By AMY CHOZICK and TRIP GABRIEL, MAY 24, 2015

After 11 Republican presidential contenders spoke to a huge gathering of Iowa party activists at the Lincoln Day Dinner this month, they moved to hospitality suites to greet people one on one.

Jeb Bush’s suite looked sparse, with a handful of visitors asking the former Florida governor for a photo. Rick Santorum said hello to a scattering of old supporters.

But the line to meet one candidate, Carly Fiorina, a former Silicon Valley executive whose name recognition is negligible among voters, snaked down the hallway. For more than an hour, Iowans filed into the suite for their chance to meet Ms. Fiorina.

Ms. Fiorina, a former chief executive at Hewlett-Packard with a flair for biting one-liners, had just delivered a speech that included references to God and a joke about former President Bill Clinton’s hormones. When a timekeeper cut off her microphone, indicating that she had used up her allotted 10 minutes, the audience broke out in catcalls and groans. The crowd wanted more Carly.

“It was the most exciting speech all night,” said Cait Suttie, 27, who waited to meet Ms. Fiorina and now wants to volunteer with her campaign.

Iowa voters are known to fall in love with firebrand candidates and underfunded outsiders, from Pat Buchanan in 1996 to Howard Dean in 2004. And this cycle, Republicans here are starting to swoon over Ms. Fiorina, who is so unknown in national polls that she may not even be included in the first presidential debate in August.

Ms. Fiorina, whose net worth is between $30 million and $119 million, has generated headlines and steady crowds of conservative voters. In April, nearly 300 people showed up to see her deliver the keynote address at the Clinton County Republican Party dinner in Iowa, twice as many as were expected. On Saturday, when she spoke at the Southern Republican Leadership Conference in Oklahoma City, she was interrupted by several standing ovations.

Whether Ms. Fiorina, the only woman in the Republican race, can build from her status as a crowd-pleasing speaker and curiosity into a serious competitor is not clear. But something is happening on the ground here.

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Gender clearly separates Ms. Fiorina from the pack. And she seems to be building on the popularity of Joni Ernst, the state’s motorcycle-riding senator, who became the first woman to represent Iowa in Congress after a campaign last fall in which she promised to cut pork in Washington much the way she had castrated pigs on her farm.

But another element of Ms. Fiorina’s appeal is an experience often lost in her biography: She spent much of her technology career in marketing, and has a talent for reading an audience and crafting pithy, and sometimes cutting, comments.

Ms. Fiorina says she writes all of her own remarks, including some choice jabs at the Democratic front-runner, Hillary Rodham Clinton. “Flying is not an accomplishment, it’s an activity,” she likes to say, knocking Mrs. Clinton’s boast that she traveled 956,733 miles as secretary of state. In her announcement video, Ms. Fiorina watched — and critiqued — Mrs. Clinton’s own announcement video.

She is prepared with answers on issues from the Islamic State to the California drought (which she has blamed on “overzealous liberal environmentalists”) and distills them into one-liners that play to the party’s base.

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