Most Republicans would see a Sanders candidacy as a gift, letting them paint the entire Democratic Party in socialism. The idea that he might emerge as the candidate against Trump is too much of a dream for them to even admit. Many Democrats agree.

Sanders’s team thinks all those people haven’t woken up to the new political reality, or to the power clearly demonstrated this year by independents and Millennials.

“He’s uniquely positioned to do better against Trump in the general because he appeals to white working-class and rural voters—much better than a conventional Democrat does,” said Ben Tulchin, who was Sanders’s 2016 pollster and remains in touch with his team. “He also is very popular and has done well in the Midwest, such as Michigan and Wisconsin, which are critical to winning.”

Read: Bernie Sanders’s pitch to Trump voters

Most of the potential 2020 Democratic candidates deciding whether to pull the trigger are deep into staff interviews and debates about the timing of exploratory-committee announcements, but Sanders has turned inward. The number of people he’s actually talking to is tiny. The time they’re spending on what they consider the transactional politics of endorsements and influence is close to nonexistent.

“The place where the country is now is so far off, so out of whack, that those kinds of tactical discussions really don’t give an appropriate amount of appreciation of the danger that Trump and his kind of politics represent to American policy,” Weaver said. “If you had a crystal ball and could say, ‘This is the person, and the only person who could beat Trump,’ then you would have the entire party lining up against him. But I don’t think that’s clear yet.”

Sanders knows that a 2020 campaign would be his last shot at running for president—he turned 77 in September. But he also knows that running isn’t the only way he could be a factor. Some around the senator, who was just reelected to a third term, think he could be a presence in the chamber while continuing to be the kind of outside force that helped pressure Amazon to raise wages over the summer.

Sanders’s midterm campaign swing was, on the one hand, a success—no prospective presidential candidate drew crowds as big as his, and he drew them consistently, from South Carolina to Iowa to Colorado. Candidates as varied as Jacky Rosen, who won her Senate race, and Andrew Gillum, who narrowly lost his governor race in Florida, were eager to appear with him. On the way to the University of Reno rally, Sanders stopped by the Culinary Workers’ union hall and was greeted with chants of “2020! 2020!” There were a number of events like that off the public schedule during Sanders’s tour, as well as meetings with local politicians and other leaders who struck the senator and his team as being much more open to him than they were the last time around.