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It would take a miracle for Ben Carson to win the Republican nomination. Fortunately for him, he can afford to wait for one.

The retired neurosurgeon’s campaign says it has raised about $2 million since the Feb. 1 Iowa caucuses, a startling windfall for a campaign that finished a distant-fourth in Iowa and dead last among eight active contenders in New Hampshire.

The haul is all the more startling because the campaign has been floundering for months. Since he briefly led polls in early November, Carson has careened from one campaign crisis to another, nursing self-inflicted wounds and slashing a bloated staff while his standing in GOP primary polls has cratered.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the Iowa caucus: Just as the vote was beginning, operatives and surrogates for Ted Cruz rapidly spread a false rumor that Carson would be leaving the Republican contest. They urged Carson's backers to align with Cruz instead. Though the Texas senator has consistently blamed an ambiguous CNN report about the issue, as well as tweets from a CNN correspondent, those reports never suggested Carson would be quitting the contest.

The backlash from Carson loyalists was fierce, and the doctor’s campaign says it’s at the core of its sudden fundraising resurgence.

Now the question is whether Carson can turn any of this campaign cash into votes, with the first testing coming in South Carolina’s Feb. 20 primary. 

“He will live and camp in South Carolina,” said Armstrong Williams, a Carson confidant and media strategist. “We’re seeing an election cycle we thought would be impossible. Anything could happen. Trump and Cruz could tank between now and July. The only way you could play out these possibilities is stay in the race.”

A campaign spokesman said Carson will indeed be in South Carolina every day until the state votes.

That Carson can even hold out that long stands in stark contrast to former candidates like Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, who bailed on the race before a single ballot when he realized his finances were upside-down. Rather than slim down his team and hope for a rebound, he pulled the plug on a campaign once considered a top contender for the nomination.

And there’s New Jersey Gov Chris Christie, who finished well ahead of Carson in New Hampshire but decided the next day to hang it up anyway. Christie’s deficit to his establishment rivals was comparable to the one Carson faces to Cruz and Trump, but his financial woes were far greater. While Carson snapped up $2 million in the past 10 days, about half of the $4.2 million Christie raised in the entire fourth quarter of 2015.

Only a few weeks ago, Carson appeared headed for a similar fate. His campaign had been hemorrhaging cash since November, when fundraising went off a cliff amid a string of foreign policy stumbles. In the last three months of 2015, Carson raised about $22 million, but he spent $27 million, nearly double what any other rival spent. Millions of dollars were shoveled to high-priced direct-mail land and phone-based fundraising consultants, and millions more went to list-building companies designed to help Carson find small donors.

With his finances back on more stable footing, his campaign is mapping out a strategy to play catch-up with his rivals.

The camp’s thinking goes like this: upend low expectations in South Carolina on the strength of evangelical voters, many of whom (they hope) are now looking askance at Cruz. Then, turn the race into a bid for delegates – which are assigned proportionally, and often divvied up by Congressional District. Carson has deep relationships across the south, especially in communities where homeschooling is prevalent, and where many states have set early-March primaries to help tilt the Republican contest toward a more conservative nominee. Backers see Carson doing well in Congressional districts in these states with large minority populations.

Campaign spokesman Jason Osborne even noted that he moonlights as the executive director of the Northern Mariana Islands GOP, which will dole out nine delegates on March 15. "I feel pretty comfortable where we are in the territories" he said.

It’s a strategy that draws chuckles from critics who consider Carson an afterthought in a race that has focused on Donald Trump and Cruz as the outsiders of choice. Jeb Bush, John Kasich and Marco Rubio are jockeying to be the most viable establishment-backed alternative, party faction where Carson has no discernible support.

Barring cataclysmic turmoil, there’s little room for Carson to emerge anywhere in the six-man field. Trump is still dominant in most polls and is riding a wave of momentum from a 20-point victory in New Hampshire. Cruz has begun coalescing tea party and conservative activist support, including voters who once supported Carson until national security issues became the focus of the race.

And while Carson draws supporters to his campaign events, when auditioning in front of much larger primetime debate audiences, Carson’s most memorable moments have been jokes about his lack of speaking time and a starring role in last week’s candidate introduction logjam. 

His campaign acknowledges that debates are not necessarily his forte but he’ll have one more chance the candidates convene Saturday. It could be his last, best chance, according to the more recent candidate to surge to a surprise win in South Carolina.

“Carson would have to find a way to really break through on the debate stage. There’s no other place when you reach that kind of number of people,” said Newt Gingrich, the former speaker of the House who won the South Carolina primary in 2012 against a field that included Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum. “Probably some of the best moments I had [were] in the debate process in Myrtle Beach and Charleston. I was still behind. Then, the debates simply changed everything.”

(Carson spent Friday in debate prep, and his spokesman said the campaign has alerted CBS to a deficit in talking time that has plagued the candidate in prior debates, as moderators have asked him markedly fewer questions than his better-polling rivals.)

Along with ample funds, Carson’s other hope in South Carolina is that he’s largely flying under the radar. Bush, Kasich and Rubio are knocking each other while trying to chip away at poll leads built by Trump and Cruz, who are engaged in a slugfest of their own.

Besting any of them in the six-way race could reframe Carson’s role in the contest. As long as that outside chance is possible, strategists see little reason for Carson to quit.

“Why would anyone get out if you can raise enough money to keep going?” wondered Barry Bennett, who ran Carson’s campaign until a staff exodus in January and now informally advises Trump. “Ben has a great donor list and as long as they keep paying the bills I think he will keep going.”

Trump, of course, would likely benefit from Carson’s continued presence in the race, since the neurosurgeon’s supporters tend to prefer Ted Cruz as a backup. It’s partly why Trump has been aggressive in fanning the feud between Carson and Cruz, repeatedly calling Cruz a liar over the incident -- and urging evangelicals to shun him.

Carson is also getting some cover from a super PAC – the 2016 Committee – that pledges to stick by him as long as he’s in the race.

“We’ve made the fundamental decision that so long as Dr. Carson remains in this, we will remain with him,” said John Philip Sousa IV, who chairs the PAC and is a descendant of the legendary composer. If he wants to stay in it through Cleveland, we’ll stay in it through Cleveland with him.

Sousa said that he – like the Carson campaign – saw an infusion of contributions after Iowa, when Carson furiously called out Cruz for “dirty tricks.” Sousa said the PAC will be a de facto get-out-the-vote operation for Carson, making thousands of calls to turn out the neurosurgeon’s backers. Some supporters of Chris Christie and Carly Fiorina – who dropped out of the race earlier in the week – have migrated toward them, he said.

But if South Carolina sees Carson repeat his distant finish in Iowa, would that be enough to get Carson out? And if not then, when?

Carson himself has repeatedly avoided setting any concrete benchmarks, suggesting he'll stay in the race as long as he's raising money and receiving support on social media.