WINNING LIKE A GUY WHO'S RUN STUFF BEFORE:

On Monday night, 24 hours before Iowans would participate in their state's caucuses, around 25 volunteers sat in an old Blockbuster Video and placed calls from their personal cellphones on behalf of Mitt Romney. They had the trappings of a Romney crowd--oxford shirts, small talk concerning fruit salad--and the names of the voters on their list were of Romney people, too. "The reason I'm calling is because I have you down as a supporter," the callers chimed, reading off a get-out-the-vote script.

This fluid caucus season has birthed and vanquished new front-runners--Gallup calls it the "most volatile" nominating contest ever polled--but there has been one constant in Iowa: a list of more than 30,000 supporters that Romney's team believed were unlikely to vote for any of his rivals. The process that produced this list had taken nearly five years to complete. Romney's previous Iowa campaign allowed him to stockpile voter data and develop sophisticated systems for interpreting it. It was that data and those interpretations that supported one of the riskiest strategic moves of the campaign thus far: Romney's seemingly late decision to fight aggressively for his first-place finish in Iowa.

Even as his campaign leadership claimed into the fall that they were keeping their options open here, Romney's targeters were quietly maintaining a continuous tally of their supporters in Iowa, a list that proved unexpectedly stable even as other candidates rose and fell in the polls. It had become a stock observation to note that Mitt Romney just couldn't move from 25 percent in Iowa--his support was both resistant to growth and impervious to decay. But what was more important for Romney's team was not just that his total share of the vote remained steady but that the individual voters who comprised it didn't move either, making it easy to keep track of who they were and to mobilize them personally.

It was the ability to pinpoint and track supporters that settled Romney's decision to publicly commit to winning Iowa late this fall.

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