His father’s campaign team is well aware that the former president is up against two sets of challengers in the first contest of the 2024 campaign season.

There are the other candidates, sure. But probably more formidable for Trump to beat are the sky-high expectations that have been set. His lead in the latest pre-caucus polls has grown to more than 30 percentage points, far greater than has ever been seen before in a competitive GOP contest this close to the caucus date.

One thing that has always been true about Iowa’s quirky process for selecting presidential candidates is that you can’t really tell what is real and what is illusion until neighbors actually gather in more than 1,600 high school gyms and libraries and churches across the state.

Going into the Iowa caucuses, part of the ritual is for campaigns to thump their chests — bragging about how many doors they have knocked on, how many Iowans have signed cards promising to caucus for them, how much of the state they have covered.

Or they crow about the enticements they are offering to assure supporters will show up for them. In 2008, early Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton’s operation handed out more than 600 snow shovels, apparently not understanding that it is the rare Iowan who doesn’t already have their own.

Her campaign that year also spent $95,000 on caucus-night deli sandwiches. A huge pile of them sat untouched on a table at the caucus I attended that year. Clinton, for all her largesse, came in a disappointing third to her fellow senators Barack Obama and John Edwards.

This year, the candidate who most closely followed what was considered the traditional Iowa formula is Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. He has visited every one of the state’s 99 counties. His super PAC claims to have knocked on more than 900,000 doors. He has lined up the most high-profile endorsements, including popular Gov. Kim Reynolds and evangelical leader Bob Vander Plaats.

At a breakfast hosted by Bloomberg News on Friday, DeSantis deputy campaign manager David Polyansky said: “There won’t be a single Iowa Republican that turns out that night that will not either have met Ron DeSantis or had the opportunity to meet him. Ask him a question, take a picture with him, shake his hand. Not a one.”

Yet the traditional Iowa formula seems to have lost its power. Trump hasn’t done any of that personal, ground-level campaigning. And it will surprise no one if former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley — who has had a far lighter footprint here, though she tells audiences, “I have been campaigning all over this sweet state for eleven months” — noses ahead of DeSantis on caucus night.

The weather, however, makes caucus night more unpredictable than ever. Never before has Mother Nature scrambled everyone’s plans with such fury as she has this year. A blizzard, below-zero temperatures, and fierce winds forced all three of the leading campaigns to cancel in-person events they had planned for the final weekend. Current forecasts for caucus night have temperatures the National Weather Service has called “life-threatening” getting even colder.

There are two schools of thought about what all of this means. One, which the Trump campaign is counting on, holds that the former president’s supporters are the most devoted, and therefore most likely to brave the elements on his behalf. The other, which his competitors are hoping will be true, is that Trump’s lead may have lulled his backers — which, polls suggest, disproportionately include people who have never caucused before — into complacency, to the point where they feel their vote won’t make much of a difference, so why not stay in their toasty homes and watch the results on television.

Among the audience at Don Jr.’s appearance in Urbandale was Gary Leffler, 62, who was proudly wearing a white cap embroidered in big gold letters: TRUMP CAUCUS CAPTAIN. He will be running things for the former president at Precinct 118 in West Des Moines.

When I asked Leffler how he plans to assure people show up for his candidate, he showed me an eight-page list of what he said were 160 names and said he is calling all of them. So far, Leffler said, he is hearing that nothing is going to keep them away from the Learning Resource Center where Precinct 118 will meet.

Except for one couple, both of whom are 94 years old. One of them told Leffler, “I ain’t going out in that.”