Just four months ago, Bachmann was getting accustomed to life in the top tier. | AP Photos Michele Bachmann's hard fall

Four months ago, Michele Bachmann seemed poised for a banner December.

She’d just won the Ames Straw Poll — vanquishing her Minnesota rival, Tim Pawlenty, in the process — and was getting accustomed to life in the top tier of 2012 candidates.


But as the race wraps up, the woman who was on a trajectory to become the first-ever female winner of the Iowa caucuses is fighting to avoid finishing dead last in the state where she was raised.

To underscore her troubles, Bachmann has spent the past 24 hours trying to spin the fallout from her Iowa state campaign chairman’s defection to the Ron Paul camp — insisting repeatedly that the man in question took a payoff to make the switch. Another longtime staffer, who went public to defend the departed chairman, was gone from the campaign by late Thursday.

All that seems certain, amid a fractured evangelical base and the latest polling data, is that the low-on-cash Bachmann rates as an extreme long shot to win the Iowa caucuses. There’s no comfort back home either: She faces uncertain reelection prospects in her own House seat at the end of the presidential primary season.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. For a time, she looked like the real deal — a candidate who would be a viable conservative alternative to Mitt Romney, and who could do damage to the front-runner coming out of Iowa.

Instead, her campaign slowly disintegrated. There was a bitter split with a coterie of top advisers, a slew of campaign trail missteps and claims of unfair treatment. Contributions dried up and the candidate herself never quite developed a message. Once Rick Perry stole her thunder after her Ames Straw Poll win, she retreated to a familiar comfort zone of Fox News and conservative radio appearances.

“I think to a certain extent it was a smoke and mirrors operation,” said her former campaign manager, Ed Rollins. “The debates kept her in it and the end of the day that’s not the substance [of a campaign]…We got her to a point where people looked at her [but], just as other candidates found out, once the spotlight goes on you, you better be prepared.”

He added, “It was a full-scale rush from the day that I signed on to the day I left…there wasn’t the time to properly plan for a campaign.”

Monte Shaw, an Iowa GOP state central committee member who is neutral in the primary, echoed that sentiment.

“She peaked so soon after getting in the race that she didn’t have the infrastructure in place to lock down the goodwill that she had at that time,” said Shaw, adding that at the time she was still seeing crushes of people at her events, she should have had a field staff in place to take advantage of it by, among other things, signing up names. Instead, he said, “she was still trying to hire field staff.”

The congresswoman also suffered a key problem that many first-time presidential contenders fall prey to — she refused to take the counsel of the people she brought on to tell her how to handle a presidential campaign.

“I think for her, she is her own best adviser,” said one former Bachmann staffer, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “And so I think anything that comes from the outside is not just filtered in the normal sense but doesn’t weigh the same as how she weighs her instincts on things. Her instincts outweigh, generally speaking, a fair amount of counsel. Having lost only a school board election and having won ever since, I think she feels like she has great political instincts. But it’s just that we’re at a different level at this point. She’s not an easy person in terms of taking counsel.”

Bachmann spokeswoman Alice Stewart insisted that anything can happen and that the candidate is still marching forward on a 99-county tour that is seeing huge crowds. She added that some polls show that upward of 40 percent of caucus-goers are still either making up their minds or could switch support.

“We have a good ground game,” Stewart told POLITICO. “We believe we’re going to do well in Iowa, and that will help us [going forward] in the other early states…We’re three or four days out from the caucuses. Back in August when we were three or four days out from the straw poll, there were a lot of people who said she couldn’t win, and she did.”

Back then, as a tea party favorite who knew how to work the national conservative press, Bachmann burst into the primary as the breakout star of the June 13 debate in New Hampshire. She seemed measured, impressive and highlighted her work on the House intelligence committee to great effect.

She also offered something that, with Sarah Palin playing her now-familiar tease about whether she planned her own 2012 campaign, the race had lacked — a seemingly viable female candidate.

Outgunned in organization, she set out to win the Ames Straw Poll and succeeded. Her focused effort managed to edge out Ron Paul, in addition to knocking off Pawlenty, who withdrew from the race the next morning.

But just like that, Perry stepped all over any momentum she gained by jumping into the race the same day as the straw poll. The next night, presented with an opportunity to get the better of her new rival from the South at a Blawk Hawk County GOP fundraising dinner, Bachmann refused to come out of her campaign bus and share the spotlight with him, despite entreaties from most of her advisers.

The news coverage of the event was not favorable. According to many Iowa politicos, it was the turning point for her campaign there. She seemed weak by comparison, and while she used the debates to soldier on, she has never reached the same heights again.

