6 million, but it spent $27.3 million, and closes out with just $6.6 million cash on hand. (For comparison, Ted Cruz has $18.7 million on hand; Hillary Clinton has $38 million.) Among the largest spending areas, a couple stick out: fundraising phone calls ($2.4 million), and postage and printing ($7.3 million). So do several of the largest payees:

Action Mailers, $4.5 million

CMDI, $1.4 million

Communication Management Source, $1.3 million

Direct Advantage, $3 million

Eleventy Marketing, $4.8 million

InfoCision, $2.4 million

TMA Direct, $2.9 million

Together, these vendors account for $21.2 million, the vast majority of what Carson spent in the fourth quarter.

Most of these companies are involved in either direct mail or telemarketing for fundraising. Every campaign uses these methods, but they’re very expensive—you have to spend a lot of money to make money—the Carson campaign’s heavy reliance on them fed two allegations. Some observers felt the campaign was unfairly targeting naive low-dollar donors; and either way, the fact that many of the vendors doing the pricey work were connected to the campaign made it look like they were treating the Carson for president push as a way to line their own pockets.

This filing doesn’t do much to assuage those concerns. For example, TMA is run by Mark Murray, one of Carson’s top fundraisers. Murray has also long worked with Eleventy and InfoCision, two Akron, Ohio-based companies. InfoCision has been implicated in past scams. Eleventy’s president is chief marketing officer for Carson. Communication Management Source is run by Joanne Parker, whose husband Dean Parker departed the campaign in December.

Can the Carson campaign do more than just fundraise? In Iowa, he won three delegates, at a cost of $47.5 million so far. It’s hard to see what sort of future it has after the Hawkeye State. Carson came in fourth in Iowa, and things only get rougher from here. In New Hampshire, he’s a distant eight in the RealClearPolitics average, and while he does a little better in South Carolina, it’s still a long way back and will drop if he has two weak showings. Nationally, he’s also down to fourth in a no-man’s-land between the triple leaders Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, and Marco Rubio and a peloton of also-rans.

What’s peculiar is not just that he has dropped. It’s the circumstances. Typically, a candidate leaves the race because he is out of money or because it becomes clear that voters don’t like him. Yet neither of those apply to Carson. He had another excellent fundraising quarter to close 2015—more on that in a moment—and he’s viewed quite favorably. Nearly a third of Iowa voters viewed him favorably in that DMR poll, and his unfavorability is about even with Marco Rubio in the lowest slot. Nationally, Carson is also well-liked.