State Rep. Christopher Rants (R-Sioux City) still hasn’t said anything official, but we can add two new tea leaves that indicate he’s running for governor to our growing stack.

First, the career state legislator and former house speaker appears to have hired a staffer, Sara Craig, who was listed as a media contact for Rants on a recent press release.  Craig worked for Rants during the difficult 2006 campaign cycle, overseeing House Republican campaigns in southwestern Iowa.  She later worked for former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney’s failed 2008 presidential campaign, which Rants helped to organize from the beginning. After the caucuses, Craig moved to North Dakota, where she was in charge of the state senate Republican campaign fund and served as Interim Executive Director of the state’s Republican Party, according to her profile on the social networking site LinkedIn.

Craig’s profile has not been updated to include information about her recent work for Rants, but it seems unlikely that she would move back to Iowa to work for a restless state legislator who isn’t running for governor.  (It’s also unlikely that a Republican Party employee from one state would moonlight for a potential primary candidate in another state, since doing so would almost certainly violate neutrality rules.)

In addition to hiring a staffer, Rants has also reserved the domain name RantsForGovernor.com.  Though the address currently points to a placeholder Web site, it was registered last month by Creative Leap, Inc., the Des Moines-based design firm that has built sites for Rants and the Iowa House Republican Caucus before.

Expect a new site to be ready immediately after Rants makes an official gubernatorial campaign announcement. Rants’s current Web site, paid for by his state legislative campaign committee, has not been updated since the middle of last month.

Rants and perennial candidate Bob Vander Plaats (also of Sioux City) are the only two potential candidates who are publicly soliciting support from party activists, but others are rumored to be exploring candidacies and dialing for dollars behind closed doors.