Adam Wren is a contributing editor at Indianapolis Monthly.

Three days before Super Tuesday, a white Make America Great Again Trump RV steered into a cul-de-sac in a neighborhood of two-story houses and well-trimmed lawns outside of Arlington, Texas.

On the RV’s rear end, an image of Trump, holding his fingers up in a peace sign, hovered over snow-capped mountains and pine trees. On the vehicle’s side, there was a life-size bust of a golden retriever wearing a red Make America Great Again hat. With its golden mane, the dog bore a passing resemblance to the candidate himself.


A side door opened up, and out poured a handful of volunteers sporting white Trump t-shirts and hats. Equipped with a smartphone app called Strike List GOTV, which listed potential supporters and their addresses, they fanned out across the neighborhood to block walk for Trump.

Walking the block for Trump doesn’t exactly square with the popular image of the billionaire’s presidential campaign, which for months hasn’t consisted of much more than a series of phoned-in interviews to cable news programs and mega-rallies connected by private jet hops. But as Trump has gained momentum, racking up three wins in four states and 82 delegates so far, the campaign has changed shape, and started to look a lot like a conventional candidacy buoyed by more bread-and butter-activities like knocking on doors.

On this warm Texas day, there were no grand escalator entrances or helicopter rides or screaming crowds—just a team of Trump volunteers checking off voters on their iPhones. Trump’s new GOTV operation might not be the most formidable one in the state; but it just might be enough to pull off an upset, striking a mortal blow to Texas’ favored son Senator Ted Cruz by denying him the 50 percent threshold he needs to grab all the delegates on his home turf.

Among the block walkers was John McGrath, a high school junior from Arlington, who had already knocked on 70 doors for Trump that afternoon, flipping five voters toward Trump from candidates such as Marco Rubio and even Bernie Sanders, he told me. While he’s not old enough to vote in his state’s primary on Tuesday—he will turn 18 just before the general election in November—this isn’t McGrath’s first time going door-to-door for a candidate. Back in 2014, he knocked on doors for Gov. Greg Abbott, who endorsed Cruz last week. From a military family, McGrath liked what Trump had to say about keeping the country safe. And after eight years of the Obama administration, he said, he would never support a one-term senator.

McGrath handed me five Trump yard signs to carry, as he thumbed his phone looking for his next possible convert. As we went from house to house, the Trump RV circled the block like an ice cream truck, hawking not Klondikes or Orange Dreams but a candidate who would, according to a 6-point platform printed in red-lettering on the side, “Destroy ISIS” and “Protect the 2nd amendment.” (At one point, I even saw a boy with a slack-jawed grin chase after the vehicle.) And instead of blaring creepy music, signs on the RV trumpeted the importance of voter turnout: “Vote Tuesday March 1.”

Not more than three houses in, McGrath won the block-walking lottery: An undecided Republican voter opened the door, a kindly middle-aged woman who didn’t immediately shoo him away. McGrath’s eyes widened.

“What’s your biggest issue?” he asked her.

“I’m not too sure if he’s the right man or not,” she said about Trump. “I’m not too positive, and I’m a Republican. I’m just weighing the goods and bads and stuff.”

“I do want to tell you, out of the top three guys that are left—Trump, Rubio and Cruz—he’s the only one that’s actually been in charge of a lot of money and a lot of people,” McGrath said, writing off Ohio Gov. John Kasich and neurosurgeon Ben Carson, who will also appear on his state’s ballot on Tuesday. “He has the executive experience to be the guy. Now, I understand that maybe you don’t like his character, he’s created jobs.”

She hadn’t mentioned anything about not liking his character; it was an unforced error. He and a fellow volunteer worked the woman for another few minutes, but couldn’t get a commitment.

“The excitement is there,” McGrath said, as he headed to the next house. “We just need to turn people out.”

***

I spent the weekend before Super Tuesday inside Trump’s Texas ground game, from going door-to-door with volunteers such as McGrath to talking with more than a dozen Trump voters—all but one of whom had already cast votes for the candidate, joining more than a million of their fellow Texans who voted early—to eating cold pizza with Trump’s Texas state director. What I found was a campaign angling to finish a strong second at the very least, peeling off more than a third of the state’s delegates, and knocking Trump’s fellow anti-establishment candidate Cruz out of the race in the process.

In their final push to plunder as many votes as possible from the state, where 155 Republican delegates—more than 25 percent of the total delegates—are awarded on Tuesday, the Trump campaign has bulked up their Texas operation. Three new offices now dot the state, in addition to their Austin headquarters, including one in Dallas, Houston and San Antonio, light blue areas where Team Trump thinks they can check Cruz, who is leading Trump by anywhere from 1 to 15 percentage points, according to a battery of polls. They have also enlisted nearly 30 paid staffers and thousands of volunteers across the state.

