“I will not let someone run down the field and kick my teammate in the face,” a billionaire former-hedge fund manager and Democratic presidential candidate Tom Steyer told the crowd of voters in Clinton, Iowa, on Friday.

His audience, a mostly older, mostly white crowd huddled into a music venue on the bank of the frozen Mississippi river, nodded approvingly.

Steyer appeared to have won the support of the anti-face kicking wing of the Democratic party. If he is to win the Democratic nomination, however, Steyer will have to build a broader coalition. His strategy so far has mostly involved spending lots and lots of money ($201m in 2019), but having just watched one billionaire become president, can Democrats really stomach another?

In Clinton, Steyer said he views politics through the lens of team sports – hence the talk of faces, and kicking. Steyer was speaking in front of a big yellow sign which said “Beat Trump” on it, although from the back of the room an American flag slightly obscured the “b”, offering a rather different message.

“I’ve spent the last 10 years putting together coalitions of people, to fight what I think is unchecked corporate power,” Steyer said.

“I’m running because I think corporations have bought the government.”

Steyer’s fortune – he is worth about $1.6bn – has drawn comparisons to Donald Trump, and like the president, Steyer was born in New York City.

Steyer hates the comparison, which is understandable, and it does miss out some important points of difference. Steyer hardly grew up poor – his dad was a lawyer and Steyer was sent to elite, fee-paying schools – but unlike Trump, Steyer made his own fortune through the Farallon Capital investment firm, which he started in 1986.

Still, it’s easy to see how that background might not go over very well in somewhere like Clinton, where the high street is lined with shuttered businesses and the median household income is $34,000, well below the state average.

“I don’t like rich guys,” said Brian Driscoll, a 68-year-old retired hardware store owner.

“But I like Tom. Self-made rich which is totally different than inheriting it. And is he rich? I don’t know that he is, he gives it all away.”

The giving away of money is another difference between Steyer and Trump. In 2012 Steyer sold his stake in Farallon, and committed himself full-time to philanthropy, becoming well-known in charity circles. He founded NextGen America, a not-for-profit which mobilizes young people to vote, and has invested tens of millions of dollars in state elections.

In 2017, Steyer started the Need to Impeach campaign, aiming to boot Trump out of office, throwing tens of millions dollars into the effort.

“He started out with not a lot and he built it up,” said Anita Smith, a 77-year-old who used to work at the sprawling dog food factory that greets visitors to Clinton, pumping out both steam and a vague smell of meat.

“And he stopped his job and he gives to good causes, not like Trump. With Trump it’s just: ‘Me, me, me’.”

Nevertheless, there have been grumblings, about Steyer’s campaigning methods. By 13 January he had spent $123m on tv and digital advertising, according to NPR. Not including fellow Democratic presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg, the former New York City mayor who is even wealthier than Steyer, that is more than all the other Democratic candidates combined.

Steyer has also been able to hire more campaign staff than some of his better known rivals. In Iowa on Friday all that money translated into a surprisingly high turnout at the Clinton event, despite being held in the middle of a work day, and later on Friday about 100 people traveled to a Steyer town hall in Dubuque, about 60 miles north along the Mississippi.

Still, there is a big difference between getting people to come to a candidate’s campaign event and actually winning votes.

“I do have a lot of reservation about Bloomberg and Steyer – just like let’s just buy our way in,” said Vanessa Kettner, 40. She was visiting her boyfriend in Iowa, but will cast her primary vote in California, on 3 March.

Kettner was open to voting for Steyer, potentially, but preferred the more progressive candidates, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. Indeed, for all the goodwill Steyer received in Clinton, none of the people the Guardian spoke to actually planned to vote for him, and it was a similar story in Dubuque. You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it vote for you.

At the Dubuque event, Steyer talked about how, as an activist, he has “taken on” corporations, helping to fight oil companies to protect California’s clean-air laws, and tackling tobacco companies. He also railed against campaign financing. Wealthy people and corporations have too much sway over the outcome of elections, in Steyer’s view, and are “controlling our politics”.

But given Steyer’s grave warnings about the influence of money in politics, his response when the Guardian asked if he was trying to buy the election seemed a little contradictory.

“You can’t buy an election. The question is do Americans hear you say something that’s differential, important, and do they trust you?” Steyer said.

“There’s no way that anybody, including Mike Bloomberg, can buy an election, the only thing you can do is see if Americans respond to what you have to say, and who you are, and what you’ve done in the past.

“And you can look at my history and see I’ve had over a decade of fighting as an outsider and beating these corporations, and Americans can see that too.”

On Monday, when Iowans go to the caucuses, we’ll find out if that is, actually, how Americans see it.