CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa — Marco Rubio has ceded much of Iowa’s most conservative region and rural regions, banking instead on an aggressive push in Des Moines and the state’s more urban east to ensure Ted Cruz doesn’t walk away from the caucuses with unbeatable momentum.

While others brag about visiting all 99 of Iowa’s counties (Mike Huckabee hit that target last week as Cruz’s bus tour rolled toward it), Rubio is investing little in the western and rural reaches of the state. His travel schedule, ad buys, and his own advisers point to a strategy almost entirely dependent on a far narrower strip of the state.


But this game plan amounts to a high-stakes geographic bet that Rubio can consolidate the more traditional wing of the GOP in the east, even as he’s squeezed there by an emboldened Chris Christie and an organized Jeb Bush campaign. All the while, Donald Trump and his loud and loyal following threaten to wreak havoc on everyone’s carefully plotted maps.

“You hunt where the ducks are,” said Eric Woolsen, a longtime Iowa GOP operative who is currently unaligned. “And if there aren’t many ducks for Marco Rubio in the western part of the state, then he needs to be hunting elsewhere.”

Perhaps nothing reveals Rubio’s Iowa playbook as much as his media-buying strategy.

In the final two weeks before the caucuses, Rubio’s campaign has reserved a whopping 1,300 gross-ratings points in the Cedar Rapids media market that also covers the eastern population centers of Waterloo, Iowa City and Dubuque.

The huge buy is almost double Rubio’s saturation in any other Iowa market and a heavier rotation, according to ad buy data provided by a media tracker, than any other candidate or super PAC has reserved in any Iowa market in the 2016 campaign. An average viewer in those cities should see ads from Rubio’s campaign 13 times in each of the last two weeks.

In contrast, among Iowa’s major markets, the Florida senator's campaign has bought the smallest penetration in Sioux City, which broadcasts across the more evangelical northwest.

Rubio’s own team has seen up close how greatly the ideology of Iowa Republicans varies by region. In 2014, now-Sen. Joni Ernst won a landslide primary victory over a crowded GOP field. But in the northwest, Sam Clovis, a well-known social conservative who’s backing Trump today, racked up huge margins, doubling and tripling her vote haul in some counties, even as he lost statewide by nearly 40 percent. One of Ernst’s consultants on that race, Todd Harris, is a top Rubio adviser. Harris accompanied Rubio across Iowa this week.

Northwest Iowa, home to firebrand Rep. Steve King, who campaigned with Cruz this week, is legendary for its intensity and concentration of social conservatives. It is the place where Rick Santorum drove up his vote count over Mitt Romney four years ago, and where evangelical leader Bob Vander Plaats, another Cruz endorser, scored his best showings in his failed 2010 bid for the GOP gubernatorial nomination.

The Des Moines region and eastern cities like Cedar Rapids, Davenport and Dubuque, meanwhile, have historically favored more business-oriented and establishment-type Republicans. The 10 counties in the state where Romney had his biggest vote margins over Santorum four years ago were all near Des Moines and to the east.

That, in essence, is Rubio’s 2016 road map.

Though Rubio's campaign won’t acknowledge writing off any part of the state (spokesman Alex Conant declined comment for this story), the entire Rubio political apparatus is built around its overwhelming confidence in Rubio’s preternatural political talents. They want to simply get him in front of as many voters as possible, they say. And the reality is, more voters live east of I-35, the highway that bisects Iowa through Des Moines and roughly demarcates east from west in the state.

"It's no state secret," said Robert Brownell, a Rubio supporter and supervisor in Polk County, home of Des Moines. "If you want to run your numbers up, population centers are the place to go."

Rubio has campaigned so often around Ankeny, the Des Moines suburb that is home to his headquarters and the district of his campaign chairman, state Sen. Jack Whitver, that jokes spread last year about him running for mayor there.

Yet so far, of the state’s 34 westernmost counties, Rubio has campaigned outside the two main cities, Sioux City and Council Bluffs, only twice this cycle, according to the Des Moines Register’s candidate tracker. And one of those appearances was hardly a small meet-and-greet affair. It was a speech at a multicandidate Republican cattle call that drew a crowd of more than 1,000.

Craig Williams, a member of the Iowa GOP central committee who is neutral in 2016, said Rubio has a following in Carroll County, where he lives (and where Rubio has appeared in person). But he said any candidate writing off swaths of Iowa risks backlash.

“When they don’t show up in your town, people wonder, ‘Why didn’t you come here?’” Williams said. “Candidates that aren’t spending time over here are really going to lose out to candidates who are.”

Cruz has been more than happy to draw comparisons. This week, Cruz’s bus drove from small town to small town, as Rubio flew his campaign jet from population center (Cedar Rapids) to population center (Mason City) to population center (Fort Dodge).

“We’re spending a lot of time in small, rural counties, where men and women from Iowa can look you in the eye and take the measure of the candidate,” Cruz said at a stop in Winterset earlier in the week. “That’s the way campaigning should operate in Iowa. It doesn’t work from a TV studio in New York City.” (Rubio’s campaign manager, Terry Sullivan, memorably told The New York Times last month, “More people in Iowa see Marco on ‘Fox and Friends’ than see Marco when he is in Iowa.”)

The Rubio campaign has been tight-lipped about expectations in Iowa, wanting him to be seen as slotting no worse than third, behind Trump and Cruz. Rubio certainly faces the expectation that to be a top contender, he must beat out Bush and Christie, who are also hunting and competing for votes in eastern Iowa.

There is no question, between millions in ads and an intensifying schedule, that Rubio is making a full-throttle push in Iowa. Rubio has campaigned in the state four of the past five weeks (Christmas was the lone exception). But he continues to fend off questions about earlier absences. In Cedar Rapids, the first question Rubio got this week in a press gaggle was from The Des Moines Register, asking why he wasn’t in the state more.

“I mean, I’m here today, we’re here yesterday, we’ll be here later on again,” he said with a hint of exasperation. “We’re going to continue to run our campaign.”

That campaign has looked heavily eastward. During Rubio’s late December trip to Iowa, four of Rubio’s five stops were in the east or at least a short drive from Des Moines. The lone exception was Sioux City, which has a surprisingly robust 16 percent Hispanic population, according to U.S. Census data. Sioux City is also the only place west of Des Moines to house a Rubio campaign office.

In his five stops this week, the farthest west Rubio ventured was Fort Dodge — only 40 miles west of I-35.

But, capturing the challenge of Rubio’s desire to appeal to every segment of the GOP spectrum, he is not giving up on Iowa’s influential evangelical bloc. He began rotating in a TV ad this week, making an explicitly religious appeal. “Our goal is eternity,” Rubio says in the ad. “The ability to live alongside our creator and for all time. To accept the free gift of salvation offered to us by Jesus Christ.”

And as Rubio campaigned here this week, he rolled out a set of new backers in the rock-ribbed northwest — even as he never set foot in the region.

“Of course, I want him to be in my neck of the woods every day — he's a great candidate and a campaigner,” said state Rep. Megan Jones, one of Rubio’s new endorsers. “But we don't always get what you want.”

Cruz would campaign in her district the next day. Trump swung through in December. She said of Rubio: “He's one of the few candidates who we haven't seen yet.”