Even outside of Trumps’ Texas campaign, in local watering holes and on local newscasts, in restaurants and coffee shops and Uber cars, Super Tuesday’s Trump v. Cruz fight dominates Texans’ conversations. There’s a palpable sense among even the most casual of political observers that the state will shape the contours of the race in the coming months. And no matter how many eye-roll-inducing Texas caricatures (Everything’s bigger in Texas!) and clichés (Is Trump all-hat, no-cattle?) they have to endure from parachuting-in national political pundits to get there, they’re genuinely excited about tipping the scales.

“I have a good chance to win in Texas,” Trump told his audience last week in Fort Worth. “I would love to get Texas.” To accomplish that, the Trump campaign seems to have learned the lessons of a second-place finish to Cruz in Iowa, as the well-run rolling RV-turned-mobile Trump campaign office demonstrated.

It’s a ground game that’s still far behind Cruz’s, though. “To the extent to which ground games matter, the other campaigns have nothing,” said Mark P. Jones, a political science professor at Rice University. “It’s like comparing a six man football team to the Dallas Cowboys.” Whether Trump can pull off a Texas upset will depend on not just GOTV apps and determined volunteers, but on pickpocketing the kind of casual Tea Party voter who first sent Cruz to Washington back in 2012.

***

It was four days before Super Tuesday, at 8 p.m. on a Friday night, and Donald Trump’s Dallas campaign office was buzzing. A cacophony of overlapping phone conversations filled the room. Early voting had ended an hour ago, but more than a dozen volunteers and two paid staffers remained, dialing to make America great again.

Across the way, another four campaign workers assembled yard signs, roughly 2,000 of which lay on the floor before them already assembled. Boxes of half-eaten pizza lay out on a folding table in one corner of the room.

Hours before my arrival, Trump had pulled off a Texas surprise at a mega rally in Fort Worth, smuggling his vanquished foe-turned-friend New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie into the state for an endorsement that induced gasps among the coterie of journalists in the Forth Worth Convention Center room.

Their candidate had since left the state, but a cardboard cutout of him stood sentinel at the front of the office. Trump volunteers could be heard still talking about the endorsement, wondering along with rest of the chattering class what it meant for the future of the campaign.

Thirty minutes before, a well-meaning if overzealous Trump volunteer had chased me away from the non-descript corporate office park campaign digs. Once inside, I had introduced myself as a reporter, and asked if I could talk to some of the candidate’s supporters. The volunteer who met me explained that the office was private property, and I wasn’t authorized to step foot inside. She showed me the door. As I pulled out of the parking lot, I saw her in my rearview mirror as she walked after me, watching me until I pulled out onto a nearby thoroughfare.

In a matter of minutes, though, Trump’s communications director, Hope Hicks, authorized my visit, telling the volunteer to invite me back inside for a tour. Now, members of Team Trump offered me slices of pizza and talked up their Texas prospects. What if they could finish second in most of the congressional districts, stealing from Cruz a third of the state’s 155 delegates?

“We’re not leaving any state to its own devices,” said one of the two paid staffers, a middle-aged man wearing a blazer who would only describe himself as having worked at Americans for Prosperity with Corey Lewandowski, the stone-faced architect of the New York real estate mogul’s improbable, insurgent and ascendant campaign. “Texas is looking pretty good for us, I gotta say.”

I asked for the staffer’s name.

“Uh, Billy Bob Thornton. Don’t write about me. He’s the state director,” Thornton said, pointing at Josh Jones, Trump’s Texas director.

In a short interview, Jones, a former engineer in the oil and gas industry, pulled back the curtain on how Trump’s campaign revamped its ground game in Texas, Super Tuesday’s biggest prize.

Jones told me the campaign is poised to capitalize on a surprising voter calculus that could spell trouble for Cruz’s campaign on Super Tuesday and beyond—if indeed there is a beyond.

“What we’ve been saying around here is, we like Senator Cruz as Senator Cruz,” Jones told me.

Interviews with nearly a dozen Trump voters—the kind of voters to whom Cruz has made overtures by positioning himself as TrumpLite throughout the primary—buttressed that sentiment. In voting for Trump, they realize they get a two-fer: Trump, whom they love, as their presidential nominee, and Cruz, whom they can live with, in the Senate.

If that bears out at the ballot box on Tuesday, it could unlock much of the delegate-rich state for Trump, upending Cruz’s campaign. And it’s likely why Trump unleashed one of the great plot twists of the 2016 campaign—the Christie endorsement— in Cruz’s own backyard.

