While the other candidates stay almost exclusively focused on the various Election Days this primary season, Mitt Romney consistently eyes another big prize: the votes cast beforehand.

In the primary states that offer absentee ballots and/or early voting, Romney’s campaign has worked hard to bank early votes. And in a race as volatile as this one, its planning has had a real impact. In Florida, for instance, CNN reported that at least 180,000 people had returned their absentee ballots before Newt Gingrich pulled off his unexpected victory in South Carolina, protecting Romney from the fallout. According to Florida’s preliminary numbers (the final count isn’t available yet), about 41 percent of votes cast in the state were early or absentee votes. Gingrich may have had the momentum going into Florida but, in order to win, he would have had to gain a large percentage of those voters left; he didn’t.

“[Romney] put them in the bank when he was riding high in the polls,” says Rick Wilson, a Florida Republican strategist. “He was doing very well before the South Carolina surprise.” At the time, Romney was the New Hampshire victor and believed to have won, albeit by a slight margin, in Iowa as well. “During the window where people were casting their absentee ballots, the Romney people had the perception of inevitability,” he says.

“They had an incredibly aggressive early media campaign running against Gingrich,” Wilson adds, discussing the tactics of Romney’s campaign and Restore Our Future super-PAC in Florida. “They had all the programmatic things you do in a competitive race running well before Election Day. So they did direct mail. They did phone calls. They did TV.”

In addition to those efforts, Florida Republicans who had requested absentee ballots were invited to join Romney tele-town halls, reported the Tampa Bay Times.

For the most part, Romney faced little real competition for those early votes. “I think there was some late-breaking effort by Gingrich,” recalls Wilson, “but nothing compared with the scope of what Mitt Romney’s people did.”

Hunting absentee-ballot voters is a formidable task. “The entire process when done correctly is extraordinarily labor- and data-intensive,” says Todd Harris, a Republican strategist, “using boots on the ground and very sophisticated targeting and data management.”

States that keep permanent records of voters who request absentee ballots are a boon to campaigns, as candidates’ organizations are permitted to request copies of the rolls. But in other states, campaigns must identify likely supporters (targeting all primary voters could lead to indirectly boosting a rival candidate) and push them to apply for an absentee ballot. In either case, after the ballot has been sent out, campaigns track which voters have returned their ballots and which haven’t, using a variety of methods — mail, phone calls, text messages — to try to nudge those who haven’t voted into their camp. Organization is crucial for keeping the process on track.

In Michigan and Arizona, as in Florida, early voting and absentee ballots played an important role. Santorum surged in Arizona polls about a week before the primary, but state politicos told me that it was virtually impossible for him to overcome the advantage Romney had accrued from early voting and absentee ballots. In a poll by Democratic firm Public Policy Polling — conducted two days before the election — Romney had a 12-point lead over Santorum among voters who were planning to vote on Election Day. But among Arizonans who had already cast their vote, Romney held a 23-point lead.

The same story played out in Michigan. A day before the election, Romney was ahead of Santorum by 27 points among those who had already voted, according to PPP, which estimated those voters to constitute about 18 percent of the electorate. Among those who hadn’t voted yet, Santorum was leading, seven points ahead of Romney.

Once again, it was only Romney’s campaign that had focused on attracting early votes. “They effectively used their surrogates — like the attorney general [Bill Schuette] who chaired his campaign and was on board early; they got him and others to reach out to either events and media that seniors were consuming,” observes Michigan GOP strategist Greg McNeilly. “For instance, some local talk radio has a disproportionately high number of senior Republicans in its audience. They really worked those outlets once the absentee ballots started to drop.”

“They are the only ones I know that did the paid advertising to absentee voters,” McNeilly adds, referring to the work done by the campaign and the super PAC. “Pro-Romney messages were hitting would-be or likely absentee voters during the absentee time frame. In Michigan, that began about six weeks prior to February 28. Literally, it was late January, and he had his machine going. So while everybody else was paying attention to other states, he was hitting those people who were casting votes early.”

McNeilly said he wasn’t aware of any paid advertising conducted by other campaigns that looked as if it were targeted to absentee voters.

Romney’s efforts, McNeilly adds, made a “crucial” difference. “The way the race had closed by the time it came to those who voted on Election Day, I think if they had not invested in it, things might have been different.”.

Ohio is another state in which the Romney campaign worked to nab absentee-ballot votes. Romney beat Santorum among those voters, this time by 7 points, according to PPP. “People who are Romney-identified supporters were encouraged to vote by absentee and return their ballots,” says Mark Weaver, an Ohio Republican strategist who is doing legal work for the Romney campaign. Phone calls, he adds, were the most common way the Romney campaign contacted such voters.

But the Romney campaign strategy is not simply about the primary wins. They’re also looking forward, trying to build the type of organization that will be necessary to beat Barack Obama if Romney is the nominee. “We’re going to keep that operation in place so that we can go toe-to-toe with President Barack Obama’s formidable political machine,” Romney spokesman Ryan Williams told the Tampa Bay Times.

Rick Wilson highlights the importance of wooing voters long before the day of the primary itself. “They didn’t get beat on Election Day, they got beaten on Election Day and three weeks, four weeks before,” he says of Romney’s Florida rivals. Organization matters, too. “Being the Death Star,” says Wilson, “sometimes has its advantages.”

— Katrina Trinko is an NRO reporter.