“It doesn’t seem like he really wants to win Iowa,” says Craig Robinson, the state party’s former executive director, who is now editor of The Iowa Republican. “Of all the campaigns, he’s probably done the least of getting around the state. There are plenty of people who would love to vote for him. . . . But I hear more excitement on the ground in Iowa about Chris Christie than I do about Marco Rubio. And it shouldn’t be that way.”

On the campaign trail, Marco Rubio is calling for a “new American century.” He’s also running a different type of campaign, one that eschews spending on policy staffers, field operations, and other traditional aspects of a winning bid in favor of television advertising and digital outreach.

The campaign’s light footprint on the ground has increasingly become a source of controversy in Iowa and New Hampshire, where prominent activists and Republican officials believe a robust ground operation is critical to wooing voters who want to interact with their presidential candidates, and who have become accustomed to doing so.

Much of the negative attention has focused on New Hampshire, a state whose moderate electorate could be more receptive to the establishment-friendly Rubio. But behind the scenes in Iowa, criticism of Rubio’s operation has deepened. There are whispers here that prominent Republicans have scolded his campaign in recent days for its failure to organize in the Hawkeye State.