Democratic presidential candidate, Mayor of South Bend, Indiana Pete Buttigieg speaks at the Iowa Federation Labor Convention on August 21, 2019 in Altoona, Iowa.

Tune into “Erin Burnett OutFront” at 7 p.m. ET for more on this story.

Des Moines CNN  — 

Pete Buttigieg, a candidate who once had more momentum than any Democrat in the 2020 race, has plateaued.

After using a well-reviewed appearance at a CNN town hall in March to introduce himself to Democratic voters, the South Bend, Indiana, mayor rocketed from relative obscurity to the upper echelon of the once growing field of Democrats vying to take on President Donald Trump.

Months removed from that burst, though, Buttigieg’s polling has largely remained static, with middling single-digit numbers that consistently land him behind candidates like Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and Vice President Joe Biden – even as he rakes in dollars from big donors around the country.

The way forward, Buttigieg’s team believes, is by not only spending that money to hire top talent, but also by creating a unique organizing plan that matches the mayor’s own distinctive story. While the mayor rose to national prominence without much of an organization, getting him past this point will require committed organizing, aides argued.

And Buttigieg has spent the most time focused on one state: Iowa, where the mayor made his 10th trip on Wednesday.

“Iowa is central,” Buttigieg told CNN in an interview. “It’s the first chance to really prove everything we’ve been saying about how organized we are about the idea that what we have to say is winning with people across a range of voters and caucus-goers.”

The campaign has moved quickly in recent weeks to leverage a growing number of all-in volunteers to expand his reach, profile and support in a state that will likely be crucial to his path to the nomination.

Buttigieg has seen plenty of success over the last three months, but his overall standing in the race hasn’t followed the money or early attention that has rolled in, a fact that has not gone unnoticed by his top campaign operatives.

He raised more money than any other candidate from April to June of this year, using it to grow his once four-person shoe-string campaign operation into an over 300-staffer behemoth nationally. And the mayor has turned in two well-received, albeit not breakout, debate performances.

His once-thin policy portfolio has also expanded on a seemingly weekly basis, from a major foreign policy address and a sweeping proposal to tackle what he views as systemic racial inequities to a newly released proposal to spur investment and growth in rural regions of the country.

To many inside top Democratic circles, it is astounding that Buttigieg has even made it this far.

Buttigieg, once a small city mayor with no national profile, came into the campaign with built-in disadvantages when compared to people like Biden, Warren and Sanders – three Democrats with far more name recognition and reliable donor bases. And he’s become far more of a household name in Iowa, where only 26% of Iowa Democrats likely to attend the caucuses didn’t have an opinion of him in June, according to the CNN/Des Moines Register/Mediacom survey, a number that was 73% in March.

But the mayor is far from satisfied with just grabbing attention and having a singular “moment” in the race. As he told a voter in South Carolina over the weekend, he’s not running to lose.

“We’re in it to win it,” he said when asked if he would consider a vice presidential slot.

Staffing up

Buttigieg’s top aides, while admitting that their polling has flattened in recent months, tell CNN that they aren’t currently concerned but will be if this continues in the coming months.

“I would be more worried if we’re having this conversation 45, 60 days from now,” said Jess O’Connell, Buttigieg’s newly hired senior adviser who previously served as the CEO of the Democratic National Committee. “I feel good about (his current standing), but I think we have work to do.”

Buttigieg’s once four-person presidential campaign has ballooned in recent weeks. The campaign recently crossed the 300-person threshold and advisers hope to have 90 people in Iowa, more than 60 in New Hampshire, 30 in Nevada and South Carolina and 20 in California by the end of September.

“We’re about to level this up to a full-scale, real presidential operation,” O’Connell said, adding that Iowa – because Buttigieg is a fellow Midwesterner – will be central to his late-year push. Buttigieg’s trip to Iowa on Wednesday was his 10th as a candidate.

And operatives in the state – some who once complained about Buttigieg’s lack of an organization – have felt that increased presence.

“On the ground, his people are everywhere,” said Laura Hubka, the chair of Howard County Democrats, whose county went for President Barack Obama by 20% in 2012 and Trump by 20% in 2016, a flip that represented the biggest flip of Obama to Trump support in the nation.

She said Buttigieg’s organizational blitz has become hard to miss over the course of the last month, and that it’s starting to rival the top operations in the state – something she said, anecdotally at least, was reflected in the enthusiasm when he personally showed up at events as well.

Given that, however, she did have a looming, unsolicited observation.