“What Trump realizes is that he doesn’t even need to defeat Cruz to weaken him,” Mark Jones, the political science professor, told me. “By keeping Cruz from achieving a landslide victory in his home state, Trump wounds him. He denies Cruz his signature victory. If he doesn’t win with a landslide margin, the interpretation will be “yeah, he won his home state but not in a convincing fashion.”

For Trump, March 1 is shaping up nicely. For Texas’ favored son, on the other hand, Super Tuesday may not be not so super.

***

Hours before Christie endorsed Trump, Curt and Lee Rhoads huddled together outside of the Fort Worth Convention Center on a chilly Texas morning. Nearly four hours before their favored presidential candidate was set to speak at one of his trademark mega rallies here, the husband and wife stood in a line that already snaked a few hundred yards around the building.

The Rhoads casted their vote for Trump three days ago. But they voted for Cruz’s senate bid in 2012. “I guess he’s been doing fine,” said Curt, a Vietnam veteran and retired signal worker for Burlington Northern Santa Fe, who wore a red Make America Great Again hat. “But for president? Nope.”

Trump has hijacked the average casual Tea Party voters such as the Rhoadses in this state—the kind of voters Cruz needs to expand his coalition beyond don’t-tread-on-me die-hards and Constitutionalists. “They've jumped into the political scene only recently and don't have the strong ties to Cruz that the rest of us do,” Julie McCarty, president of the Northeast Tarrant County Tea Party, the deep red heart of the national movement, said of Trump voters. Tarrant County, where the rally was held, is home to the NE Tarrant County Tea Party, arguably the strongest Tea Party affiliate in the country. “They feel like they need to throw all the bums out...not realizing that not everyone is a bum.”

To these voters, Cruz might have delivered on his promise to do battle with D.C. insiders, but why vote for him as president when they can still keep them as their senator and get Trump in the Oval Office?

“I can see why he’s not liked in the Senate,” said Lee, a pharmacy technician. “Is he a senator?”

Curt nodded.

A few hours later, inside the Trump rally, the Fort Worth Convention Center was rocking. Amid a sea of Make America Great Again Hats, “The Silent Majority Stands With Trump” signs, Trump t-shirts that pilfered the Dallas Cowboys colors and lone star, and dozens of inexplicable “I Vape, I Vote” placards, Sherri Blasingame waited to see Donald Trump, the man for whom she casted an early vote hours earlier.

For the 51-year-old realtor from tony South Lake, a suburb of Fort Worth in Tarrant County, it was the first time in her life that she couldn’t wait for Election Day to hit the polls. Until about a year ago, Blasingame counted herself as a proud member of the NE Tarrant Tea Party. She attended their meetings. She supported the Tea Party chapter’s gold boy, Cruz, in his Senate bid.

And then Trump got in the race last summer, around the same time Blasingame started to lose touch with the Tea Party. They were too dogmatic and didn’t seem to be getting enough done. Her support for Cruz waned. “Now, he’s a big Evangelical,” Blasingame said of Cruz, as she jostled up against the media corral gate in the exhibit hall, minutes before Trump would take the stage. All of the religious appeals to Evangelicals seemed too clever by half. “I really hadn’t seen that before. ... I’m just a little disappointed in him, and I’m completely supporting Trump. But I’m a Texan, born and raised.”

It’s a voter such as Blasingame who may give Cruz pause ahead of his high-stakes, home-state Super Tuesday primary.

“If Cruz isn’t cleaning up in Tarrant County, that’s a bad sign for him,” said Jones, the political science professor. “That is Cruz Country, particularly in the Northeast part of it. That’s the most visible and vocal part of the Texas Tea Party.”

Even Cruz’s most faithful voters are wondering whether the senator can win 50 percent of the vote here in Texas, an accomplishment that could help him elbow his way back into the race for the GOP nomination.

“Nowhere in Texas is the Tea Party stronger than in Tarrant County, and loyalty to our senator runs deep,” McCarty told me. “I suspect Cruz will win Tarrant County easily. Pulling off a 50 percent victory statewide, however, is another story.”

Back at the rally, Blasingame moved closer to the center of the room, sidling up near a gate that cordoned off the media, trying to escape the crush of a crowd that was getting rowdier with each passing minute.

An announcer introduced a surprise guest. She tilted her head when she heard the name.

Chris Christie?

“Most of my friends are voting for Trump,” she said.

Almost as if on cue, Christie posed a question to the audience that Blasingame had already answered.

“Is Texas going to be Trump Country?”

“Woo!” Blasingame shouted.

The audience roared.