AMES, Iowa—Cory Booker drew the second-biggest crowd of the weekend in Iowa at the Prairie Moon Winery here earlier this month. Then he attracted the biggest crowd, more than 300 people, similarly diverse, a few hours later in Davenport. Few reporters went to either. Booker and his campaign say that’s all part of the plan. Check back with them in seven or eight months. The other 2020 Democrats will have their media moments, Booker and his campaign people believe, and the voters will cycle through them. And as that happens, he’ll keep reaching out to voters in small venues like these in Ames and Davenport and building out an organization to hold onto them. Others will flare up and falter, according to their plan, and the New Jersey senator will be there to pick up the pieces. In early thinking about the race last year, Booker was the candidate talking unity and uplift. He would be the one identified with summoning connections across racial lines, and drawing on the history of America with a hopeful vision of what it could get back to. As the early months of the race have actually played out, Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, Amy Klobuchar, Bernie Sanders, and most recently Beto O’Rourke have risen up and have seemed to leave him in the dust. Despite starting out with some of the highest name identification in the field, he’s stayed in single digits. His fundraising hasn’t been breaking any records. The most coverage he’s gotten was the day that he launched on February 1, which was quickly overtaken by first the yearbook photo scandal of Virginia Governor Ralph Northam. That should change Wednesday night, when he goes back to South Carolina to record a CNN town hall. [] But while opposing campaigns snicker that he’s already become an also-ran, several top Democrats look at him and see a potential sleeper—if he can raise enough money to keep his campaign together, and hold onto nervous supporters who see other candidates seeming to leap ahead while he insists he’s the tortoise. In Iowa and the other early-primary states, Booker’s people are among the more experienced and respected on-the-ground operatives—so far matched only by Elizabeth Warren’s staff, and to a slightly lesser extent, by Kamala Harris’s. Others are confused by how, given how little attention he’s gotten compared to others, he still has as much confidence as he insists he does. “This is not an air campaign,” he told me after the event at the Prairie Moon Winery, referring to TV and radio ads. (Yes, they actually make red wine in central Iowa). “Don’t listen to the media and what they’re reporting. Just get on the ground, knock on doors, talk to people and try to make real connections.” Booker can come off as trying to be a little weird, but often the key to understanding Booker is that he just is a little weird. He’s a former college tight end, bald, vegan, who doesn’t drink, and is nearing 50 without ever having been married. He loves talking about love and explains how much more admirable love is than “tolerance”—try going home at night, he says in one of his standard campaign bits, and seeing how it goes over if you tell your family that you tolerate them). His heat-seeking ambition has put his friends on edge for 15 years, but he also sits at home and reads about the history of the Know-Nothings. And he’s spent several weekends over the past few years slipping away quietly to do rural poverty tours of struggling farms and environmental degradation. Up on stage delivering a big speech, he can be a compelling, earnest preacher, but he can also seem like a drone who’s going on too long and working too hard. In the six weeks since he launched his campaign, Booker’s staff has kept him away from big events at which those things might happen. While others have invested time and resources in rallies, his kick-