Donald Trump Campaign Lags in Mobilizing Iowa Caucus Voters

By TRIP GABRIEL

Donald J. Trump has dominated much of this political season, excited an often-ignored part of the electorate, filled huge arenas with followers and upended the rules of how modern campaigns are run.

But now he faces an urgent question: Can he actually win crucial early contest states?

Translating a personality-driven campaign to the voting booth is no easy feat, especially for a candidate who has never run before.

But here in the state with the first nominating contest, about six weeks away, Mr. Trump has fallen behind in the nuts and bolts of organizing. A loss in Iowa for Mr. Trump, where he has devoted the most resources of his campaign, could imperil his leads in the next two nominating states, New Hampshire and South Carolina, where his get-out-the-vote organizations are even less robust.

A successful ground game is crucial in Iowa because of the state’s complicated method of caucus voting, but the Trump campaign has lagged in reaching some of its own benchmarks.

Mr. Trump’s Iowa director predicted that he would recruit a leader for each of the state’s 1,681 Republican precincts by Thanksgiving. Instead, the first major training session for precinct leaders, heavily promoted in emails and conference calls, drew only about 80 people to West Des Moines last weekend, with about 50 participating online.

Some of Mr. Trump’s Republican rivals have spent months calling and knocking on doors to identify potential supporters to draw them out to caucuses, but Mr. Trump does not appear to have invested in this crucial “voter ID” strategy until recently.

The Trump campaign hopes to attract a surge of independents and disaffected Democrats on caucus night, but the latest data from the Iowa secretary of state show no significant growth in Republican registrations.

Interviews in Iowa with Mr. Trump’s campaign workers, his volunteers and dozens of attendees at his rallies over two months, as well as observations of voter outreach, conference calls and confidential training sessions, indicate that Mr. Trump’s support in the Feb. 1 Iowa caucuses may fall short of his poll numbers in the state. He is now trading the lead position with Senator Ted Cruz of Texas. Mr. Trump’s greatest organizing asset is a database of thousands of email addresses of Iowans who have attended packed rallies. Yet it appears that organizers have only recently begun tapping that database, which a Democratic strategist in Iowa called “malpractice.”

The “magic number” of voters the Trump campaign has revealed it wants to turn out — 48,000 — is highly optimistic in the view of other Republican campaigns and independent experts.

“It’s easy for someone to sit on a phone when they get a polling call and say, ‘I like candidate X,’ ” said Steve Grubbs, the Iowa state director for Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, referring to Mr. Trump’s strength in Iowa polls. “It’s far different to get that person out of a La-Z-Boy to hop in a car and avoid the black ice and head to their local firehouse.” Mr. Grubbs, who said he had already signed up 800 precinct captains for Mr. Paul, added, “You really have to put your organization together by Dec. 15.”

Mr. Trump has about 15 paid Iowa staff members, compared with 36 working for a “super PAC“ supporting Ben Carson that is organizing in his behalf in Iowa. Asked where Carson supporters have canvassed in Iowa, Tina Goff, who is directing the troops, said, “Where haven’t we canvassed?”

The campaign of Mr. Cruz opened a 48-bed dormitory in Des Moines this month, nicknamed Camp Cruz, for what it says will be 500 volunteers from out of state. They will knock on doors and make calls to potential supporters, who are identified by microtargeting software. Because of the peculiar nature of the caucuses, for which voters gather in classrooms and senior centers at an appointed hour, turnout is lower than for primaries. A representative of each candidate — a precinct captain — may give a brief speech, and then there is a secret ballot. Only about one in five active registered Republicans have historically participated, making a candidate’s get-out-the-vote organizing critical.

But Mr. Trump “so far is not running a traditional campaign reliant on the fundamentals,” said Jeff Patch, a Republican strategist in Iowa unaffiliated with a candidate. “A campaign depending on turning out low-propensity G.O.P. voters and bringing new voters into the process should be registering people in December and January.”

