DES MOINES — On Sunday, Pastor Bradley Cranston stood at his pulpit in Burlington, Iowa, and, citing Exodus 18:21 (“select out of all the people able men who fear God ... as leaders”), endorsed Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, urging his parishioners to also consider voting for him.
In Washington, Iowa, Pastor Joseph Brown of Marion Avenue Baptist Church plans to continue recruiting volunteer captains supporting Mr. Cruz for each of the caucus precincts in his community.
Mr. Cruz’s success in consolidating evangelical Christian voters, which has helped propel him to front-runner status in Iowa, reflects how he has methodically and painstakingly pursued the Christian right here since he announced his presidential candidacy in March at Liberty University in Virginia, the evangelical institution founded by Jerry Falwell. He has sewn up endorsements of crucial Iowa evangelicals; deployed his pastor father, Rafael Cruz, as a surrogate; and activated networks of faith-driven voters like pastors and home-school families, which in a caucus state like Iowa are important in turning out voters.
“We have a networking ability that campaigns spend years and years trying to build,” said Mr. Brown, who has taken on the kind of organizing tasks that a campaign normally would.
With the first nominating contest just over three weeks away, on Feb. 1, Mr. Cruz is poised to benefit from the organizing muscle of evangelicals, the most influential bloc of Republican caucusgoers in Iowa, who ensured the winners in 2008 and 2012. He will need their support with recent polls showing a tightening of the race with Donald J. Trump, who last week injected a volatile new element into the race by questioning Mr. Cruz’s eligibility to be president because of his Canadian birth.
Although Mr. Brown does not plan to endorse Mr. Cruz from his pulpit, which is controversial because of the tax-exempt status of religious institutions, he broadcasts his support in other ways — from displaying a Cruz bumper sticker on his car to speaking on Mr. Cruz’s behalf at meetings of the Republican committee at the county courthouse. “A pastor in Iowa is out in the community,” Mr. Brown said.
Mr. Cruz has won over many evangelical voters in Iowa through both pluck and luck. Although he has spent a year aggressively courting them, Mr. Cruz has benefited recently from the decline of Ben Carson, who briefly led Iowa polls thanks to evangelical support, then saw those voters swing to Mr. Cruz after questions arose about Mr. Carson’s grasp of foreign policy.
Mr. Cruz first stirred Iowa crowds in March at a Pastors and Pews event, and later at a Christian home-schoolers convention and a Faith & Freedom forum. He seized on the issue of “religious liberty” — the right of business owners, for example, to refuse services for gay weddings — and drew thousands to rallies in Iowa and South Carolina.
Last month, Mr. Cruz won the endorsement of the most influential leader of Iowa’s politically activist evangelicals, Bob Vander Plaats.
“Over two years we have been praying for unity; we have been praying God would lead and he would raise up a candidate,” Mr. Vander Plaats said in introducing Mr. Cruz on the first day of a bus tour of Iowa last week.
Behind the scenes, Mr. Vander Plaats is “activating his personal network,” said Bryan English, the Cruz campaign’s Iowa director.
Mr. English, a social-conservative activist, worked with Mr. Vander Plaats on a 2010 recall of three State Supreme Court justices who were part of a unanimous decision legalizing same-sex marriage.
“Part of my job is to say: ‘Hey, this guy’s for real. He’s one of us,’ ” Mr. English said of Mr. Cruz. He said he had reached out to fellow social conservatives “to say to them, ‘Would you come make some phone calls or knock on doors?’ ”
The campaign is also tapping the network of Christian home-school families, a politically active conservative group that turns out many caucusgoers.
“I don’t know too many home-schoolers that aren’t politically aware or active on some level,” said Amy Deace, who was named last week as a leader of Mr. Cruz’s home-school coalition. “It’s a large community that tends to run in the same circles. So we see each other a lot and communicate with each other a lot.”
An effort to recruit pastors supporting Mr. Cruz in all of Iowa’s 99 counties was the brainchild of Mr. Brown, who in part was persuaded to support the Texas senator after meeting Mr. Cruz’s Cuba-born father. “He’d get choked up speaking about America,” Mr. Brown said, recalling a visit to his church by Rafael Cruz.
“His father was tremendously effective in one-on-one and small groups throughout the spring and summer,” said Eric Woolson, who managed the 2008 Iowa campaign of Mike Huckabee. Mr. Huckabee won the caucuses that year with evangelical support, but he trails far behind this year.
One pastor supporting Mr. Cruz, Darran Whiting of Liberty Baptist Church in Marion, said he had made more than 150 phone calls to other pastors. He has made announcements about the caucuses during Sunday services since early last month, he said. “Find your polling place and get there,” he tells parishioners.
Mr. Cruz has pursued a national strategy of uniting evangelicals and other conservatives behind him, arguing that with the backing of energized conservatives alone he can win not only the nomination, but also the general election.
When he took the stage after Mr. Vander Plaats’s introduction, at a theater in Winterset, he said the key to Republicans’ taking the White House was simple, and would not require a compromise with moderates. “We have to awaken and energize the body of Christ,” he said, referring to faith-driven voters.
In a Des Moines Register poll last month, Mr. Cruz had a 10 percentage-point lead, largely because he had twice as many evangelical supporters as Mr. Carson, and more than three times the evangelical support of Mr. Trump, who has sought to question Mr. Cruz’s faith by saying “not too many evangelicals come out of Cuba.”
Rick Tyler, Mr. Cruz’s national spokesman, said, “Carson is our last obstacle.”
A supporter of Mr. Carson, Holly Beth Michaels, went to hear Mr. Cruz share the stage in Winterset with James C. Dobson, the Christian broadcaster and the founder of Focus on the Family, who endorsed Mr. Cruz in a surprise visit to Iowa. Ms. Michaels, a freelance writer, said that she had raised her children listening to Mr. Dobson and that she was now considering Mr. Cruz.
But even though Mr. Cruz is winning over evangelicals in Iowa, it is another story nationally, at least among the grass roots. A CNN/ORC poll last month showed Mr. Trump leading Mr. Cruz nationally, 45 to 18 percent, among white evangelical voters.
Even in Iowa, it is premature to assume Mr. Cruz has victory locked down, as some Republican leaders in the state have taken to saying. Four years ago, 46 percent of caucusgoers made up their minds in the final few days before voting. Senator Marco Rubio of Florida is airing a new TV ad in the state aimed at evangelicals, in which he declares, “The purpose of our life is to cooperate with God’s plan.”
Mr. Huckabee and Rick Santorum, although in low single digits in the polls, continue to travel the state, with Mr. Huckabee visiting his 99th county on Thursday.
With its army of volunteers and six-day bus tour last week, the Cruz campaign has created high expectations of an Iowa victory, and a failure to do well here could damage his momentum in future states.
One sign of possible insecurity is the belligerent tone of one of the campaign’s chief surrogates, Steve Deace, an Iowa radio host and the husband of Amy Deace, who has called on Mr. Santorum and Mr. Huckabee to drop out to strengthen Mr. Cruz’s evangelical support.
“Huckabee doesn’t have a right to let his flailing campaign poison our state on the way out the door,” Mr. Deace wrote on Facebook last week.