Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has begun putting a field operation together in Kansas, hiring a full-time state coordinator and opening an office in Wichita to coordinate his Kansas campaign.

“Trump Team Kansas” sent out emails Wednesday providing contact information and soliciting volunteers to help with the campaign.

Kansas GOP executive director Clay Barker confirmed Wednesday that Carly Couture has been hired to lead the Kansas campaign. She is the wife of former state Rep. Travis Couture-Lovelady, R-Palco, who resigned this year to take a job as a lobbyist for the National Rifle Association.

Couture did not return phone calls Wednesday, but Barker said she had been hired within the last week and would be setting up operations at a state party office in Wichita. He also said that, in an unusual move, the Trump campaign itself would be supplying the office with yard signs, bumper stickers and other campaign material to distribute.

“Mitt Romney and John McCain didn’t do that,” Barker said, referring to the 2012 and 2008 GOP presidential candidates. “That was all decided a while ago.”

Wednesday’s email in Kansas came out the day after Trump overhauled his national campaign staff by demoting campaign manager Paul Manafort while naming Breitbart News executive Stephen Bannon and GOP pollster Kellyanne Conway to top positions.

But Barker said the effort to hire a Kansas campaign coordinator had been in the works for weeks before those changes.

Although the Trump campaign has been struggling nationally, especially in the wake of a series of campaign gaffes that led up to the staff shakeup, he is still heavily favored to win Kansas, which has not voted for a Democratic presidential candidate since 1964.

“I haven’t quite figured out his support in Kansas, but at the (party headquarters) office we’re getting far more phone calls than we normally get this early from people wanting yard signs and stuff right now,” Barker said. “He has some hard-core supporters.”

Kansas Democrats, however, are hopeful that Hillary Clinton will at least do well in the 3rd Congressional District of suburban Kansas City. That’s a district heavily populated with the kind of upper-income, college-educated voters that Trump has had a particularly difficult time attracting.

The 3rd District is also the last congressional district in Kansas to have elected a Democrat. That was former U.S. Rep. Dennis Moore, who served six terms before stepping down in 2010 for health reasons. He was succeeded by Republican Rep. Kevin Yoder, who Democrats believe could be vulnerable, either this year or in 2018.

The Clinton campaign has had a state organization in place since late June. Andrea Johnson, a native Kansan who has worked on several Democratic campaigns around the country, is serving as Clinton’s state director in Kansas, working out of the Kansas Democratic Party’s headquarters in Topeka.