“If Steve Scheffler isn’t one of your first three visits when you come to Iowa, you’re already beaten,” Chuck Laudner, a spokesman for the Iowa GOP, told Religion News Service in April.

Scheffler admits he has received a lot of attention lately. Scheffler, president of the Iowa Christian Alliance (ICA) since 2000, said all of the major Republican presidential hopefuls have recently called him. “They want to make their case to our constituency,” he said. Most caucus-goers “tend to be very, very conservative,” Scheffler said, estimating that social conservatives, in particular, could make up 40 percent of next year’s caucus-goers and significantly sway the outcome.

Until last year, the ICA had been known as the Christian Coalition of Iowa and affiliated with the Christian Coalition of America, the national organization originally founded by Pat Robertson in 1988. In a statement, Scheffler said his organization cut ties from its parent organization because it thought the CCA was mired in debt and had lost its integrity:

“From this time forward, we will be known as Iowa Christian Alliance (ICA). We are honored to be serving the Lord in a conscious effort to develop the integrity and leadership needed to guide our fellow citizens toward the traditional values on which our national strength and survival depends. We will only be of service to our Lord and our fellow man if we uphold standards of moral integrity.”

ICA mostly focuses on state politics but now that it’s caucus season, Scheffler said, the group will spend a lot of time educating voters on where the presidential candidates stand. The nonprofit, nonpartisan organization has a candidate page with all those running from both parties. But in reality, ICA caters to Republican voters.

On June 30, ICA will co-host a candidate forum with Iowans for Tax Relief. Currently, these candidates plan to attend: U.S. Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan., former Virginia Gov. Jim Gilmore, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, U.S. Rep. Tom Tancredo, R-Colo., and Tommy Thompson, a former secretary of Health and Human Services and former governor of Wisconsin.

Conspicuously absent — besides Democrats — are the GOP front-runners, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani and Sen. John McCain of Arizona, who both recently pulled out of the Ames Straw Poll, a must-attend event for GOP hopefuls in Iowa.

Additionally, ICA intends to host a series of house parties with its members and the different candidates. Huckabee and Romney have already attended one, Scheffler said, and U.S. Rep. Duncan Hunter of California and Brownback are interested.

Scheffler said that neither he nor ICA would endorse a candidate but would instead act as “an educational tool” for members. For the first time in its history, ICA will produce a voter's guide based on the voting record, public statements and survey responses of the candidates, Scheffler said. ICA has previously produced voter's guides for congressional and statewide races. Last year’s guide asked congressional candidates their stance on the “Federal Marriage Amendment,” the “Human Life Amendment,” a “Ban [on] Embryonic Stem Cell Research,” “Legalized Adoption by Homosexual Couples,” and “Sex Education Curriculum that Stresses Abstinence.”

Scheffler said he could not predict which candidates would garner support from social conservatives at the caucuses. “All the candidates have pluses and minuses; there are no perfect candidates,” he said. “There’s no clear indication of where they might gravitate at this point.”

He did say, however, that Giuliani “has got some challenges” ahead of him based on his record as mayor of New York City and his marital history.

On the other hand, Scheffler said he did not think Romney’s Mormon faith would prove to “a big stumbling block” and that social conservatives looked for moral leadership. “I don’t think his faith is going to be that big of an issue. An out-and-out atheist or a Mohammed-Jihadist-extremist [would probably] be disqualifiers. Outside of those two areas there’s not going to be a litmus test.” Scheffler also said that Romney, who at various times has been pro-choice and pro-life, had eliminated many doubts about his opposition to abortion. “The governor talked about his stance on those issues and quite frankly he’s done a fairly good job enunciating those,” Scheffler said. “He’s repeated them enough that he’s probably made some headway.”

In fact, Giuliani and McCain may have dropped out of the Ames Straw Poll because they realized that Romney had become so dominant in the state. From ABC’s The Note: “‘Maybe the handwriting was on the wall,’ Iowa Republican Party Chairman Ray Hoffman tells ABC News when asked about the impact Mitt Romney’s organizational strength had on the Wednesday announcements from the Giuliani and McCain campaigns that they will not invest resources in the Iowa Republican Party’s Aug. 11 Straw Poll in Ames. ‘Mitt Romney, no doubt, is probably the biggest player in the state,’ said Hoffman.” And social conservatives, some of the biggest conservative activists in Iowa, were likely part of the Romney coalition. Chris Cillizza of the Washington Post previously reported that Romney was heavily courting Scheffler and Iowa social conservatives.

Scheffler is also on the Republican State Central Committee, but counted himself as a sometime-critic of the GOP. “I’m much more about issues,” he said. “But if I’m going to affect public policy, I can’t sit on the sidelines and let others who I don’t agree with set the agenda.” He called himself “a lifelong activist” and said that social conservatives would significantly shape the GOP caucuses now and in the foreseeable future. “Let’s face it,” he said. “If [our issues] ever got removed from the GOP platform, the life issue, the marriage issue, gun rights, immigration,” Republicans would suffer.

In addition to the candidate forum, the house parties and the voter guides, ICA intends to have a series of caucus strategy meetings so “regardless of who they’re supporting,” Scheffler said, “those issues are at the forefront.”