DES MOINES — If you were an upstart candidate looking to build an army for a presidential campaign, here are four things you would look for in your recruits: a deep network, a ferocious commitment, a disregard for the establishment, and a flexible schedule.
That is probably why four likely Republican presidential candidates found themselves recently in the ballroom of a Holiday Inn across the road from the airport, making their case to an audience of about 400 home-schoolers.
‘‘Do what you’ve done in the past — what you did in ’08, what you did in ’12 — which is to look at the candidates and trust your own judgment,’’ said Rick Santorum, the former US senator from Pennsylvania who narrowly won the Iowa caucuses last time. ‘‘Do not defer to the experts. If you hear the term out of anybody’s mouth about ‘electability,’ run for the hills.’’
Social conservatives are a crucial component of the Republican base in Iowa — and a group that is thought to be up for grabs in 2016.
If recent campaigns are any indication, a key subset of that group — families that choose to educate their children themselves, often for religious reasons — will be some of the most important political foot soldiers in the GOP.
The modern home-schooling movement is generally traced to the 1970s and liberal theorists such as John Holt, who argued that compulsory education in a classroom was authoritarian and stifled creativity.
It began gaining popularity among evangelicals and other social conservatives a decade later, in part as a backlash against public school curricula that they saw as contradicting their values.
Across the nation, about 3 percent of the school-age population was being educated at home in the 2011-2012 school year, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.
In 2012, a total of 10,700 Iowa children were registered with the state as receiving ‘‘private instruction.’’
The figure is now believed to be larger, although no one knows by how much. The state deregulated home-schooling in 2013 and no longer requires parents to formally notify the state when they decide to educate their own children, or to submit to having the children’s progress monitored.
The passage of that law, similar to legislation in a growing number of states, is a testament to the political power of the home-schooling movement.
Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee — again a potential presidential candidate — said home-schoolers were ‘‘a great part of our coalition’’ when he won the Iowa caucuses in 2008.
Huckabee joined Santorum, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, and Governor Bobby Jindal of Louisiana for a roundtable at the Network of Iowa Christian Home Educators’ annual lobbying day recently.
Former Texas governor Rick Perry, although not on the roundtable, appeared with the home-schooler group at the state capitol, where members were making the rounds for their annual lobbying day.
Before Huckabee’s appearance with his three potential rivals, he held another session in the same hotel with fellow Arkansans Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar — easily the most famous home-schooling couple in the country, thanks to their enormous family and its starring role in the TLC reality show ‘‘19 Kids and Counting.’’
‘‘Governor Huckabee has not announced yet, but we’re begging him to run,’’ Jim Bob Duggar said. ‘‘Our country needs spiritual leadership. There’s such a void right now.’’
Home-schooling families are finding fresh urgency in a campaign season in which opposition to Common Core education standards runs strong.
‘‘What I hear a lot is everybody is excited that we have a lot of strong people to choose from,’’ said Vicki Crawford, a home-schooling and campaign veteran who worked for Huckabee in 2008 and then-Representative Michele Bachmann, a Minnesota Republican, in 2012. ‘‘In the past, it has been maybe one or two.’’