Former neurosurgeon and presidential candidate Ben Carson is starting to hit his stride it seems. It might be surprising, and he still might not really have a chance, but he’s probably feeling pretty good about himself right now.

As The Atlantic reported:

He’s been a steady, if middling, presence in GOP primary polls for most of the year—always earning at least 5 percent, but rarely more than 10. Yet over the last two weeks, Carson has secured a second-place spot after Donald Trump, both nationally and in the crucial opening battleground of Iowa, where he is a favorite of the state’s sizable evangelical community. A Monmouth University poll released this week even showed him tied with Trump for the lead in Iowa, at 23 percent.

Carson and Trump come from very different backgrounds, and although both are clearly conservative, this provides very different strengths and weakness in the minds of Republican voters.

But Carson has been somewhat of a question mark in the race thus far. He’s made some pretty extreme statements that may have hurt him but also kept things basically under control at the recent GOP debate. So maybe reeling it in a bit helped his cause?

In terms of understanding where the conservative votes lie, there’s no better place than Iowa. It will become much clearer come Februrary 2016 at the caucus.

“I think his appeal is firm,” Steffen Schmidt, a longtime caucus-watcher at Iowa State University told The Atlantic. Schmidt said that Carson is now gaining speed with voters who perhaps previously supported Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum.

“The campaign has sort of incrementally moved and proved and done what campaigns do—fill out and grow from the beginning,” said Doug Watts, the campaign’s chief spokesman. Carson aides have boasted in recent days of raising $6 million in August, more than double the previous month. And in contrast to the money sources of the more experienced Republicans in the race, almost all of Carson’s contributions have come from small donors giving $200 or less. Watts said the campaign had recently received its 400,000th donation and had 275,000 “unique donors,” providing a broad base to which the campaign hopes frequently to return. “We’ll never be hurting for money.”

But not everyone is convinced that he has a real shot. “I think that come caucus night, you’ll see him get 12 or 13 percent,” a veteran Iowa operative with a rival GOP campaign told The Atlantic. “He won’t go below. He won’t go above. His floor is his ceiling.”

We’ll just have to wait and see how much progress Carson makes and if he has a real shot in the coming months.