Rick Santorum has been met with a lot of firsts in Iowa since his come-from-behind first-place finish in the state’s presidential caucuses more than four years ago.

On Sept. 1, 2015, he became the first GOP presidential hopeful to visit all of Iowa’s 99 counties when he dropped into Rock Rapids, a town of fewer than 3,000 people in GOP-friendly Lyon County.

On Oct. 23, 2014 — with the help of a few low-tier Iowa Republican hands guiding him to the Johnson County GOP victory office — he became one of the first politicians to test Iowa’s political waters for a 2016 run.

On Monday (exactly one week before caucus night), the former Pennsylvania lawmaker locked up another first.

When he tossed in onions, mushrooms, spinach, and Swiss cheese for a custom Hamburg Inn omelet, he became the first presidential candidate of any election cycle to personally make his own breakfast at the famed diner.

“President Obama has proliferated more gun violence in American than any other president, I’m told,” Santorum said to a crowd of about 20 people inside the diner, as he was surrounded by framed newspaper and magazine clippings of Iowa political winners and losers of yesteryear.

Monday’s early morning breakfast visit was one of almost 70 stops the 57-year-old has planned throughout Iowa.

Among those: several sit-downs at Pizza Ranches, a political talking points breakfast at a popular Des Moines organic grocery store, and a visit to a shooting range and pro-life western Iowa church.

It’s all a part of last cycle’s unofficial caucus night winner’s attempt at becoming this cycle’s true winner-take-all.

He has even brought back his love for sweater vests — a move that is as much a political one as it is personal, campaign aides said this week. The new tour has been affectionately dubbed the “InVest in America tour.”

Excellent photos from today's @RickSantorum visit to @HamburgInn by @TheDailyIowan/@DIpolitics #IAcaucus pic.twitter.com/CSaukPVfhz

— Quentin Misiag (@quentin_misiag) January 25, 2016

At the Iowa City event — as he has done at a string of recent Iowa stops — the two-time presidential candidate let patrons, not his political aides, shape the conversation.

At one point, he called upon a Hamburg Inn waitress as she shuffled hot food and coffee in and out of the small kitchen.

In a less than a one-hour span, the candidate belittled Democratic presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders’s single-payer health-care proposal, hit at President Obama and the Affordable Care Act, pleaded to patrons about why they must stand up and combat single-parent households in the U.S., a topic he called the nation’s “central core problem of our education problem, our criminal justice problem, our gun problem our health-care problem.”

As the nation’s first presidential nominating contest, the caucuses have shocked and wowed state and national political pundits and voters with its results, all the way back to the 1970s.

While he was able to win the caucus four years ago by razor-thin margins, Iowa Republican insiders, including state operatives, ground organizers, and former Santorum supporters have questioned his ability to win this time for months, dozens of interviews with The Daily Iowan show.

“People are just looking right over Santorum,” said Josh Bakker, the chairman of the Lyon County Republican Party.

Bakker supported Santorum in 2012, calling him “the best of the field.” But over the past four months, he has put the low-tier candidate this way: “He had the chance already.”

Santorum registered 0 percent support in the latest Wall Street Journal/NBC poll. Conducted between Jan. 9-13 with 400 likely Republican voters, the poll had a margin of error of plus or minus 4.9 percentage points.

Santorum’s campaign had raised about $1.05 million as of Nov. 16, when the latest data was available, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. It had spent $833,643 during that same period.

Unlike rival Sens. Ted Cruz, R-Texas and Marco Rubio, R-Fla., Santorum has never been a White House hopeful who has looked to pricey TV and radio ads to get voter attention in Iowa.

In fact, it wasn’t January of this year that Santorum’s backers put up their first weeklong TV commercial, “Fairy Tales.”