Trav Robertson, the South Carolina Democratic Party chairman, watched from a distance, sipping a cup of sweet tea, fresh off a three-hour drive south from a packed party fundraising dinner in Greenville that featured House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. With the people Steyer is hiring, Robertson told me, it’s “apparent” they’re “preparing a strategy to win the nomination.” A voter, he said, had just brought up to him the community bank that Steyer had started years ago with his wife.

“The fact that he is resonating appears to indicate that the race is wide open,” Robertson said.

Read: Why Tom Steyer changed his mind on running for president

Steyer is the billionaire self-funding chaos factor in the primary race, with the potential to shift the center of gravity as others run out of money and he’s still standing come spring. He’s one of the most successful hedge-funders ever, and his team likes to think of him as an undervalued stock in the race.

“We can organize in states on Super Tuesday that no other candidate can,” said Doug Rubin, a longtime Democratic operative serving as a senior adviser to the campaign, pointing to how Steyer’s millions can pay for campaign staff and television ads while other campaigns are going to be running out of cash or making tough decisions about where to compete. “The way the race is now is not the way it’s going to be in January and February,” Rubin said.

Tonight in Ohio, Steyer will be the only candidate onstage who hasn’t appeared in one of the primary debates so far. He’s also one of just eight who have qualified for the next debate in November.

When we met in South Carolina at a bland hotel a few miles from the jamboree, Steyer greeted me with a rant about Republicans taking their time to distance themselves from President Donald Trump, comparing them to co-conspirators in a trial. But that’s not the Steyer that he and his team are trying to present, on the trail or at the debate.

“The advantage of our resources is that we can play the long game,” Rubin said. “Tom doesn’t need a splashy moment to be competitive long-term.”

That’s the tension of Steyer’s campaign: He jokes about how people would think, from media coverage, that his first name is “Billionaire,” but his campaign is possible only because of said billionaire status.

Steyer and his aides think any other campaign or reporter who isn’t taking him seriously is making a big mistake. He has a staff of 200 (and growing), spread among his San Francisco headquarters and offices in Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, South Carolina, Colorado, and California. His campaign has a research operation that’s been testing and targeting messages, digging deeper than any other candidate could afford to in the primary. His team announced last week that 166,000 people had given an average of $12 each to his campaign, for a total of almost $2 million, since July. (Yes, they gave this money to a billionaire.) A Morning Consult average of early-state polling last week had him at 8 percent, or fourth place in the race.