After ducking questions about his fund-raising last week, Beto O’Rourke silenced critics on Monday when his newly launched campaign announced that he had raised a staggering $6.1 million in his first 24 hours as a presidential candidate, outstripping each of his Democratic rivals and confirming that the small-donor juggernaut he built during his Senate campaign will be a formidable weapon. O’Rourke’s haul is particularly impressive considering his mid-tier placement in early primary polling. Bernie Sanders, who leads the field of declared candidates, raised $5.9 million in his first 24 hours; Kamala Harris raised just $1.5 million.

O’Rourke set high expectations for himself last week in an e-mail to supporters, acknowledging that his first fund-raising number would “set the tone in the national conversation about the viability” of his White House bid. At the same time, there was a growing backlash to O’Rourke online, where the Twitter commentariat was unsparing in its heightened criticism of O’Rourke’s whiteness, his maleness, his perceived privilege and entitlement, such as when he cracked a joke about his wife raising their three children “sometimes with my help.” The new conventional wisdom appeared to solidify when, two days later, O’Rourke still hadn’t released his fund-raising numbers. “Money is the measure of national Betomania! and last November the needle was off the charts,” observed the conservative blogger Allahpundit, after O’Rourke awkwardly dodged the question in Iowa. “Now he won’t share his numbers. Why?”

Money isn’t everything, of course. But horse race narratives are still meaningful. If O’Rourke had underperformed, pundits would have seized on that fact to bolster the notion that O’Rourke, despite his groundbreaking run against Senator Ted Cruz in Texas last year, is a lightweight. News that O’Rourke brought in $6,136,736—all of it online, and from all 50 states—destroys the narrative that journalists were itching to write. On the contrary, it would appear to confirm what Vanity Fair contributor Peter Hamby wrote last week: Twitter is not real life. If “the convulsions of everyday Twitter, a small club of media elites and professional opinion-havers, are plainly disconnected from the concerns of most Democratic voters,” as Hamby argued, then the resurgence of Beto looks like proof.

That’s not to say that O’Rourke himself is ignoring Twitter. On Friday night, he apologized for his “ham-handed” joke about his wife, Amy, and also addressed “the truth of the criticism that I have enjoyed white privilege.” Later, he also apologized for his writings as a teenager, when he was a member of a group of activist hackers, which surfaced online last week. “I have to look long and hard at my actions, at the language I have used, and I have to constantly try to do better," he said during a recording of the podcast Political Party Live in Cedar Rapids, adding that he as “mortified to read it now.”

That burgeoning self-awareness is surely an asset, whether or not the world outside of Twitter cares about his past. O’Rourke, who spoke to my colleague Joe Hagan for this month’s Vanity Fair cover story, betrayed a certain political naïveté when he exclaimed, “I want to be in it . . . Man, I’m just born to be in it.” Later, O’Rourke was mocked on television and lampooned by Jimmy Fallon for a series of early campaign appearances that were full of soaring rhetoric but noticeably light on policy. This week’s fund-raising announcement is sure to augment those emerging narratives, but Beto will still have to do more if he wants to stand up against heavyweights like Sanders, Harris, and former vice president Joe Biden, who is likely to announce his own run in the coming weeks.

On that score, the next few days will be decisive. O’Rourke’s campaign still has a ways to go before it hits the end of its first week of fund-raising, allowing Democrats another opportunity to gauge where O’Rourke stands vis-à-vis Sanders, who raised $10 million in that time period. Regardless, there is a clear nationwide appetite for what Beto O’Rourke is selling, and a strong case to be made that perhaps Democratic voters are not as easily pulled to the left as their Republican counterparts would like.