Not long after, Rollins and two members of the team he’d put together, David Polyansky and pollster Ed Goeas, parted ways with the team. For new campaign management, she turned to Keith Nahigian, a longtime advance man who’d worked with her campaign and with whom, as one former staffer put it, she felt as if she could heed her own counsel and instincts a bit more.

The split had been presaged, however, for weeks, thanks to a divide between the staffers and advisers on her campaign bus, and the national and Washington-based team. Her then-state chairman, Kent Sorenson — who is now a Paul backer — disliked her national advisers and the way they ran things and made that clear to her, sources said.

It was then that Bachmann decided to double down and continue to follow her political instincts, according to several sources familiar with the campaign — addressing the hard-right of the party with a string of Fox News appearances instead of broadening her message. She also failed to develop a cohesive message beyond beating up on 'Obamacare' and talking about the nation’s fiscal crisis.

She repeatedly passed up opportunities to ding Mitt Romney in the debates — a product, Rollins said, of preserving her options for sharing a ticket with him.

“There was some talk early on between her and her husband that she could end up as the vice presidential nominee,” Rollins said.

And she repeatedly made claims on the campaign trail that she couldn’t back up — including the one where she recounted a mother telling her about a daughter developing “mental retardation” thanks to the HPV vaccination that Rick Perry had mandated in Texas for young girls. The medical community at large denounced the claim, and it added to a sense that she was unserious, and prone to making claims without having the facts first.

Her fundraising base was never quite what people thought it was either, Rollins said, despite the impressive hauls she’d racked up in her House races. It relied heavily on a costly direct-mail base, as opposed to donors with a network to be tapped, and she was never able to develop it.

Kevin McLaughlin, the Polk County GOP chairman who is neutral in the race, argued that Bachmann had never gotten good advice from her national team, and that that was where the fault rested.

“She had people working for her who were difficult to work with,” he said. “She’s imminently qualified, she’s a very smart woman and she’s obviously proven herself in Congress. You can’t count her out. She’s from Iowa.”

He noted how many evangelicals remain split and insisted she could still gather some to her side, especially after hearing caucus speeches from supporters.

He conceded, “She stumbled in public. She [made] silly mistakes…If she gets lucky, she’d be a third-place finisher; if not, she’s probably down around five or so.”

It wasn’t just bad advice that was a problem. Bachmann herself developed a penchant for, as Rollins put it, seeing “sinister” motives in almost everything that happened along the way. She accused Newt Gingrich of “buying” tea party support in South Carolina. Sorenson was accused of leaving for a payoff. Her campaign has suggested sexism is part of the underlying problem — a fact that may be true, but it hasn’t seemed to help her by saying so publicly.

Conservative radio host Steve Deace, who is neutral in the race but who has described Michele Bachmann as the most consistent conservative in her record, expressed surprise at her past few weeks — noting that she’d accused Bob Vander Plaats of trying to get her to drop out (which he denied), accused Sorenson of being bought off (which he denied), a super PAC that had backed her switched to Mitt Romney, and she asserted that no pastors have asked her to get out of the race (though a prominent one said he did).

“She’s accused three people of lying, all of whom say what she says is not true…When she won the Ames Straw Poll, she had just spent the summer [hitting] House Speaker John Boehner for cutting deals with Obama on the debt ceiling,” said Deace, adding that instead of focusing on the payroll tax cut fight that the House GOP lost, Bachmann chose to talk about “all these sideshows, which make great copy for blogs but which don’t impact any voters. They don’t create new jobs.”

Thursday brought another headscratcher: Bachmann insisted she feels, based on atmospherics around her bus tour, that “hundreds of thousands” of people are moving from Ron Paul to her, adding, “That’s what we’re seeing on the ground.”

Only 120,000 people voted in the most recent 2008 caucuses.

For a time, the congresswoman seemed like the candidate most likely to get the endorsement of Iowa Rep. Steve King, a conservative bellwether in Congress.

But, asked yesterday by POLITICO if she is close to done, King sighed before responding.

“She has — her way is a different style and her style is a strong push at the end,” he said. “She did that at the straw poll too and won the straw poll, so you can’t tell what Iowans are going to do, but I sure give her a lot of credit for working this thing, working it hard and having a singular conviction within her. She has driven this campaign by the force of her own determination, her own personality, and that is a very difficult thing to do.”

“Whatever happens in the caucus next week, and whatever happens after that, Michele Bachmann has made history and she’s opened many, many doors for women, and I think she’ll continue to do that for a long time,” he said. “And she’s opened doors for conservatives, by the way, without regard to their gender.”

Juana Summers contributed to this report.