Presidential campaigns are cranking up their efforts in Georgia, ahead of the March 1st primary. Ted Cruz’s campaign say it has over 11,000 volunteers, knocking on doors and making phone calls. A massive ground game helped Cruz win Iowa, and now his campaign is counting on that same approach to win Southern states.

Ted Cruz campaign in Georgia began with a fiery, 36 minute speech at the state GOP convention last May.

“We are rising up to save that shining city on a hill that is the united states of America!,” Cruz said at the end of his speech, which the audience gave a standing ovation.

Polls at the time showed Mike Huckabee was the favorite of Georgia Republicans. Cruz came in sixth. He was also running behind in Iowa, but his campaign started building an operation in every county in that state.

“There was pretty routine talk among Republicans there that Ted Cruz has the best organized ground game,” says Geoffrey Skelley, political analyst at the University of Virginia's Center for Politics.

“And as it turned out, he sort of trumped the polls, if you will, and ended up winning Iowa, and I think that’s probably true in the South, as well.”

Cruz’s socially conservative message played well among the Republican base in Iowa. In Georgia, it has fans like Carolyn Henderson, who chairs his campaign in Carroll County.

“Because when people actually sit down and listen to what he has to say, they think this is guy I’ve been looking for who can turn this ship around,” she says.

68 percent of voters here backed Mitt Romney in 2012. I met her at the Zaxby’s in Carrollton, which sits underneath a huge "Carroll County Stands With Ted Cruz" electronic billboard.

She says she flirted with supporting Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, who dropped out of the race in September. But she’s followed Cruz’s political career since before he was elected to the Senate.

Henderson says she’s had lots of conversations with friends and neighbors who weren’t sold on. Cruz, but she’s worked hard to convert them.

“Our sheriff here was not for Ted Cruz to begin with, but because he’s a dear friend of mine and he respects me politically, I kept feeding him for three months information.”

HAVING A CONVERSATION

“It’s very primal, frankly. It’s down to the very hard things in politics,” says Cruz campaign manager Jeff Roe in an interview with Bloomberg Politics.

That “hard thing,” he says, is not just reaching out to potential voters, but having a conversation with them, and convincing them Cruz is the best choice.

“And if you have the infrastructure and the data to support that conversation, that’s a powerful moment in politics. It’s what our campaign is based on.”

A big part of that data gathering is the Cruz Crew app. According to the Associated Press, the app mines data on potential supporters, allowing the campaign to micro-target on issues important to them. President Obama used data in a similar way in both of his election victories.

The Cruz campaign says it has operations in 100 counties in Georgia. So far, he’s visited the state six times.

Trey Taylor owns an insurance services company in Valdosta and is the campaign chairman in Lowndes County. He believes in the cause enough that he opened his own campaign office. He says he wanted to have a resource for supporters outside Metro Atlanta.

"You know, I grew up in Atlanta. I know how we think about people down outside the Perimeter. And they said ‘hey, if you want to go ahead and do it, go ahead and do it,’”he says.

Taylor says he spend a lot of time talking with Donald Trump supporters. Trump still leads the polls in Georgia, but Cruz has risen to second. That’s also the case in South Carolina. This Saturday’s Republican primary will be the first test of Cruz’s ground game in the South.

Tags: Election 2016, Ted Cruz