MANCHESTER, NEW HAMPSHIRE -- The flash blizzard that descended on Portsmouth, New Hampshire on Saturday did little to deter the hundreds of people who lined up in the cold to witness Donald Trump speak at a local car dealership, just three weeks before the state's critical primary.

Wearing "Make America Great Again" hats and New England Patriots jackets, these frozen Trump die-hards were precisely the kind of passionate supporters he is counting on to lift his front-running presidential campaign in the key early caucus and primary states.

There was just one problem: Most of them weren't even from New Hampshire.

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Of the first 55 people in line to see Trump, just 17 people were from New Hampshire. Inside, roughly 50 people lingered in the "VIP" section at Toyota of Portsmouth, a balcony with a bird's eye view of the stage Trump would take. Only 23 of them were from the Granite State.

The rest of the assembled crowd drove in from around the northeast - from nearby Maine, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island - to catch of glimpse of the Trump phenomenon. They will be unable to vote in the New Hampshire primary come February 9.

Their support isn't entirely wasted, however, especially if Trump's performance in the first few primaries matches his lead in the polls. Massachusetts is among the group of states that go to the polls on Super Tuesday, which is March 1 -- just three weeks after the New Hampshire primary. Maine's GOP caucus is a few days later on March 5.

The makeup of the star-struck crowd, typical of Trump events here and in other primary states, hinted at a running question hovering over the campaign: Does Trump have the kind of organization that can turn huge, enthusiastic crowds into actual primary and caucus votes?

Interviews with scores of volunteers and potential voters at recent Trump events suggest that the campaign lacks a coherent voter turnout strategy, and lacks the kind of voter targeting that has become commonplace in modern politics.

In Portsmouth, only a handful of the 60 Trump supporters interviewed by CBS News said they had ever been contacted by the Trump campaign. Matt Burrell, a registered Republican from Meredith, said he got a Christmas card in December. "They even spelled my name right, I was really impressed," Burrell said.

Some of the others who spoke to CBS had received emails but had never been called by the campaign, or had their doors knocked on, or been asked to volunteer - all standard practices for political campaigns.

Renate Plitzko, an independent from Dover, said she has attended four Trump rallies in the state. Typically, a campaign would identify her as a committed supporter and try to enlist her as a volunteer, in hopes of getting her to persuade others in her network. But Plitzko said she has not heard a peep from the Trump organization.

"Only Hillary Clinton and the New York Times call my house, harassing me," Plitzko said. "I like that Donald doesn't call me. It's nice."

At events like the one on Saturday, it's difficult to tell if the Trump campaign is secretly professionalized -- or just a slapdash operation struggling to keep up with the GOP front runner's snowballing momentum.

At most Trump events in New Hampshire, the campaign asks people to sign up before entering the venue, asking them if they are registered to vote and making them sign what they call "endorsement cards." On Monday in Concord, a Trump volunteer was signing in voters on an iPad, using their first and last names along with an email address - presumably entering that information into a database of supporters.

Trump county chairs have also been hosting house parties, bringing local supporters together to discuss the campaign.

In recent weeks, the campaign has been passing out slips of paper with phone banking information - with times (9 a.m. to 8 p.m.) and office locations (Manchester, Keene and Newmarket) for those who want to get involved.

"Mr. Trump needs your help to turn his supporters out to vote, so please come to one of our offices after the rally to help Make America Great Again!," the fliers read.

Those sign-up tactics are standard practice for campaigns, said Jon Seaton, a Republican strategist who advised Lindsey Graham's campaign last year and Tim Pawlenty's 2012 effort. But he said the campaign could be doing more to get their most passionate backers involved.

"You certainly want to collect as much info as you can, email addresses are good, but really collect as much info as possible," Seaton said. "Ask them to sign up to volunteer and to come in to the HQ to make calls, to walk their precinct, to be active on social media and be an ambassador to the campaign that way. And then have a call-from-home feature so people can make phone calls during their free time to likely voters."

State Rep. Steve Stepanek, co-chairman of Trump's New Hampshire campaign, said their operation is "primarily focused on the phone campaign" and turning out "low-propensity voters" who typically do not show up for Republican primaries.

"We differ, because everyone is focused on likely Republican voters," Stepanek said. "We are focused on low propensity voters because they are not somebody who is normally on anybody's radar screens. But we look at our polls and we are so strong in that area. Those are the people who are very angry. We're focused on getting those people motivated."

Some of them, though, have not been getting calls. Said Carolyn Musto, a Trump supporter in Portsmouth: "Just emails. No phone calls. I get emails. I'm on his Facebook page."

Along with many of the voters at Trump's two most recent New Hampshire events, many of his volunteers were also from out-of-state -- not atypical for campaign organizations. But in interviews with CBS News, some said they were not on-boarded to the campaign with any sort of training.

One volunteer in Portsmouth, who donned a red sweatshirt and a black leather cowboy hat named Steve Shaw, said he was from New York. He had driven in for the event, and said he had not been asked to knock on doors or make any calls, but was ready to do whatever they asked of him at events. He could be found loitering around near security at the entrance.

Another had driven up from Oneota, New York. He had been a volunteer for one week and had come to Portsmouth to hand out green slips of paper with phone banking times. He had no intention of phone banking himself, he told CBS News.

A handful of Trump's volunteers on Saturday, though, had tried their hand at phone banking.

Catherine Washburn of Merrimack, New Hampshire had accompanied her son to a phone bank last week at Manchester headquarters. She guessed that she had made 25 calls.

"We told them, 'We're conducting a survey for Trump,' and then some people would say, 'We don't like Trump and hung up,' and then others would say 'Oh great, we love Trump," Washburn said.

Another Portsmouth volunteer who did not want to be named said she made 400 calls in a single day last Friday. "We don't have a list, it's computerized so the names just come up and we call them," she said.

Staffers for rival campaigns, both Democrat and Republican, told CBS News that their field organizers have never seen Trump volunteers canvassing neighborhoods and knocking on doors.

One paid Trump staffer said that he had been asked to knock on doors.

"They wanted me to go banging on doors, and I don't like it," said the staffer, who also asked for anonymity to discuss campaign operations. "When I'm home on Saturday and Sunday, I don't care what I'm doing, I don't want people banging in my door. I don't like it. I don't believe in it. I haven't done it. I like phone calls. I make phone calls. That's what I do."

CBS News located one volunteer in Concord, Dennis Soucy, who said that he doesn't "do the phone thing" but had knocked on doors once, without a list of specific addresses or a script.

"I did door knocks with my wife - we just picked out neighborhoods," said Soucy, who was helping at Trump's rally Monday at Concord High School. "It was one day, there were about 15, 20 of us gathered and they just said, go! And we did! That had to be when the weather was still good. So, September maybe? So we left fliers and stuff."

With the Trump phenomenon having all the predictability of a tornado, it's possible that a having a superior ground game might not even matter on primary day. Regardless, the campaign is still looking for help: Field organizers sent out a call on Facebook this week for volunteers, saying the campaign would pay for hotel rooms in the final weeks of the race.

Scott Brown, the former Massachusetts senator who unsuccessfully ran for Senate here in 2014, predicted that Trump will win the primary no matter what kind of field organization is behind it. "The race right now is for second place," he said.

"Social media, phone calls, having his supporters get 20 or 30 of their people out to the polls, that will be enough," he said of Trump. "I don't think it's going to hard to get his people out."