MANCHESTER, N.H. — It was the day before Christmas Eve in Manchester, and a long line of last minute shoppers waited idly in their cars as traffic in front of the Mall of New Hampshire slowed to a halt. Just ahead of them, a crowd of about two dozen supporters of Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul stood in the cold, perched on giant snow banks and in the highway median, clinging perilously close to oncoming traffic. They brandished signs, implored motorists to honk and waved banners touting Paul’s opposition to the war in Iraq.

Just 16 days before New Hampshire’s first-in-the-nation presidential primary, it was as captive an audience as could be found in the Granite State, and somewhere in Manchester, Vijay Boyapati was smiling.

Boyapati is the 29-year-old behind Operation Live Free or Die, a grassroots effort to bring 1,000 people to New Hampshire to campaign in support of Paul, a libertarian-turned-Republican antiwar Texas congressman who advocates the repeal of the federal income tax, rails against gun control and abortion, and supports the dissolution of most federal agencies.

Boyapati himself quit his job with Google, kicked in $10,000 of his own money, and moved across the country from Seattle to launch the effort. The operation has already raised $50,000 from over 3,000 donors and has rented out 10 homes across the state for supporters to stay in.

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“I’ve driven all over this state, and there’s not a single campaign that has this kind of grassroots support,” said Boyapati.

The organization has attracted an unconventional mix of passionate supporters — professionals, college students, retirees, hippies, veterans — all of whom have put their lives on hold and moved to New Hampshire to campaign. “Everybody’s making sacrifices, but it’s a testament to how much [the volunteers] care about this campaign,” Boyapati said.

Boyapati first became interested in Paul while watching a Republican presidential debate in May. When Paul later spoke at Google, Boyapati greeted him enthusiastically and handed him a check for $2,300.

“I was incredulous that a guy like this existed in the Republican race and was a member of Congress,” says Boyapati. “It was love at first sight, I guess.”

Boyapati grew up in Australia and moved to the United States in 2000. He only recently became a U.S. citizen and has never voted in a presidential election. Even so, his friends and family weren’t surprised when he left Seattle for the campaign trail in New Hampshire. “My life is that I become really focused and obsessed with something and then spend all my time devoted to it,” he said.

Boyapati’s decision to come to New Hampshire may have been reinforced on his first night in the state in early December when he visited a pub in Manchester popular with Paul supporters. On that night, Paul unexpectedly dropped in.

“He stood up on top of a stool and gave this speech on the spot, and the place just went crazy,” he said. “It was amazing.”

Operation Live Free or Die has rested its hopes entirely on New Hampshire, a state that Boyapati says is particularly receptive to Paul’s message. The state is the only one in the country without a mandatory seatbelt law, and also boasts the lowest tax burden in the United States, according the Tax Foundation. The state is the only one to include the “right of revolution” in its state constitution.

“We couldn’t afford anything but a strong showing in New Hampshire,” said Boyapati. “This is going to be the place where we do it.”

But the path to changing the world is a long one, and Boyapati currently spends most of his time managing the details of the effort: organizing transportation, making sleeping arrangements and buying food for the organization’s small army of volunteers. “It’s all those details — It’s who’s going to pick this guy up at the airport? And it’s everything from buying beer and burritos to air mattresses,” he said.

So far, Boyapati says that the volunteers have enjoyed their time in New Hampshire. “These people have fallen in love with the state,” he says.

But the campaign is a challenging one. Paul is currently mired in the single digits in most New Hampshire polls, and many mainstream news accounts on Paul refer to his candidacy as a “longshot.” A recent Atlanta Journal-Constitution article portrayed Paul supporters as aloof for failing to see the weaknesses of his candidacy, including his low poll numbers, lack of a high profile national campaign operation and the fact that, according to the newspaper, Paul’s image “hardly fits the modern Republican profile.”

But Boyapati is not deterred. The polls don’t accurately account for independent voters, he says, and ignore most younger voters who tend to use only mobile phones. He points to the $19 million that the Paul campaign has raised so far in the fourth quarter as proof of Paul’s legitimacy as a candidate. “I think this longshot image is something that the media perpetuates,” he said. “I don’t think it’s accurate.”

For now, Boyapati’s future is uncertain, left up to the will of New Hampshire’s independent and Republican voters on January 8.

“I guess it all depends on how we do in New Hampshire,” he says. “But I can tell you this, there’s nothing else I’d rather be doing right now. There’s nowhere else I’d rather be.”