Paul and his senior advisers shrugged off his absence from the trail at a key moment. Ron Paul's Iowa victory

SIOUX CITY, Iowa— Ron Paul is within striking distance of winning the Iowa caucuses, a significant milestone for a candidate now on his third try for the presidency.

Yet in the final weekend before the votes are cast, the congressman could be found at his Texas home, the only GOP hopeful who slept in his own bed Saturday night. He had flown home Friday with plans to return Monday.


Paul and his senior advisers shrugged off his absence from the trail at a key moment — it’s not a big deal, in their view — noting that he appeared on three of the five Sunday shows. Besides, they point out, he has avoided retail campaigning on Sundays all year.

“Sunday’s a holiday, and it’s a Sunday, and it’s a bowl game day,” said A.J. Spiker, one of Paul’s three Iowa chairs. “We made that decision long ago.”

Since a candidate’s time is the most precious campaign commodity, Paul’s decision to spend two of the final four days outside the state revealed a fundamental truth about his unorthodox campaign: Even with a more professionalized and better-organized operation than in 2008, Paul’s bid remains at heart a movement, rather than a single-minded effort to capture the GOP nomination. Winning Iowa would be nice, but with a likely top-three finish, his work here is already done.

Unlike most other candidates, Paul rarely asks explicitly for someone’s vote. Nor does he act like a man who expects to be in the Oval Office come Jan. 21, 2013. At 76, Paul is the oldest candidate running, and his campaign has been careful not to overschedule the septuagenarian. When he’s been in Iowa, he rarely has done more than three events a day — separated by enough hours that he has down time and so that he can always start events punctually.

As much as anything else, his pitch centers on sending a message.

“This is ideological,” he said here late Friday night at his last campaign stop of 2011. “So it isn’t a numbers game. It has to do with determination.”

He paraphrased a Samuel Adams quote, saying, “It doesn’t take a majority to prevail. It takes an irate, determined minority keen on starting the brushfires of liberty in the minds of men.”

“So in many ways, it’s a political revolution to change these ideas, but it’s an intellectual revolution,” Paul explained, wrapping up a nearly hourlong speech. “It’s a change in ideas about economic policy, understanding our traditions about foreign policy, understanding monetary policy. This is where we’re making progress. This is where we have advanced so much over the last couple decades and even in the last four years.”

“So I am encouraged by that,” he added. “I do not know what the future will bring, but I do know that a message can be sent. Hopefully a message can be achieved with this election, with this campaign. Maybe on Tuesday. Who knows? I don’t know what the result will be, but I am optimistic that we are moving in the right direction and that many people are awakening now to the need for more liberty and less government.”

Spiker introduced him to the town hall crowd of 250 as “the Thomas Jefferson of our day.”

Many of his die-hard supporters see him more as an alarm-sounding Paul Revere than a Founding Father.

“I would say its 10 percent campaign, 90 percent a movement,” said Quaitemes Williams, a 26-year-old nursing student who drove from Dallas to volunteer for the full week before the caucuses. “Once you’ve seen the light, you can never go back to the dark. Once you learn about the Federal Reserve and foreign policy, you can’t go back to thinking in the right-left dichotomy.”

Like a snowflake, no two Paul speeches are exactly the same. Sometimes he starts with a riff on foreign policy; sometimes he begins with economic policy. He doesn’t have one message. He has more like 15. He attacks the Patriot Act, drone attacks, the Federal Reserve, foreign military bases, efforts to curtail internet privacy, the drug war and whatever else comes to mind. His stump speech is part history lesson (he thinks the country really started to go downhill under Woodrow Wilson) and part tutorial on the Constitution. (He laments that Jefferson was unsuccessful at including a provision that would have prevented the federal government from taking on debt.)

With his unique perch, Paul doesn’t need to do retail campaigning to convey his message — the Internet does it for him. Nor does he need to worry about the order he finishes here. No matter the outcome, Paul will stay in the race for an extended period — as the figurehead of his movement, his fundraising will not dry up if he underperforms expectations.

Rand Paul, the Kentucky senator, will accompany his father as he makes his final push Monday. They’ll start in Des Moines and then make four stops in the eastern half of the state: Davenport, Cedar Rapids, Cedar Falls and Mason City.

Those events are likely to underscore the difference between the Paul campaign and the others: No one can consistently draw crowds as big or energetic as Paul in Iowa, yet proportionally fewer undecided voters show up at his events than for any of his rivals. Many of the same faces show up again and again at the Texas congressman’s forums. A surprising chunk of voters say in interviews that they drove long distances from out of state to meet him.

Paul arrived at the convention center in Council Bluffs Thursday night to find a raucous crowd of more than 700 chanting his name.

“I’m so disappointed,” he said, only half-joking. “They said I was going to meet with a lot of undecideds.”

In nearly two dozen interviews, his voters repeated again and again that a vote for Paul is a vote to repudiate the status quo.

“A lot of people are really just frustrated with the whole government system. It’s become so large and unruly,” said Kristi German, a 44-year-old rancher from Holstein, Iowa. “It’s a campaign, but it’s bigger than that. It’s not going to go away when this is over. So it’s a movement in that sense. The ideas are going to carry on no matter what happens.”

The open question in the final 36 hours before the caucuses is just how well Paul’s vaunted ground game will perform. The campaign declines to offer metrics or give access to their get-out-the-vote operations, eager to keep outsiders guessing.

“It’s really hard to keep track of all the grass-roots people since a lot of them will be unsupervised,” said Mark Hansen, Paul’s chairman in Pottawattamie County.

Their passion for the cause, however, is unquestioned: It’s no coincidence that Paul and Mitt Romney, the other acknowledged ground game leader, were the only two to meet Virginia’s rigorous ballot signature requirements.

Blake Whitten, a statistics lecturer at the University of Iowa who has been going to every Paul event during his Christmas break, said he knows about 10 kids phone banking in Ankeny during this home stretch, but he worries that many of Paul’s college-aged supporters will still be in their home states — like Illinois, Wisconsin or Minnesota — on Tuesday.

Still, he’s feeling good about the state of the campaign no matter where Paul finishes Tuesday.

“I’m feeling so gratified,” said Whitten, 52, who serves as the faculty adviser to Youth for Ron Paul, which has about 300 students involved in Iowa City. “I never thought I’d see the day when it was cool to be a libertarian.”