WEST DES MOINES, Iowa—It’s the No. 1 question headed into the primary season: Does Donald Trump merely have fans, or does the national front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination have voters who will mobilize come Iowa caucus day?
The definitive answer won’t arrive until first-to-vote Iowa heads to the polls on Feb. 1, but interviews with dozens of voters, political operatives, party leaders and campaign volunteers in the past week painted a mixed picture of Trump’s efforts to make sure they do.
Even some of the billionaire real-estate mogul’s most ardent backers wonder whether the political novice has the kind of ground game needed to ensure supporters — especially those new to taking part in a caucus — can navigate a process that isn’t as easy as simply casting a ballot.
But many believe that even if Trump is falling short when it comes to building a get-out-the-vote effort, his supporters are so enthusiastic that it won’t much matter.
“I have a feeling we’re going to actually do better than the polls are saying because there’s a movement,” Trump told supporters in suburban Des Moines last week, dismissing suggestions the thousands who pack his rallies won’t make it out on caucus night.
“I don’t know, maybe they won’t,” he added. “But it seems crazy because some of those people were waiting on line for seven hours in the cold.”
But they’re not eager to show off. Trump’s campaign repeatedly turned down requests from AP to tag along with volunteers or speak with Iowa staffers. Some volunteers said they had been barred from talking to the media by the campaign.
Laudner declined to discuss the campaign’s efforts at length, but said at a pre-Christmas rally, “We have counties where we have more committed caucus goers than total turnout four years ago.”
Trump’s team appears acutely aware of the pitfalls of setting the bar too high, even as the candidate brags about how well he’s doing in the polls and all his team is doing. “One of the great misconceptions is that we don’t have that much ground game. Because they don’t know,” Trump told AP in a December interview, boasting of “amazing people” including “hundreds and hundreds” of volunteers in the state.
Said Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, “The expectation for Ted Cruz to win Iowa right now is exceptionally high... People have underestimated Donald Trump from the day we announced.”
Trump’s campaign is holding unadvertised caucus training sessions, including one last week at a Pizza Ranch restaurant in outside Des Moines, which drew about a dozen people for a two-hour long presentation on how to use the campaign’s “Ground Game 2” smartphone app.
Larry Weigel, an accountant who attended the session, said he'd already called 60 people and lined up commitments from seven of the 25 people he was aiming to get to caucus for Trump. “You feel it,” he said of the campaign’s momentum.
Many of Trump’s rally-goers say they are longtime caucus voters who are well-acquainted with the process. And others who’ve never felt compelled to caucus say they will this year, and they don’t need a phone call or door knock to remind them.
“Our country’s in dire straits right now,” said Bruce Gjetley, 59, adding that while the caucus process sounds like “messy business,” he is planning to participate for the first time in his life. “We’ve been through eight years of hell and we can’t do it anymore.”
For Gjetley and his wife Kim, of Toledo, Iowa, Trump has become more than just a politician.
“I hang onto every word he says,” says Kim, 58, a retired nurse, who walks her pit bull everyday wearing her Trump hat and gleefully described receiving an Ivanka Trump perfume and lotion set for Christmas, along with Christmas and New Year’s cards from Trump himself.
Kim said that she’s offered to volunteer for the campaign, including opening a small office in her town — though she hasn’t heard back on her offer.
“I want to be able to help whether it’s call people or hand out yard signs. Anything,” she said.
Still, others aren’t quite sure.
Derrell Peters drove about 50 miles from Eldora to Cedar Falls last week to see Trump in person, stood in line outside of a college gymnasium in the cold more than three hours before Trump took the stage, and even attended a caucus training session organized by his local Republican Party.
But despite the time he’s already invested, he said he was having second thoughts about caucusing.
“I thought, if this is what it is, I really ain’t too sure about it,” said Peters, 65. “I might stay home.”