In Davenport, a blue-collar city on the Mississippi River, a paid Trump staff member and two volunteers worked their phones early this month from a restaurant booth, encouraging people to attend a Dec. 5 rally with Mr. Trump.

Fanned across the table was an inch-thick stack of pages with registered Republicans. The campaign had yet to narrow the universe of thousands of Republicans in the Davenport area to potential Trump supporters, the kind of screening some campaigns had already done.

Betsey Tibbitts, a volunteer sipping white wine, got off a call with a voter named Mildred. “Mildred is a big X,” she said. “Mildred is not going to vote for him.”

She was more encouraged on the next call when a woman said she was logging on to her computer right then to register for tickets to the rally, which were free.

Chuck Laudner, Mr. Trump’s Iowa state director, declined repeated requests to discuss the details of his field effort. In a brief interview after a Trump rally, he disputed the notion that Mr. Trump could not turn out a huge wave of first-time caucusgoers.

“The media says the conventional wisdom is new people don’t come out and vote,” he said. In the 1980s, he added, “when I cut my teeth, Pat Robertson turned out the entire religious right that had never mobilized before.”

The demographics of Trump supporters reveal his challenges: They are younger, lack a college degree and are less likely to be evangelical Christians, according to polling. The profile of past caucusgoers is the opposite: most are 45 and up, college educated and evangelical. What the Trump campaign has going for it is the enthusiasm the candidate inspires at his rallies, which are the largest of any Republican. “I take Trump’s caucus prospects very seriously,” said an operative supporting another candidate, speaking on the condition of anonymity to candidly assess a rival. “It’s true that new candidates think they can change history. It’s true that they never do. It’s true we’ve never had a new candidate like Trump.” Trump supporters compare him to another candidate in recent caucus history who generated record-setting turnout by first-time voters: Barack Obama. But unlike the Trump campaign, Mr. Obama invested heavily in Iowa. He had over 200 paid staff members in more than 60 offices. Derek Eadon, an organizer for Mr. Obama in 2007 and now a political consultant in Des Moines, said that despite collecting contact information for people to attend Trump rallies, the campaign was neglecting follow-through. “It’s very tough to activate via email without field staff following up on the phone and asking them to volunteer or talk about the campaign,” he said. “It’s malpractice not to follow up with those folks immediately.”

Of eight people interviewed at a Trump rally in Waterloo in early October, all gave the Trump campaign their emails. Contacted recently by a reporter, four of the eight said they had not received any follow-up. The others received a mass email asking them to volunteer for Mr. Trump, but they were uninterested. Russell Hotchkiss said he was too busy with a 1-year-old and a small business to be a political activist. Judy Cruze, a nurse, deleted the campaign’s emails and has no intention of caucusing for anyone. For its training session last weekend, the Trump campaign had sought out people who had attended rallies to be caucus leaders. The modest participation for the session in person and online contradicted Mr. Laudner’s promise to have nearly 1,700 caucus leaders in place by Thanksgiving, as he told NBC News in October.

The volunteer leaders, known as precinct captains, learned that they would be responsible for bringing 25 or more people from their neighborhoods to the caucuses. They were shown how to download an app, Ground Game 2, with a “walk list” of registered Republicans in their precincts.

It was clear from the training that the Trump campaign was only beginning to identify supporters, and that its volunteers could face unique challenges in going door to door. “Just listen to them,” a Trump staff member advised volunteers on how to elicit and record issues on voters’ minds. “If they’re concerned about the border,” he said, mark down immigration. “If they’re worried about space aliens stealing the fillings out of their teeth, it’s ‘other.’ ”

Tana Goertz, a peppy former contestant on “The Apprentice,” Mr. Trump’s reality television program, enticingly held out the prospect of rewards for the best performers, like a game show.

“At the end of the caucus night, Mr. Trump is going to know who won their precincts, and he’s going to know you were the precinct leaders,” she said. “I know he does nice things. You will be recognized.”