“They called me the oth­er night and said I’d be a pre­cinct cap­tain,” she said as she stood in snow flur­ries wait­ing to enter a Trump rally. The job en­tails call­ing oth­er po­ten­tial Trump sup­port­ers in Mar­shall County to re­mind them to turn out Monday night at 7 p.m. Of course, to do that she needs names and phone num­bers—which, as of earli­er this week, she still had not re­ceived.

“I’ve asked for a list, and there’s only a few days left, so I hope it’s soon,” she said.

And therein lies the cent­ral mys­tery of the de­veloper-turned-real­ity-TV-star’s un­ortho­dox cam­paign: Is pre­cinct cap­tain Mat­ney’s in­ab­il­ity to get ba­sic cam­paign data the ex­cep­tion? Or the rule? And, with a can­did­ate who has re­lied on his abil­ity to hi­jack “earned me­dia” cov­er­age with out­rageous re­marks, does it even mat­ter? Even the ex­perts ad­mit they don’t know.

“Any­one who is be­ing hon­est with you will tell you that they have no earthly idea of what’s go­ing to hap­pen caucus night,” said Matt Strawn, a former chair­man of the Iowa Re­pub­lic­an Party.