Cruz counters Trump’s overtures with targeted approach in Iowa

Sen. Ted Cruz’s leading Iowa supporters say his get-out-the-vote operation is the best they have seen for a presidential campaign here. He had better hope they are right.

With his monthlong lead in the polls erased, Cruz’s hopes for pulling out a much-needed victory over Donald Trump in the Iowa caucuses on Monday now rest in the hands of thousands of campaign workers and supporters who are spending this weekend telephoning, emailing and knocking on the doors of likely caucusgoers.

Cruz’s campaign boasts a chairman or chairwoman for each of Iowa’s 99 counties, captains in 1,537 of the state’s 1,681 precincts, and 10,000 people from this state and beyond who have volunteered to help in the final push.

But it is precisely whom all those Cruz backers are striving to reach, and reach again, that illustrates the differing approaches and expectations of the Cruz and Trump campaigns.

As 46 volunteers sat making calls and eating popcorn in Cruz’s office-park headquarters in suburban Des Moines around lunchtime Thursday, Bryan English, Cruz’s state director, described the Iowans they were targeting.

“Our voters tend to be voters who vote consistently,” English said. The campaign worked from lists of past caucus participants, then built profiles on individual voters based on what the voters relayed as their overriding areas of interest.

It is a sophisticated, narrowly tailored approach: Borrowing from the latest research in behavioral psychology, the campaign gave its precinct captains talking points from which to write personal notes or to make calls telling supportersthe captains were looking forward to seeing them Monday.

“If I know someone’s looking for me on caucus night – if you and I are planning to see each other on caucus night, I’m more inclined to go because I want to keep my commitment to you to show up,” English said.

Trump’s campaign, conversely, is counting on a surge of new caucus participants with little experience of what can be a forbidding process. The pamphlets he passes out at his rallies include instructions to find one’s precinct online, reminders that one can register as a Republican right before caucusing, and bullet points noting that “the ballot is secret” and that “most caucuses take less than one hour!”

Cruz’s supporters are skeptical that Trump can produce a wave of new voters. He is not as organized, they say with striking self-assurance.

“I’ve seen no evidence of and heard no supporting evidence to suggest they’re running anything like this,” English said, nodding toward the din of dozens of simultaneous phone conversations. “If this is what it takes to get regular caucus voters to go to caucus, it would take this plus something in order to get people who don’t.”

This is now the assumption on which Cruz’s Iowa campaign rests: that, while turnout may increase above the 121,500 who voted in the 2012 Republican caucuses, it will not exceed 140,000.

Jeff Roe, Cruz’s campaign manager, said the operation had amassed enough committed supporters – he would not say how many – to “withstand a swell of voters.” A well-executed turnout effort, he noted, can increase a candidate’s vote share from 2.5 to 5 percentage points.

As late as Friday, Cruz’s campaign was still trying to identify and potentially persuade additional voters, rather than call only already committed supporters to urge them to caucus – a sign of just how volatile the race remains in the closing days.

Cruz’s supporters in offices here and in northwestern Iowa were making more than 15,000 calls a day, with a refined list of exactly which voters they have identified as up for grabs. Roe said at a Bloomberg Politics breakfast Friday that there were 9,131 Iowans deciding between Cruz and Trump, 3,185 choosing between Cruz and Ben Carson and 2,807 who were down to Cruz or Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida.

If those voters make up their minds based on how much contact they have had with the campaigns, it could be enough for Cruz, the junior senator from Texas, to pull out a win.

In a Monmouth University poll last week, 25 percent of likely Republican caucusgoers who had been asked by a candidate to turn out said they had heard from Cruz’s campaign, more than any other candidate; 13 percent said they had been contacted by Trump.

In interviews, many Cruz voters reported receiving mail and phone calls recently from the Cruz campaign – though they did not necessarily answer those calls.

“Caller ID is great,” said Bill Ellis, 61, of Graettinger, Iowa.

At campaign events, volunteers have made the rounds with voters, asking them if they planned to caucus for Cruz and if they knew their caucus location. If the voters did not, volunteers offered to look it up for them.

Many of the volunteers are staying in a dormitory known as Camp Cruz, which has attracted hundreds of Cruz enthusiasts from states as far away as Texas and Idaho.

“It gives you some credibility when you say, ‘I jumped on a plane from Georgia and came on my own expense,’” said Kathy Hildebrand, 62, of Snellville, Ga., hauling a box of Iowa-shaped Cruz sugar cookies at a recent event. “They care what you think after that.”

The main super PAC supporting Cruz, Keep the Promise I, has also been lending a hand, with nine Iowa workers – more than some lower-polling candidates’ actual campaigns.

As the campaign entered its final hours, Cruz’s supporters expressed confidence in their organization.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” said Bob Vander Plaats, a prominent Iowa evangelical. “If we lose, it’s not because they haven’t done an unbelievable job. We just got beat in a strange environment.”

The method assumes a carefully cultivated list of supporters, well acquainted with what is expected of them when they show up at their precincts.

Nowadays, though, Cruz sometimes sounds more like a preacher than a presidential candidate. But one biblical tenet he rarely evokes is tithing, a mandate that 10 percent of possessions be donated to God.

That’s because tax records Cruz released between 2006 and 2010 show he and his wife donated less than 1 percent of their income to charity, and nothing to their church. That underscores who Cruz was before running for president, when he was known more as a fiery fiscal conservative than a devout Southern Baptist.

Cruz’s religion wasn’t a centerpiece of his 2012 run for Senate in Texas. Cruz also suggested in 2013 that politicians should “avoid ostentatiously wrapping yourself in your faith” – advice he’s ignored amid his rise in the national polls.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

This story was originally published January 30, 2016 at 3:17 PM with the headline "Cruz counters Trump’s overtures with targeted approach in Iowa."