People rally during a campaign event for U.S. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump in Phoenix, Arizona July 11, 2015. REUTERS/Nancy Wiechec

By James Oliphant and Emily Flitter

CLEVELAND (Reuters) - Four years ago, only one Republican candidate was consistently hitting the same kind of polling heights among the presidential field that real estate mogul Donald Trump is reaching now. His name was Mitt Romney.

The fact that Romney went on to capture his party’s nomination should be, at the very least, one basic reason why Trump’s recent surge can’t be dismissed as the aberration that so many pundits and party strategists claim it is.

That doesn’t mean, of course, that Trump, who will command center stage at the first Republican presidential debate on Thursday, is going to wind up the party’s nominee a year from now. There are significant obstacles in his path: his history of supporting liberal causes, his sclerotic campaign organization and his limited appeal - so far - to a narrow swath of Republican voters.

Still, some Republicans, especially those outside of Washington, are urging the party to take Trump’s bid seriously, arguing that it’s not out of the question that he could shock the world and win the primary.

Craig Robinson, the former chairman of the Iowa Republican Party, sees echoes of the current president in Trump's run, saying Trump is another product of the media environment.

"Obama was a brand. Donald Trump is a brand. At the end of the day it was really cool to be an Obama supporter and really uncool to be a McCain or Romney supporter," said Robinson, who is neutral in the Republican primary.

Steve Deace, an influential conservative radio host in Iowa, said those within the Republican party who are dismissing Trump's chances of securing the Republican presidential nomination “are underestimating just how fed up the base is with the feckless actions of this political party.”

Trump, who has made incendiary comments about Mexican immigrants, is dominating polls that suggest he is riding a wave of anti-immigrant and anti-establishment fervor. The big question is whether he can ride that wave all the way to the Republican nominating convention in Cleveland, Ohio, in July 2016.

ROOM TO GROW

To do that, "he’s going to need to do one of the harder things in politics - bring scores of new voters into the primary voting process," Deace said.

That’s because, while Trump’s support within the party at the moment appears to be relatively substantial compared to the rest of the presidential field, it is also limited.

He attracts male voters who are less educated, less affluent, and less religious than the Republican electorate as a whole, according to a Reuters/Ipsos survey of almost 2,000 Republicans conducted last month.

It showed 61 percent of Trump supporters to be male and almost half of those surveyed in the poll said they weren’t religious. Over half had not attended college and almost 20 percent earned less than $50,000 a year.

To win the nomination, Trump would need to widen his appeal by attracting social conservatives in greater numbers than he’s doing now as well as more upscale, college-educated voters and women voters.

To that end, Trump is showing signs of wanting to be more than a celebrity contender. Slowly, he’s beginning to build organizations in the key early primary states of Iowa and New Hampshire to compete for voters.

In Iowa, Trump has hired Chuck Laudner, a well respected operative who in 2012 worked for the underfunded and little-known Rick Santorum, the candidate who shocked the national political scene by tying Romney in the caucuses.

A religious conservative, Laudner signing on with Trump was viewed by some in Iowa as a surprise and it could mean that Trump will be able to expand his base of support. Last month, Trump raised eyebrows when he told an Iowa audience that he had never sought forgiveness from God for anything.

"I don't bring God into that picture. I don't," Trump said.

“Chuck Laudner’s a true believer in the Christian right,” said Douglas Gross, a Republican strategist in Iowa. “Ideologically, [he and Trump] couldn’t be farther apart."

In New Hampshire, Trump already has a chairman in each county in the state.

“I’ve been part of campaigns for the past 20 years in New Hampshire, and I’m seeing all the right things being done to put him in a very good position for the primary,” said Lou Garguilo, a county co-chair for Trump.

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