“All the people at the bot­tom of the to­tem pole should get out, be­cause it’s mak­ing it hard for voters,” said Ros­a­lie Thomas, an un­de­cided Republican voter at­tend­ing Ru­bio’s town hall in her ho­met­own of Ber­lin. She said she was “lean­ing in his direction” be­fore the event.

Ru­bio has the most at stake in the state’s primary. His campaign is hop­ing that New Hamp­shire voters anoint him as the clear es­tab­lish­ment favorite, provid­ing a sig­nal to his like-minded rivals to drop out and con­sol­id­ate be­hind him. But Ru­bio hasn’t yet pulled away from the com­pet­i­tion in state polls, and des­pite the na­tion­al buzz, hasn’t spent nearly as much time cam­paign­ing in New Hamp­shire as Christie, Bush, and Kasich. Ac­cord­ing to National Journ­al’s Travel Track­er, Ru­bio has spent only 20 days in the state since the be­gin­ning of the year, com­pared to Christie’s 57 days and Bush’s 37.

Ru­bio, sens­it­ive to cri­ti­cism that he’s been out­worked, lav­ished the state’s blue-col­lar “north coun­try” with at­ten­tion in a three-day cam­paign swing with his family be­fore the hol­i­days. He spent nearly two hours an­swer­ing ques­tions at every town hall, wait­ing un­til the last at­tendee left be­fore de­part­ing. After a staffer at Monday’s event signaled for the last ques­tion, Ru­bio in­ter­rup­ted. “I’m not leav­ing here. I’ll be around tak­ing every­one’s ques­tion and to say hello.”

Cliff Hurst, Ru­bio’s New Hamp­shire co­chair­man, ac­know­ledged that the sen­at­or from Flor­ida had a lighter state cam­paign sched­ule than most of the oth­er candidates, but said he would be re­train­ing his fo­cus on the state in Janu­ary, when voters play the closest at­ten­tion. “Ru­bio had to raise enough money and get things in place so he wouldn’t be drop­ping out after he came here, like some others,” said Hurst, who pre­vi­ously worked for Wis­con­sin Governor Scott Walker’s pres­id­en­tial cam­paign.

The risk for Ru­bio is that by run­ning a more na­tion­al cam­paign, he ends up ceding ground to the candidates who have put all their chips on win­ning New Hamp­shire. That ap­plies es­pe­cially to the feisty Christie, who has been creep­ing up­wards in state polls and cul­tiv­ates a much more free­wheel­ing approach at his town halls than the more on-mes­sage Ru­bio.

After an at­tendee at a VFW town hall in Pel­ham in­sisted that former Pres­id­ent Bush waged war in Ir­aq only for oil, Christie fired back: “I fun­da­ment­ally, profoundly dis­agree with the premise of your question,” to un­an­im­ous ap­plause. He strongly de­fen­ded the rights of po­lice de­part­ments to main­tain mil­it­ary-style equip­ment, say­ing that Pres­id­ent Obama is “a joke on these law-and-or­der issues.” After someone cri­ti­cized se­quest­ra­tion for cut­ting the de­fense budget, Christie took out a but­ton from his pock­et with that very mes­sage.