Read: The last days of the other 1 percent

This is the man whose presidential run started as an intellectual curiosity, a rolling revelation he had while finishing a book last year called The Land of Flickering Lights. He went to Iowa in February, and officially declared his candidacy in May. (In between, he underwent surgery for prostate cancer that was diagnosed at the beginning of this year.) His curiosity became a mission, and those classic politician lines about really wanting to run got sucked up into Bennet actually wanting to run.

Bennet says the sense of inequality and disconnect with Washington he found as he campaigned was more intense than he’d expected, and the combination of the candidates leading the race and the DNC rules that he feels end up boosting those candidates has lit him up. “This is like making a decision about who goes to the playoffs based on preseason football, which nobody’s watching,” he said. His campaign puts out press releases and fundraising emails boasting support from the likes of George Will, Trevor Noah, and James Carville. He might not look like Howard Beale, but all of a sudden, Michael Bennet is mad as hell.

There’s nothing subtle about the political calculation Bennet is making: He thinks former Vice President Joe Biden’s campaign is going to collapse, that Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont won’t be able to expand his base of support, and that people will get scared off of Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts as soon as they think seriously about her going head-to-head with President Donald Trump.

Despite Biden’s consistent lead in the polls, Bennet’s campaign, like several others that I’ve spoken with over the past few weeks, has internal polling that shows Biden’s support to be very soft. Many campaign operatives I’ve spoken with say they think Warren, despite being the only candidate to show consistently upward movement in the polls over the past few months, has even softer support. “Fully two-thirds of those who chose Biden, Sanders, Warren or [South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete] Buttigieg say they might change their mind,” reads a strategic memo produced by Bennet’s campaign. “Vote instability creates lots of room for Bennet.”

Bennet is not the only one who believes that the Biden and Warren rides will end—but he’s far behind other campaigns hoping to step up when that happens. He has fewer than 20 staffers in Iowa, while the leading campaigns have upwards of 60. His events tend to draw somewhere between 40 and 60 people. Bennet says he plans to “build out concentric circles of support while the field shifts.”

Speaking to me about Biden, specifically, Bennet said, “I think that he has well-earned and well-deserved name recognition. I think that’s what he has. I don't think it’s deeper than that.” I asked Bennet if he’s worried that Biden would lose to Trump. “Oh, sure,” he said, though added that he’s continued to see what he believes is a level of broader delusion in Biden that is just as worrying. “The idea that if we just get Trump out of the way, that things are going to revert to some normal pattern, as the vice president seems to think, ignores so much of the wreckage that exists in Washington, D.C.,” Bennet said. “We [the Democrats] should never have lost to Donald Trump to begin with. We just manifestly should not have lost to him to begin with. But we did lose. And that is proof that we can lose again.”