WASHINGTON (AP) — With all eyes on Democrats as they prepare to cast their ballots in Iowa’s highly anticipated kickoff caucuses, President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign is working to try to persuade Republican voters to turn out at their caucus sites, too — even if there’s no real competition.

The push — complete with a presidential rally, GOP-led training sessions and a new video featuring the president’s daughter-in-law — makes clear the campaign is trying to avoid the optics of empty Republican rooms on caucus night juxtaposed with Democratic gatherings brimming with enthusiastic voters.

But they also demonstrate just how dramatically Trump has seized control of his adopted party, ensuring that no Republican could credibly take him on, despite his historic unpopularity. And they show the remarkable daylight between Trump’s threadbare 2016 operation and his current Iowa campaign, which has more staffers on the ground today than it had in November 2016.

But the caucuses also provide the campaign a test run of sorts, serving as an organizing and party-building tool that reaches across all the state’s 99 counties and nearly 1,700 precincts, bringing in new volunteers, building enthusiasm and testing ground operations, officials say.

“It’s an amazing tool that will pay dividends for us for the entire year,” said Eric Branstad, a senior campaign adviser in the state who also directed Trump’s Iowa campaign in 2016. “It really gives us an opportunity to activate our base.”

“The Iowa caucuses are a chance to flex the organizational muscles of President Trump’s campaign,” said Trump campaign spokesman Tim Murtaugh, who promised a “heavy presence across the entire state” in the days ahead.

While states such as South Carolina, Nevada, Arizona, Alaska and Kansas chose to cancel their Republican primaries and caucuses outright to save cash and signal Trump’s lock on the nomination, Iowa chose to press forward, in part to maintain its status as the first-in-the-nation nominating contest.

“That has never been a consideration for us out here in Iowa. We were going to hold this caucus. Period,” said Jeff Kaufmann, the chair of the Iowa Republican Party. While “it would have been so much easier and so much less expensive for us to just go ahead and cancel this,” he said, the state couldn’t risk giving the Republican National Committee a reason to reconsider the calendar.