The next day I asked Booker if there were anything to Patrick’s argument about having better or more successful executive experience. This elicited the famous Booker wide-eye. “Are you asking that with tongue in cheek?” he said. He started to laugh and then suppressed it, evidently not wanting to seem to be laughing at Patrick. What about the bills he got passed in the Senate? Booker asked. What about last year’s criminal-justice-reform bill, whose passage he helped lead? That’s the only bipartisan law Trump has signed. What about the economic development and education reform he pulled off as mayor of Newark?

All of which are legitimate achievements. In theory, Booker really should be doing better. But campaigns aren’t run in theory. So why isn’t he doing better in actual practice?

Maybe it’s that he can come off like he’s trying too hard—like the moment during Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings when he said, “This is about the closest I’ll probably ever have in my life to an ‘I am Spartacus’ moment.” Maybe it’s because cynical political reporters can’t avoid laughing off his talk about a “conspiracy of love,” or about how there’s no way to love America without loving everyone in America, as being out of step with Trump’s America. Maybe he’s just too weird a confection of traits—a vegan Star Trek fanboy who still lives in inner-city Newark while courting Wall Street and dating the actress Rosario Dawson—to connect with a broad cross section of voters. Or maybe he’s being subjected to a kind of second-order racism: it’s not that voters are opposed to putting another black man in the White House; it’s that they’re afraid other voters won’t be willing to put another black man in the White House—a sort of racist Prisoner’s Dilemma.

Read: Cory Booker challenges America’s disneyfied history

“I’m not sure he can win, but I want to give him a chance to compete,” the woman who’d previously supported Klobuchar told me. Why don’t you think he can win? I asked. “Because he’s black,” she said. When I recounted this to Booker, his only response was “Wow”—but when another reporter asked him two days later about whether his race was an impediment to his election prospects, he said: “I know that the last Democratic president was a guy named Barack Obama, and he won.”

At a Democratic event in Las Vegas on Sunday night, Booker gave a powerful speech that once again got a huge response in the room—and that once again failed to reverberate beyond it. “We cannot beat Trump by being more Trumpy,” he said. “We must beat his darkness with our light. We must beat his hate with our love … The candidate we choose must be the antidote.”

Jim Demers is a big shot in New Hampshire Democratic circles. He chaired Obama’s campaign in the state in 2008. This cycle, he signed on early with Booker, and he’s clearly tired of getting the same questions about his candidate’s struggle to break out of the low single digits. “People say, ‘I love this guy—I just need the field to get smaller,’” he told me.

Booker himself seems to be handling everything with his usual upbeat equanimity. “You focus on what you have to do, what you can control, and fate will handle the rest,” he told me in the RV. “I feel a sense of peace about this whole race. We’re giving it everything we’ve got.”

Then he rushed off to catch a flight to California to try to raise enough money to keep his campaign afloat.