Russell, the Warren campaign’s rural-outreach coordinator in Iowa, had no prior experience in the art of sign painting.

“Absolutely none,” he said.

But with a mock flourish, Russell, who wore a white plastic zip-up painters coverall to protect his clothes, moved toward his canvas. “This is what the Iowa caucus demands,” he declared. “We’re going to get creative.”

The 29-year-old from Galena, Ohio, has been working for the Massachusetts Democrat’s campaign since last April, when he decided to sell his farming equipment and move to Iowa. He lives in an apartment above a biker bar in Webster City, a town of about 8,000 an hour north of Des Moines, working for a candidate he believes will stop the systemic corruption that hurts small towns like the one he came from.

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Last spring, he launched listening sessions in parts of the state where candidates rarely go. He put up fliers in small-town convenience stores and chatted up patrons at the local bars on Warren’s behalf, many of them Trump voters. Plenty were skeptical, but he’s still trying.

Russell has spent time in towns so small that he said he had “perfected” the art of cooking ramen noodles on camping equipment while parked outside a darkened public library, where he used the free Internet to check his email at night in areas where cellular service is spotty.

He put in about 6,000 miles a month driving around Iowa in his truck — a four-door, extended-cab 2018 Chevrolet Colorado with a 2.8-liter diesel engine, the one he used to use on the farm — until it broke down last fall. When there was a six-week backlog on the parts needed, the local Chevy dealer loaned him an Impala, which he drove until his truck was fixed.

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“I don’t know if the dealer is going to be reading this story, but that rental car traversed some pretty treacherous Iowa farm driveways and roads,” he said. “Needless to say, it was not a four-wheel-drive, so that caused some issues.”

While Warren’s agenda and her calls for “big structural change” might draw more fans in places such as Des Moines, Cedar Rapids and Iowa City, which tend to be more liberal, the senator invested early and heavily in a field operation focused on winning over more sparsely populated parts of Iowa, gambling on the idea that trying to reach those voters could generate some support in a fluid race in which every delegate matters.

“We make it a point on the campaign to compete for votes everywhere,” Russell said. “Everybody deserves representation, right? But doing 5 or 10 or 15 percent better in these rural areas? If we can do that everywhere, if we can replicate that, that’s going to spell out the kind of numbers it takes to win.”

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For months, Russell visited farmers and held his listening sessions in rural areas such as Ringgold County, one of the poorest parts of Iowa, convinced that Warren’s message about affordable housing, universal child care and expanding economic opportunity would impress residents who have felt left behind by Washington.

Russell knows the pain of watching a community struggle. He came from a small town where jobs had been slowly sucked away by the collapse of the steel industry. Then the opioid epidemic came, opening another chapter of despair. Five of his friends died of overdoses. “It’s just like, enough is enough,” he said.

Russell began organizing, trying to elect Democrats to state and local offices, and even embarked on a failed bid for Congress in 2018, determined to change the trajectory of his town. When Warren announced her presidential bid, he decided to go all in. “That’s how I got to Iowa,” he said.

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It is unclear whether Warren’s big gamble on her Iowa ground game will pay off in the state’s Feb. 3 caucuses. But Russell and other organizers have worked for months to turn out voters in small Republican-leaning towns by pointing out that they weren’t the only Democrats in their communities.

Now, on the eve of the caucuses, they are trying to convince those Democrats who are considering Warren that they aren’t the only ones supporting the senator.

And that’s how Russell ended up painting signs that will end up in farm fields across the state in coming days, a final step of persuasion. “It is about saying you aren’t alone out there,” he said. “This is the visual embodiment of that. I don’t think they are a big deal in any way, but it so nice [to have someone] drive by and say, ‘Oh my gosh, in a cornfield of a guy I know whose politics are a mystery to me, there are Warren signs.’ ” That could, he argued, make a difference in turning out voters in a tight race.

But first, he had to paint them, and Russell was nervous about it. His canvass was a 4-by-6-foot piece of plywood, already painted in Warren’s signature campaign color of liberty green — the result of “some serious haggling,” he explained, with the paint specialist at Menards. “It’s got to look like the Statue of Liberty,” he’d told him, presenting a photo of Lady Liberty herself on his iPhone. “Turns out you really can’t color-match that way,” he said, but it worked out in the end.

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And as Russell slowly painted inside the outlines of the letters spelling out the name “WARREN” in navy blue, he thought of the other signs he had dreamed up — including a Burma-Shave style series of signs that would spell out the words “Hope Over Fear,” one of Warren’s closing arguments here in Iowa.

Could he do it? Russell paused and thought about Bob Ross, the public-television painter who calmly taught a generation of amateur Picassos to be okay with a smudge here and there.

“No mistakes,” Russell said, his paintbrush sliding back and forth. “Happy accidents.”