NASHUA — Donald Trump's New Hampshire team sent an e-mail last week to supporters — the first of its kind in the campaign — with this request: Could enough volunteers show up at Trump's campaign offices that weekend to contact nearly 100,000 Granite State voters?
Their goal represented roughly one-third of the voters expected to participate in this year's Republican primary on Feb. 9 — an ambitious figure for any candidate, even the GOP front-runner who regularly attracts thousands to his rallies.
But with the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary approaching, Trump's aides are attempting to turn these throngs into votes.
The bombastic businessman has always had one of the largest GOP staffs in New Hampshire, but the crew running his operations in the state has so far run an untraditional — and, at times, lackluster — campaign on the ground.
"We know that Trump can draw a crowd, but we know we still have to do the hard work to call people and answer their questions," said Fred Doucette, Trump's state campaign cochairman and a state representative.
"The number one question people have is if he is serious and for real, and I tell them the fact we are taking the time to call and encourage them to vote proves that he is serious,'' Doucette said. "The work needs to be done, absolutely."
Trump's campaign has intensified its bid to reach voters and has recently rented vans to get people to the polls, installed a new voter contact system, and booked hotel rooms for out-of-state help. Trump's goal is to not only win New Hampshire, but also to claim a victory with the kind of margin — 20 percentage points — that he enjoys in current polls.
"We have to have a mandate,'' Trump told a crowd in Farmington, N.H., on Monday. "We have to get big numbers."
Specifically, one of Trump's state cochairmen, Stephen Stepanek, said the campaign has set a goal to get 125,000 votes in the New Hampshire primary. For context, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney received 97,000 votes (37 percent) when he won the 2012 Republican primary. Senator John McCain won the primary with 88,000 votes (39 percent) in 2012.
Stepanek said the key will be to turn out "low-propensity voters," or those who don't vote in every primary. Stepanek estimates the Trump campaign has 20,000 such voters in its back pocket.
These infrequent voters are difficult to track in polls, which survey only likely voters in the final weeks before the primary.
What's more, they're even harder for campaigns to turn out on primary day, adding a layer of unpredictability to Trump's base of support in Iowa, New Hampshire, and nearly every other nomination contest.
Trump has led every poll of the New Hampshire primary since July, with double-digit advantages over the other top candidates, Senator Ted Cruz and Ohio Governor John Kasich, in the last month. A recent Fox News poll of likely Republican primary voters in New Hampshire showed Trump with 31 percent and Cruz and Kasich with 14 and 9 percent respectively.
Trump's long-term lead has been unusual for New Hampshire, but so has his entire campaign. In a state that treasures direct access to presidential candidates, Trump frequently flies into New Hampshire on his private jet for a rally and leaves the same day.
Trump, in an interview last weekend, defended these tactics as effective.
"It is hard to envision how a man who stands outside one of my rallies in the cold for four hours just to attend a speech is not going to come out and vote for me on Election Day," he said. "It is actually a lot simpler to get people to vote in New Hampshire than it is in Iowa, and I am confident people will show up for me."
In recent weeks, however, Trump's team has reverted to more time-worn, get-out-the-vote tactics. They have been contacting the e-mail addresses they collect from his packed rallies; their new voter-calling software boasts that it allows volunteers to make up to 50 calls a minute.
Trump's team made it to half of last weekend's goal by reaching 50,000 voters, according to a Trump aide who spoke on the condition of anonymity to reveal the campaign data.
Trump, like nearly every other presidential candidate, will focus his efforts this weekend on the Iowa caucuses, which are Monday.
In addition to Stepanek, other unlikely operatives are leading Trump's on-the-ground efforts, spearheaded by his national campaign manager, New Hampshire resident Corey Lewandowski . They aren't new to politics, but they are new to winning.
"We prefer to call ourselves the motley crew," said Bob Burns, a Trump supporter and former Republican nominee for New Hampshire's Executive Council.
Burns, along with Trump supporters Joshua Whitehouse and former gubernatorial candidate Andrew Hemingway, have prodded the state's Republican Party for years.
Burns fought so frequently with the party that when he won a three-way primary for the Executive Council, the state's GOP did not recognize him at its unity breakfast.
Hemingway lost a competitive race for state Republican Party chairman to Jennifer Horn, now a vocal Trump critic. Hemingway organized a Tea Party rally in Concord to protest against Romney in 2012, and two years later, he lost the Republican primary for governor.
In Manchester, Trump organizer Al Baldasaro — whom the candidate points out at nearly every state rally — is a state representative who was recently chided for using coarse language in a public feud with a female colleague over the right for mothers to breast feed in public.
In reality, Trump's turnout in New Hampshire could also depend on his performance in Iowa, said Dante Scala, a political science professor at University of New Hampshire. A strong New Hampshire ground game could save his campaign or ensure a nomination victory.
"In some ways we might never know how good of a ground game Trump has unless he loses Iowa," said Scala. "If that happens, then he will be tested here and he will need a strong organization to bring his people out."
James Pindell can be reached at james-.pindell@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @jamespindell or subscribe to his daily e-mail update on the 2016 campaign at www.bostonglobe.com/groundgame.