Le Mars, Iowa — It’s negative four degrees here, but after briefly pondering his options at the Blue Bunny Ice Cream Parlor, Chris Christie orders a double scoop of chocolate-chip–cookie-dough ice cream for the road. It’s his go-to flavor, he says, and perfect for the 40-minute car ride to the next town hall, in Sioux City.

There’s a joke in there somewhere, but Christie already made it during his last town hall.

“Look at me. I have assaulted fitness in many ways in my life. This is not an assault on fitness,” he cracked, after recounting a newspaper that accused him of attacking fitness programs when he suggested a climbing wall might be an unnecessary expense for a college in New Hampshire, The Granite State.

Reporters who had heard the line the day before at another town hall in Fort Dodge — it’s part of a set riff he does that begins with complaining about rising college-tuition cost — smirked along with the laughing crowd.

Spend some time on the road with Christie, and it’s easy to see how he’s gone from a man who seemingly missed his moment to a serious contender for the establishment mantle. Though he has spent little time in Iowa, his town hall performances this weekend earned him converts here, where he is not in the hunt for a top three spot and the expectations are low.

Christie’s skill for conducting town halls has been documented extensively. He is a personable, funny campaigner who banters easily with attendees, and he has a facility at drawing on personal experiences and emotions to convey policy points. It is a talent that helped put him on the national radar in the first place. But it is particularly striking to see the reaction it elicits from Republicans in Iowa, many of whom said they were seeing him for the first time. “We came out with a lot of converts tonight,” Christie bragged to reporters after the Fort Dodge town hall. And indeed, it appeared to be true. A woman sitting at my table had told me before the event that she wasn’t sure whom she would caucus for, and said afterward that Christie was now her top choice.

The New Jersey governor isn’t doing well enough in Iowa to be the target of any attack ads, but his strength in New Hampshire caused Marco Rubio to go after him anyway during a speech in Johnston on Saturday, attacking him for supporting the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court.

Christie gives as good as he gets. “We made a mistake seven years ago,” he says in Le Mars, a variation on a line he used at several town halls over the weekend. “We made a mistake. We gave the presidency to a first-term United States senator who had never run anything bigger in his life than his own Senate staff of 30 people. . . . Even if we agree with that person philosophically, it doesn’t make them any more ready to run something.”

Still, Christie can expect little on caucus night, and he knows it. “I’d like to do as well as I can, but I’ve said all along that my initial goal in all of this is to be the number-one governor. If I can be the number-one governor coming out of here, I’ll have had a really good night,” Christie told reporters in Fort Dodge. That means beating Jeb Bush and John Kasich, neither of whom is making serious efforts to compete in the state.

But as receptive as crowds were this weekend when meeting Christie, some voters come to his events with a high level of skepticism. Iowa Republicans told me several times over the course of the weekend that a “New Jersey Republican” is a tough sell for them. For all the pushback Ted Cruz got for his “New York values” jibe, it’s a remark that could do him some favors here.