Paul is following the roadmap set by Barack Obama’s 2008 strategy: Start early, learn the rules, and use superior organization and devoted young supporters to dominate the arcane but crucial party procedures in states your rivals are ignoring — states where caucuses and conventions that elect the delegates who will ultimately choose the Republican candidate. The plan begins in places like Minnetonka, Minnesota, a Minneapolis suburb where Paul has based his state headquarters, and where staffers have already begun running “mock-auses” — practice runs for Minnesota’s February 7 caucuses…

Paul has, says his campaign chairman Jesse Benton, “offices, staff and strong organization” in ten caucus states besides Iowa: Colorado, Washington, Maine, Idaho, Minnesota, Nevada, Kansas, Louisiana, Missouri and North Dakota. (Alaska and Hawaii are also a caucus states and prime Paul territory.)

Those states together will award 419 of the 2,286 delegates who will choose a nominee in Tampa in August. They operate under complex, individual rules that favor the prepared. In Idaho, for instance, voters will gather in 44 county caucuses, each of which delivers a vote weighted by its size. Those caucuses will conduct run-offs until there are only two candidates left, and if any candidate gets over 60% in a caucus, he gets 100% of its vote. Any candidate winning more than 50% of the state’s weighted vote wins all 32 of Idaho’s delegates — more than will be awarded to all the candidates in Iowa combined…

Paul’s campaign, meanwhile, is already practicing procedures and planning to run slates of delegates at the most local levels — a move “which is pretty unheard of,” Golnik said. “They are uber-organized.”