“I just don’t know why the polls don’t have him higher.”

Buttigieg echoed his team in saying at least at this stage in the race, he’s not worried about the polling, beyond the fact “they put us in a tier of candidates beyond most of the competition.” Indeed, in a field of nearly two-dozen candidates, Buttigieg falls in the top 10 in both polling and fundraising, which qualifies him for the next round of debates in September.

Instead, he views the current moment as firmly in the second phase of a three-phase campaign plan – the part where the money and national attention is funneled into a well-honed campaign machine.

“This is the stage where I think the campaign is really to be won, because now we have people on the ground forming the interpersonal relationships that are the real stuff of good politics, especially in a place like Iowa,” Buttigieg said.

Therein lies a central organizing strategy for the campaign, one that prioritizes personal relationships over more traditional techniques.

Make it personal

Top Buttigieg advisers believe that because their candidate hasn’t been a national name for years, it will take longer for possible supporters to get to know him. To do that, they said, they will urge their paid organizers and volunteers to tap personal networks more than asking them to do cold calls to people they don’t know.

This was on full display Tuesday night at a suburban home about eight miles away from the state capitol building in Des Moines, when 18 Buttigieg volunteers were getting their first taste of the campaign’s emphasis on relationships.

“We want to rethink how you guys think about campaigning and how you think how a campaign is done,” Shannon Sankey, one of the campaign’s organizers, told the group assembled in scattered chair across a kitchen with a ring of a dozen “Pete 2020” or “Boot-Edge-Edge” signs taped on the walls around them. “This is just the beginning of how we’re going to do this.”

Door knocking and phone banking keyed off of voter files are certainly central components of the campaign’s operation, advisers say, but at a time when nearly two dozen campaigns have driven many Iowans to ignore numbers they don’t know, it’s the personal relationships that get calls answered.

During the 90-minute session, each volunteer was asked to write down three to five friends or relatives on a sheet of paper who they thought might be interested in Buttigieg. Then three to five more friends, or acquaintances who weren’t as politically involved. Then they got on the phone and moved to wrangle new recruits – either to attend Buttigieg’s Iowa appearances the next day, or to attend a future house party, or even just to receive links to information about Buttigieg and his campaign.

The strategy is, to some degree, simple: Leverage relationships. Rely on the friends and relatives to preach the book of Buttigieg. Lean on supporters who are all in to bring their social circles on board with them.

The Des Moines meeting was one of dozens that have taken place in all corners of the state in recent weeks.

O’Connell, who in 2008 was a senior aide on Hillary Clinton’s failed presidential campaign, said the Buttigieg strategy is most similar to then-Sen. Obama’s campaign in 2007 and 2008, a sizable claim given that campaign would go on to remake Democratic organizing for years to come.

“I do think there are, for us, some similarities to Barack Obama in the 2007/2008 race in the sense that he had to widen the electorate and expand the sort of base in Iowa,” O’Connell said. “Pete’s lane is going to require his own coalition to win and, again, that is why we are taking the extra time with people in a different kind of way.”

The Buttigieg campaign sees multiple upsides with this organizing strategy. Enlisting friends to call friends creates a multiplier effect to a paid staff in Iowa that is still growing.

It gets voters on the phone more reliably than cold calling, but it also expands the contact universe – something Buttigieg’s campaign, with a focus on rural counties, some of which flipped from supporting Obama to heavily favoring Trump, has sought to capitalize on, with Buttigieg’s message of a Midwestern mayor who regularly talks about his faith.

“It’s everything,” Buttigieg said of the role those volunteers will play in whether his campaign is a success. “You need to have that that kind of army of people who can spread the message, and often they find ways that I wouldn’t have even thought of to describe what’s at stake, and why this candidacy matters.”

Pam Kenyon, a Democrat who said she has never actively volunteered for a campaign before, is to some degree the prototype for the rapidly expanding campaign. She attended a house party in May in Dallas County where she knew nobody and was curious to hear what Buttigieg had to say.

By the time he was done speaking, she was hooked. She signed up to phone bank. And then did it again. And again. And attended another house party. Before long, she was spreading the word to everyone in her circle.

“It was sort of like an addiction in a way of wanting to be with such a refreshing human being who seems to really care about what’s happening,” Kenyon told CNN.

Asked about the broader Democratic field, Kenyon ticked through the names and said positive things, noting she wished Biden would’ve run in 2016. But when it came to Buttigieg, she ticked through a handful of his policy proposals and concluded: “He is just better.”