As the first voting approaches Monday in Iowa, Trump faces two overarching questions. One is whether his supporters, many of whom are less habitual voters, will turn out in the strength that polls project. Even if the answer is yes, Trump will eventually face a second key challenge: whether his polarizing personal style and message, particularly on race-related issues like immigration, will leave him with too low a ceiling of support to win if and when the race narrows.

But in this early stage, Trump’s new coalition has allowed him to poll well across a surprisingly broad range of states and voters. “Trump has transcended all of this and it has surprised many of us, because these have always been ideological fights,” said Scott Reed, the campaign manager for Bob Dole in 1996 and now a senior adviser to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. “But the frustration and the anger at Washington has overshadowed a lot of ideology.”

The results in Iowa Monday will mark the first test of whether Trump can translate his gaudy poll numbers into success at the ballot box. But in surveys, he’s showing a demographic consistency and geographic reach without recent Republican precedent. Since South Carolina moved up in 1980 to become the third major competition behind Iowa and New Hampshire, no Republican candidate in a contested presidential primary has won all three. But NBC/Wall Street Journal/Marist Polls released last week showed Trump leading in all three states, with virtually identical patterns of support.

In recent cycles, ideology and religious affiliation have functioned as the most important divides in Republican nominating contests. Candidates have struggled, for instance, to win both Iowa and New Hampshire, because the former usually favors the candidates preferred by evangelical Christians and the latter tilts toward more secular and often more moderate economic conservatives.

Both John McCain in 2008 and Mitt Romney in 2012 followed the same broad formula for winning the nomination. Each man won about half of Republican voters who did not identify as evangelical Christians, and about one-third of those who did, according to a cumulative analysis by ABC pollster Gary Langer of all the exit polls conducted in each contest. Evangelicals and non-evangelicals each cast about half of the total Republican primary votes in both contests, Langer’s analysis showed.

In a related pattern, Romney and McCain also ran better among more centrist voters than among conservatives. McCain won 55 percent of moderates in 2008, compared to just 35 percent of self-identified conservatives, according to Langer’s analysis. No one has published a comparable cumulative analysis of GOP voters by ideology in 2012. But Romney carried voters who identified as moderates in 18 of the 20 states in which exit polls were conducted, and those who called themselves somewhat conservative in 15 of them. By contrast, in 14 of the 20 states with exit polls, most voters who identified as very conservative preferred Newt Gingrich or Rick Santorum over the former Massachusetts governor.