O’Malley drops in for some brownies. [View all]

The former Maryland governor is trying to win votes in Iowa the old-fashioned way.

OGDEN, Iowa — Martin O’Malley is trying to get elected president one living room at a time.

Last Saturday afternoon’s living room was in this town of 2,044 people in Iowa’s Boone County, a fertile heaven of soybeans and corn. It belongs to Mike O’Brien, a former state representative, and his wife, Ronna, who spent the afternoon refilling plastic decanters of Country Time Lemonade. Pam Nystrom brought over some fudge brownies and a cinnamon coffee cake. It was an old-fashioned event, and not only because there was a “Home, Sweet Home" plaque nailed to the hall wall.

It is in settings like this, an hour’s drive northwest of Des Moines, that Mr. O’Malley, the former Democratic governor of Maryland, hopes to build a presidential campaign. With a small campaign budget and his support at 4 percent in this month’s Marist/​NBC News Poll, he has little choice. He has a barebones staff and a steep uphill battle against former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, who leads the pack with 37 percent. His targets of opportunity are Iowans such as Penny Vossler, who stood against the kitchen cabinets in the O’Briens’ home, knitting a multi-colored dishcloth. She’s undecided.

“This is how you do it in Iowa,” says Mr. O’Malley. “History’s full of candidates going county to county to county.” The last one to prevail with this strategy was former Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, who won the 2012 caucuses here by 34 votes over former Gov. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts, the eventual Republican nominee.

Mr. O’Malley, 52, knows this firsthand. As a Catholic University student he worked the southeast corner of Iowa for Sen. Gary Hart, an insurgent who stunned the political world by finishing second here in 1984, and then Mr. O’Malley moved with Mr. Hart’s new-model army to New Hampshire, where the Coloradan forged an upset victory over former Vice President Walter F. Mondale.

Now Mr. O’Malley is making his appeal — to assist the middle class, bolster Social Security and to end the oppression of huge student debt — on his own behalf.

In 1984, he called Democrats individually on the telephone, day after day. This time there were four dozen Democrats in the O’Briens’ home, and he lingered to answer questions and pose for cell-phone pictures. His goal was to get 12 converts to sign a postcard pledge to go to a caucus for him Feb. 1. He fell 10 short, but then bravely moved on over the weekend to Tipton (population 3,199), Anamosa (pop. 5,545) and Maquoketa (pop. 6,062).

“Santorum showed it was still possible to win with a living-room strategy,” said Dennis Goldford, a Drake University political scientist and the premier expert on the Iowa caucuses. “These contests are still fundamentally a ground game, but people like O’Malley are discovering that this time the air game may be a bigger piece than it has been.”

Mr. O’Malley served as mayor of Baltimore and used that experience plus his two terms as governor as the basis of his living-room appeal, emphasizing that he had more executive experience than any of his rivals. “If there is a common thread in my experience,” he said, “it is a thread of human dignity and a belief in the common good.”

Mr. O’Malley has detractors at home, some of whom describe him as a government careerist, more cautious than his image and less innovative than he suggests outside Maryland. Some say that Mr. O’Malley, who imposed a zero-tolerance policing policy in Baltimore, deserves a portion of the blame for the city’s riots. He left the mayor’s office nine years ago and hurried home from Europe this spring when the violence broke out, but the upheaval takes some of the sparkle off his boasts about the Baltimore renaissance.

Even so, Mr. O’Malley remains an admixture of ambition and optimism. “The tough odds,” he told a voter here who questioned his prospects, “are a way a silent God tells us it is a fight worth having.” You don’t hear rhetoric like that every day in the Democratic Party.