“Hat on? Or hat off?” a Warren volunteer asked her friend, tugging at her knit cap. But there wasn’t time to decide. It was suddenly her turn, and she handed over her phone to a campaign staffer and crouched close to the floor, wrapping her arms around the ball of fluff that has become the senator’s most popular campaign surrogate here in the final days before the Feb. 3 caucuses: Warren’s young golden retriever, Bailey.

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“Such a good boy,” the young woman cooed, as Bailey stood still and pointed his snout toward the camera, seemingly on cue.

Technically, Wednesday’s event was a meet-and-greet with Warren’s husband, Bruce Mann, traveling across the state for his wife, who has been off the campaign trail this week and in Washington for the impeachment trial of President Trump.

But speaking here before several dozen volunteers and organizers, Mann, a Harvard Law professor on break from classes, seemed to know that people weren’t there to see him. “As you can see, it is all paws on deck,” Mann said with a wry smile, looking out at an audience where every head seemed to be turned toward a dog that sat yawning a few feet away. “While Elizabeth is doing her constitutional duty in Washington, she has a lot of people, and a couple of dogs, standing in for her.”

He also suggested the dog had brought some good luck. “Within 24 hours, the Des Moines Register had endorsed Elizabeth,” he said. “You be the judge: correlation or causation. But I think Bailey is a natural closer.”

After a quick pep talk, Mann cleared the way for Bailey’s photo line. It wasn’t as seamless as Warren’s selfie lines, in which the candidate shakes hands, hugs and poses with hundreds, sometimes thousands of voters after her events in a feat of staffing that keeps the event rolling like a smooth assembly line.

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To capture the perfect canine selfie, there was waving involved and, occasionally, the shaking and crunching of a half full bottle of water that made just enough noise to capture Bailey’s attention, which kept wandering toward the side of the room where Mann chatted with supporters.

Above him, Warren’s 40-something son Alex, who has been serving as the unofficial handler of his canine sibling, held on tight to the dog’s leash. He had driven Bailey to Iowa from Boston late last week, a 20-hour trip to deliver a Warren family member so popular on the campaign trail that he had been immortalized as a giant blowup creature deployed outside a Democratic dinner last fall.

As the line moved, Alex Warren occasionally bent down to straighten and position Bailey with the patience and precision of a dog show handler, or maybe someone who had done this a lot. “He’s still just a pup,” he said, as Bailey alerted to the sound of a squeak.

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It was coming from nearby where, one of Warren’s campaign organizers had stuck her hand into a bag full of dog gifts. There was a box of Milkbone dog biscuits, which Bailey sniffed curiously, and a squeaky toy, which the retriever quickly bit into and tugged on.

“Oh, he’s a fighter,” one man said, laughing. “Just like his mom!”

Nearby, Warren organizers circulated around the room hard at work at what was the real motivation for the event: to sign up supporters who had turned out for canvassing and phone bank shifts in the final days before Monday’s caucus.

Bailey wore a collar that read “consumer watchdog” and a harness that was outfitted with a Go-Pro camera that captured his point-of-view, which on this morning included reporters and photographers on the ground aiming their cameras and phones into his face and a box of doughnuts on a nearby table that he stuck his nose into before a staffer pulled it away.