Ron Paul has been sticking to low-profile states that have barely seen other candidates. Ron Paul's parallel campaign

MOSCOW, Idaho — Ron Paul thinks he could win Idaho, North Dakota and Alaska on Super Tuesday.

The Texas congressman will be on the ballot in all 10 states today, but he’s focused his resources on three with caucuses — “fertile political fields,” he calls them — where low turnout could give his motivated supporters greater influence.


“Those three are our three best chances, so that’s why we’re spending a lot of time there,” he said here Monday afternoon as he left a rally that drew 2,200 to the University of Idaho’s basketball stadium. “They’re all pretty close.” (See also: 2012 delegate tracker.)

Paul spent Sunday in Alaska, campaigning in Fairbanks and Anchorage. In addition to three Monday rallies around Idaho, he’ll hold a fourth event Tuesday morning outside Boise. Then he flies to Fargo, N.D., where he’ll spend Super Tuesday night — suggesting the campaign thinks they have their best chance to win there.

While his GOP rivals toil in the prime battlegrounds of Ohio and Georgia, Paul is running a parallel campaign. He’s in low-profile states that have barely seen the other Republican candidates, hoping to continue collecting delegates on his march to the Tampa convention this summer.

But Paul has yet to win a state outright in the 2012 cycle despite several states where campaign operatives thought victory was within reach.

Paul said he won’t think about dropping out until another candidate has secured the necessary 1,144 delegates to become the GOP nominee.

“So far, nobody’s quite close to that,” he said, predicting he’ll pick up a lot of delegates during state party conventions in May. “I just have to keep going. … We’re still in this race to win.”

“The other candidates you’ve seen, they come on the scene, they blip up, they’re in the lead and then they crash,” he added. “It looks like Newt has done it maybe twice, and I think that could certainly happen to Santorum. In contrast, we have steady growth.”

The campaign’s best shot at picking up a state Tuesday night is probably in North Dakota. Paul’s raised more money from the deeply conservative state (with a history of sharing his leeriness of foreign entanglements) than any other candidate. He’s drawn huge crowds on his past visits. And turnout for the caucus is expected to be low.

Publicly, Paul says there’s no must-win state for him. He expressed confidence Monday that he’ll wind up with a majority of the delegates from Iowa, Minnesota and Maine.

Privately, everyone on Paul’s team is eager to win the popular vote in at least one state — a prize that proved elusive in 2008 and during this year’s first dozen contests. Even a narrow win in a nonbinding contest would help keep small-donor donations flowing and energize activists heading into state conventions where delegate slates will be awarded.

On Monday, Paul drew massive crowds across Idaho despite crummy weather.

About 1,200 showed up at noon for Paul’s first rally in Sandpoint — a town in Idaho’s northern Panhandle region that has only 7,365 residents.

Paul’s biggest crowds, though, come in college towns like this one. But the campaign has grown increasingly frustrated over the past two months at how many energetic 20-somethings who go gaga for Paul at his campus rallies don’t subsequently show up when it matters.

“What we need to do is get that enthusiasm and translate that into making sure they know the rules and are motivated to go and sit out through the process,” Paul said. “For the most part, we do pretty well on that — probably as well as the other campaigns.”

This is Paul’s second swing across the state famous for its potatoes in three weeks. He’s paying to run ads on Fox News and some broadcast networks, and he won a January straw poll of 400 party activists.

“If you come more than once, people know that you’re paying a lot more attention,” he told local reporters. “Hopefully, that will energize them to do what we’d like them to do.”

The sense on the ground, though, is that Romney has the edge. A massive Mormon community gives Romney a built-in advantage. He has the backing of Gov. C. L. “Butch” Otter. And he got a strong reception during a visit to Idaho Falls last Thursday.

But there is also a significant level of uncertainty. Because small states with caucuses are notoriously difficult to poll, there’s no public polling on the three states Paul has pinned his hopes on — North Dakota, Idaho and Alaska.

This is the first time Idaho Republicans — with 32 delegates at stake — will hold caucuses. The state GOP traditionally held a May primary but they moved it up and made it a caucus in the hope that it would attract more attention from the candidates.

“We certainly have a very good chance of winning,” Paul said of Idaho. “I expect it will be one of our best states, but for me to make absolute declarations that I know I’m going to win, I don’t quite go that far.”

Paul — dressed casually, wearing loose-fitting jeans and a red sweater — started the day with a half-hour tour of a facility that assembles small aircraft in Sandpoint. He then visited Moscow and Idaho Falls.

During his rally in Sandpoint, he took a subtle shot at Rick Santorum.

“As an evangelical Christian,” a man asked at the day’s first town hall, “why should I vote for Ron Paul?”

“Well, the same reason everybody else should vote for liberty,” Paul told him. “We all should come together.”

Asked afterward whether he thinks Santorum leans too heavily on his Catholic background as he plays to social conservatives, Paul said, “Well, I think so.”

“They think that you have to have a special interest group … and then you have to do that at the expense of the other special interest groups,” he said. “Freedom shouldn’t be that way. If you’re an evangelical Christian, you should welcome liberty just like a Catholic or a Jew or a Mormon or anybody else because it’s the same principle. It shouldn’t be something special or different.”